Gothic Passages: Racial Ambiguity and the American Gothic

Gothic Passages

Gothic Passages Racial Ambiguity and the American Gothic just in d. edwards University of Iowa Press

Iowa City

University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 52242 Copyright © 2003 by the University of Iowa Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America http://www.uiowa.edu/uiowapress No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. All reasonable steps have been taken to contact copyright holders of material used in this book. The publisher would be pleased to make suitable arrangements with any whom it has not been possible to reach. The publication of this book was generously supported by the University of Iowa Foundation. Printed on acid-free paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Edwards, Justin D., 1970 – Gothic passages: racial ambiguity and the American gothic / by Justin D. Edwards. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. isbn 0-87745-824-3 (cloth) 1. Horror tales, American—History and criticism. 2. American fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 3. Gothic revival (Literature)—United States. 4. Racially mixed people in literature. 5. Passing (Identity) in literature. 6. Ambiguity in literature. 7. Race in literature. I. Title. ps374.g68 .e39 2002 813⬘.0872909355— dc21 2002066493 03 04 05 06 07

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5 4 3 2 1

For Robert K. Martin friend, colleague, and mentor

It is the horror of horrors. t h o m a s j e f f e r s o n on miscegenation Because I am the white man’s son—his own, Bearing his bastard birth-mark on my face, I will dispute his title to the throne, Forever fight him for my rightful place. There is a searing hate within my soul, A hate that only kin can feel for kin, A hate that makes me vigorous and whole, And spurs me on increasingly to win. Because I am my cruel father’s child, My love of justice stirs up to hate, A warring Ishmaelite, unreconciled, When falls the hour I shall not hesitate Into my father’s heart to plunge the knife To gain the utmost freedom that is life. c l a u d e m c k a y , “Mulatto”

Contents

Preface xi Acknowledgments xiii Introduction xvii pa rt o n e Creating a Self in the Antebellum Gothic Narrative 1. Hybrid Bodies and Gothic Narratives in Poe’s Pym 3 2. Gothic Travels in Melville’s Benito Cereno 18 3. Passing and Abjection in William and Ellen Craft’s Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom 34 pa rt t w o Exploring Identity in Postbellum Gothic Discourse 4. The Epistemology of the Body; or, Gothic Secrets in Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy 53 5. Genetic Atavism and the Return of the Repressed in William Dean Howells’s An Imperative Duty 72 6. The Haunted House behind the Cedars: Charles W. Chesnutt and the “ White Negro” 88 Epilogue: Twentieth-Century Gothicism and Racial Ambiguity 110 Notes 115 Works Cited 123 Index 141

Preface

This book seeks to locate the gothic alongside nineteenthcentury American discourses of passing and racial ambiguity. By bringing together these areas of analysis, I consider the following questions: How are the categories of race and the rhetoric of racial difference tied to the language of gothicism? What can these discursive ties tell us about a range of social boundaries—gender, sexuality, class, race, etc.— during the nineteenth century? What can the construction and destabilization of these social boundaries tell us about the development of U.S. gothic? The sources used to address these questions are diverse, often literary and historical, fluidly moving between representation and reality. As a result, gothic literature by, say, Poe and Chesnutt are placed in the contexts of nineteenthcentury racial “science” and contemporary theories about the notion of “true”—what we might now term essentialist—identities. An awareness of an antebellum articulation of a range of social boundaries and “natural” inequalities of specific racial and gender categories consistently informs this study. Placed in the context of gothic production, then, this awareness forms a backdrop for a scene that explores the creation of a popular vocabulary by which certain racial characteristics could be represented as “unnatural.” It was a “racial gothic” discourse that employed striking and metaphoric images to filter and give meaning to the social hierarchies of racial domination and subordination institutionalized through slavery and maintained in the disenfranchising effects of the segregation laws and lynchings of the postbellum period. My analyses thus move back and forth between what we conventionally call gothic fiction and what Sander Gilman has called the fictive discourses of the human sciences, particularly biology, anthropology, and nineteenth-century theories of heredity and evolution (27). Such material illustrates not only the social construction of racial difference; it also shows how “race” is an inherently fluid idea, a word with a whole range of meanings that change over time.

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During the nineteenth century, the concept of “race” required what H. L. Malchow has called a “demonization of difference” (3). Indeed, the gothic discourses developed in European and U.S. literature provided a language that could be used, consciously or not, by proslavery advocates and postbellum racists. The rhetoric of terror, deformity, degeneration, and monstrosity was used by racial “scientists” to mark the essential differences between blackness and whiteness to justify white supremacy and to discourage any potential merger of the two races. This gothicization of race, at a time when the gothic was being racialized in the United States, became a popular textual practice in both American literature and the social sciences. In order to remain sensitive to the double nature of this process, I have chosen to follow a broad, somewhat loose, definition of the gothic. Gothic discourse, I suggest, arises out of a language of terror, panic, and anxiety; it consists of the rhetoric of repulsion and disgust; it is a discourse of regulation, establishing cultural modes of conduct by constructing taboos and regulating desires; it imagines the signs of depravity to be readable and attempts to contain that which is depraved, even while it recognizes the impossibility of such a task; it is a language that articulates, or simply gestures toward, deeply buried anxieties that produce a fear of contamination once those anxieties have been unearthed; and finally, it contains the rhetoric of apocalypse, threatening the destruction and subversion of that which is imagined to be simple, pure, and natural. It is in all of these forms that gothic discourse intersects with racial ambiguity and passing in the United States. Nineteenth-century writers from Charles Brockden Brown to Thomas Dixon gothicized biracial and passing figures, and I seek to examine such depictions in literature and popular science in order to chart identificatory fluidity within gothic production. Concentration is thus given to the obsession in ante- and postbellum America over the threat of collapsing racial identities—threats that resonated strongly with fears of transgressing the boundaries of sexuality and the social anxiety concerning the instabilities of gender, class, ethnicity, and nationality. It is my hope that this book will not only build upon the work of Americanists who uncover an underlying racial element in U.S. gothic literature, but I also wish to shed new light on the pervasiveness of gothic discourse in nineteenth-century representations of passing from both sides of the color line.

Acknowledgments

Writing a book can be a monstrous task, a terrifying experience. I am fortunate to have many good colleagues and friends who have helped me tame this beast. In its earliest stages my struggle was supported by my colleagues at the University of Copenhagen, particularly Tabish Khair, Martin Leer, Martyn Bone, Paul Levine, Marlene Edelstein, Jenny Weatherford, Russell Duncan, Charles Lock, Eva Rask Knudsen, Lene ØstermarkJohansen, and Bruce Clunies Ross. I want to especially thank the Ph.D. students at the University of Copenhagen; their research seminars provided a forum in which I could test out many of my ideas and receive constructive responses. Special thanks to Line Henriksen for throwing great parties with dancing late into the night. Thanks also must go to all the students in my American Gothic class and to the English department at the University of Copenhagen for giving me a research semester to complete this book. Beyond Denmark’s borders, Robert K. Martin, Laura Browder, and Lena Ahlin read the manuscript and gave me excellent suggestions for revision; their rigorous critiques improved my writing in countless ways. Ellen Servinis’s impressive talent for editing was invaluable throughout the writing process; without her comments and encouragement this book would never have been written. Thanks to friends for support and suggestions: Andrew Miller, Inge Høyer, Axel Nissen, Douglas Ivison, Joel Baker, Mustapha Fahmi, Rainier Grutman, and Katherine Roberts. My parents, David and Cecilia, and my sister, Madeleine, also deserve credit for always being there during the scary moments in life. And finally, I want to express my love and gratitude to Anne Schrøder, who provides the love and intellectual stimulation needed to keep the monsters at bay.

Gothic Passages

Introduction

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t was Leslie Fiedler in Love and Death in the American Novel (1960) who revolutionized the study of gothic literature by declaring an American tradition that existed independent of its British ancestors. This radical declaration drew new borders on the gothic map: the boundaries of the British gothic were defined by its fantastic, metaphysical, externalized, and class-based characteristics; whereas the parameters of the American gothic were marked by its historical, psychological, internalized, and predominantly racial concerns (145– 46). “America,” according to Fiedler, “possesses neither aristocratic privilege nor an established church,” so the “gothic fable undergoes a . . . complex metamorphosis [when adopted] by Brown, Poe and Hawthorne” (145). This comment follows on Charles Brockden Brown’s assertion that “America has opened new views” to the artist, and he must therefore “profit from these sources” by “differ[ing] essentially” from European aesthetics (Edgar Huntly 3). This book owes as much to Fiedler’s criticism as it does to Brown’s fiction. Like Fiedler, I see the American gothic as intimately tied to the history of racial conflict in the United States. However, there are some areas of Fiedler’s revolutionary pronouncements that remain problematic. First, the American break from the British gothic is far too clean; Fielder refuses to recognize that the British gothic tropes of questionable primogeniture, pure bloodlines, and transgressive sexualities return to haunt the American tradition with a vengeance. Furthermore, it is ultimately too reductive to say, as Fiedler does, that the “proper subject for the American gothic is the black man” (397). Such an assertion is too totalizing, and thus negates gender, homosexuality, incest, genocide, rape, war, murder, religion, and class as “proper” subjects of the nation’s gothic literature. Fiedler’s declaration, moreover, assumes that the gothic depiction of slavery is an exclusively American phenomenon. He neglects, for example, British gothic novels such as Picquenard’s Zoflora, or, The Generous Negro Girl

xviii i n t r o d u c t i o n (1804), which is set in the years before and during the Haitian slave revolt of 1791 and follows the life of a Creole slave, Zoflora, who is persecuted and nearly raped by sadistic slaveholders. Another example is Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya; or, The Moor (1806), which “transformed the persecuted slave Zoflora into the persecuting former slave Zofloya,” in the year preceding the passage of the antislave-trade bill, the Abolition Act of March 1807 (Craciun 17). Also overlooked is the opening chapter of Mary Wollstonecraft’s unfinished gothic novel, Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman, in which the narrator declares the world “a vast prison, [where] women are born slaves,” and which then goes on to describe the slave labor of the working-class character, Jemima (79).1 Although there are racial dimensions to the British gothic, it would be misleading to conflate British and American gothic representations of slavery. The two institutions were quite different, and this has led to distinct representations; the British slave trade and plantations, for example, existed outside the nation, providing “distant but convenient treasure spots” for the development of the empire (Said 93). This distance between the homeland and the colonies made it possible for many British citizens to ignore the gothic horrors of slavery: the dreadful institution was geographically and conceptually removed from British culture. It was not at the physical or conceptual center of the national imagination as it was in the United States. However, the seed of slavery as a trope of gothic discourse was planted by Picquenard, Dacre, Wollstonecraft, Beckford, and Austen; in the United States this seed grew and developed into maturity, because the American gothic—like the nation itself—is haunted by slavery. American Gothic? Questions about the relationship between British and American gothic production necessarily lead to a larger question: What is the gothic? Recent critics note that this is a difficult question to answer: Robert Hemenway suggests that the gothic mode is “difficult to define” (101), and Teresa Goddu points out that “when modified by American, the gothic loses its usual referents” (3). Perhaps we can account for our silence and confusion when faced with this question by recognizing the instability of the genre. The gothic, says Maggie Kilgour, is a literary patchwork, “assembled out of bits and pieces” to create a unique textual form (4). It is therefore a fragmentary arrangement of textual practices, which she labels “a hybrid between the novel and romance” (6). Building on this unstable framework, it is possible to view the gothic in the light of Bakhtin’s “organic hybridity,”

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in which an “unintentional, unconscious hybridization” develops by a “mixing and fusion” of language systems to create a “novelistic hybridization” whereby textual forms are brought in contact with one another (358, 361). Such mixing, according to Bakhtin, has the “potential for new world views, with new ‘internal forms’ for perceiving the world in words” (360). For Bakhtin, the “organic hybrid” mixes different forms of language to create a new language, world view, or object; it is generative in its creation of a new life out of two older decaying systems. The gothic’s hybridity, then, may be understood in at least two ways: as a Frankensteinesque creation that is patched together from various textual features to create a new life or, as a revolutionary process, creating new life out of the dialectical merger of outdated textual productions and world views. From this latter perspective, the tendency to align the gothic with the French Revolution may be explained as a hybridized “new world view” in order to capture a new society in the shadows of revolution.2 Kenneth Graham, for instance, argues that the gothic “was as rebellious in letters as its contemporary parallel in France was in politics” (260). For Graham, gothic fiction challenged fundamental notions of aesthetics and psychology, and for Robert Keily this challenge was a by-product of the confusions derived from the social and political upheavals of revolutionary Europe (36). Recent criticism, moreover, displaces the British gothic from “terrors of a supernatural kind” to fears of a political kind (Botting 114). By placing the gothic on the eighteenth-century European political landscape, contemporary critics have challenged Fiedler’s view that the nineteenth-century American gothic politicized the genre by moving it from the supernatural sphere to the political arena. Political discourses, then, have always been embedded in the gothic. But if the political nature of gothic textual production is clear, its politics are usually out of focus, with some critics seeing the gothic as progressive and others viewing it as reactionary. William Patrick Day, for instance, argues in favor of the gothic’s politics; he claims that it exposes the realities of modern life and resists escapism in order to encourage social and political change (74). Conversely, Wylie Sypher says that the ambiguity of gothic narratives undermines any potential revolutionary values and thus fails to be socially progressive; it simply reinscribes bourgeois ideologies, he claims (60). And Coral Ann Howells suggests that the gothic aesthetic is both “exploratory and fearful,” moving between radical insights and conventionality (6). This debate speaks to the mutability of the gothic: it can adapt to

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various political agendas. The conservative Edmund Burke, for example, turned to the gothic discourses of monstrosity and excess in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), which develops the rhetoric of the gothic monster to capture what he believes to be the excesses of the French rebellion against the king. According to Burke, revolutionary France devolves into a “military democracy” that resembles a “political monster” that has “devoured those who produced it” (109). Similar discourses of gothic monstrosity are used, albeit in another historical and political context, by the African American radical David Walker. His Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1830) argues that the “monstrous excesses” of slavery are a “perpetual source of terror and dismay to every reflecting mind” (2). Slaveholders, he goes on to say, are “brutal” and “wretched devils” who may be justifiably killed in the name of emancipation (25, 29). Just as Burke uses gothic discourse to condemn a revolution, Walker invokes the same rhetoric to incite revolutionary action. The fact that the gothic has been used by conservatives such as Burke and revolutionaries such as Walker illustrates what Mary Chapman refers to as the instability of the genre. “The gothic,” she claims, “is pieced together not altogether seamlessly out of its constituent parts” (30). This loose stitching makes the gothic adaptable to various (and at times contradictory) political agendas; it also makes the genre adaptable to the varied textual forms used by essayists (such as Burke and Walker) and novelists (such as Walpole and Radcliffe). Such instability and adaptability have made gothic discourse a transnational and transhistorical phenomenon: it had been as comfortable in eighteenth-century England as it has been in early twenty-first-century America. Charles Brockden Brown makes this point in his introduction to Edgar Huntly (1799) when he asserts that the “Gothic castles and chimeras” of Europe can be traded in for the images of “Indian hostility and the perils of the western wilderness” without losing gothic sensibilities (3).3 And yet Fiedlerian attempts at isolating the American gothic as a generic category have been taken up in Donald A. Ringe’s American Gothic: Imagination and Reason in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1982) and Louis S. Gross’s Redefining the American Gothic: From Wieland to The Day of the Dead (1989). Ringe’s book provides an interesting literary map of the American gothic from Brown to Hawthorne, while Gross’s text charts the course of the American gothic as an alternative path through the back roads of U.S. literary history. According to Gross, the difference between the British and

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American traditions is located in the fact that “European gothic literature has often been dismissed as escapist romantic nonsense, but the Gothic in America, however nonsensical, has never been purely escapist. It has always engaged itself in the national predilection for self-reflection, but from its own position as a voice of the marginals: women, gays, people of color, Americans” (92). While this argument is intriguing, it works toward the construction of a gothic meta-narrative whereby two discrete gothic plots, based on national distinctions, are unproblematically placed into separate boxes, thus denying the gothic’s instability and mutability. I would resist Gross’s tendency by arguing that the gothic cannot, in the words of Martin and Savoy, “be constrained by historical comprehensivity or even critical consensus,” but it must be read as having “multivalent tendencies” that cannot be bound by “uniform synecdochic examples” (vii). The adaptability of gothicism has inspired other critics to draw a line connecting the British and American traditions. David Punter, for instance, argues that the American gothic has “transplant[ed] the English themes into the American soil” (212). And Eugenia DeLamotte illustrates the “classic gothic features” used by Poe, Melville, and Hawthorne to place these authors in the broader context (and teleology) of a European tradition (132).4 These critics, too, adopt meta-narrative tendencies that trace a gothic thread from Europe to the United States; a yarn that reads the American gothic as evolving out of an Old-World gothicism. More recently, though, Mark Edmundson has defined the gothic not as a national phenomenon or as a literary tradition; he sees the gothic as simply “the art of haunting” (5). Such a definition opens up a space from which he can analyze connections between various periods of gothic production without falling into meta-narrative traps: “The Gothic of 1790s England,” he says, “seems to have risen up again, specterlike, in 1990s America” (4). Edmundson articulates the similarities between these two gothic periods not through a teleological conception of literary history, but as a return of the repressed, a haunting of discourse. He thus hints at, but never formulates, the idea of “gothic discourses,” a label that brings together the rhetoric of gothic production to enlighten our readings of the discursive allegiances between its many forms and functions. Such a formulation avoids totalizing views of gothic writing, while remaining sensitive to the similarities and differences in gothic sensibilities. Throughout this study, the term discourse refers to gothic rhetoric and linguistic tropes in the “art of haunting.” Discourse, a word that has become

xxii i n t r o d u c t i o n common in literary theory but that frequently goes undefined, is given a range of meanings by Michel Foucault. First, he states that discourse constitutes all utterances and texts that structure our understanding of the world. This broad definition is coupled with his second explanation of discourse, which brings together a group of statements based on common linguistic structures; using this second definition, it is possible to identify a discourse of the gothic or a discourse of race. Foucault’s third definition lays the groundwork for analyzing the rules and structures that produce various utterances and texts. And here Foucault is less interested in the actual texts or utterances than in the rule-governed nature of a particular discourse (80). Discourses, however, are not monolithic: they frequently include tensions and contradictions that must be taken together to fully understand the functions of particular discursive structures. They are therefore often fraught with gaps, contradictions, and inconsistencies that destabilize the unified modes of representation presented by gothic writers. In the American context, for example, gothic discourses were used simultaneously by fugitive slaves to rally support for abolition and by proslavery advocates to justify and expand the peculiar institution. Harriet A. Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl recounts the bludgeoning, flogging, burning, selling, and confinement of slaves to suggest how actual events can produce gothic narratives. She thus uses gothic discourse to paint the slave master and the oppressive institution as a source of terror that must be eliminated. By contrast, newspaper journalists describing the 1831 insurrection of Nat Turner used similar gothic discourses to depict the black slave with trepidation. The Richmond Enquirer called the revolutionaries “horrible” and “ferocious monsters,” who “remind one of a parcel of blood-thirsty wolves” (qtd. in Greenberg 67). Other newspapers expressed “fears of a general insurrection” and presented Nat Turner’s group as “banditti” who would influence future revolts (80). These articles used gothic language to bolster support for an intensified policing of slavery, justifying the peculiar institution through references to the “animalism” and “savagery” of African descendants. These passages from generically and politically diverse texts illustrate the difficulty of establishing a norm of gothic discourse; the rhetoric of gothicism is far too complex for there to be a single norm. However, these passages also show how discursive patterns can be read alongside one another in order to analyze how similar gothic discourses are repeated, maintained, and adapted for various ends. The polyphony of the gothic, with its many political voices in both fic-

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tional and nonfictional texts, has encouraged recent scholars to think about the proliferation of gothic discourse in cultural and historical work. In fact, we do not need to look very hard at American popular culture to see that gothic discourses are alive and well—not just in Anne Rice’s novels and Tim Burton’s films—but in media renderings of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, in our political discourse, in our modes of therapy, on TV news, on talk shows such as Oprah, and in our discussions of AIDS and of the environment. Although readings of contemporary American culture as suffused with gothic assumptions can be very convincing, we must recognize that the application of gothicism to popular culture is not a new phenomenon. As my analyses of Jacobs and the Richmond Enquirer show, gothic discourse was prevalent in nonfictional writing of the nineteenth century. In fact, throughout this book references will be made to nineteenth-century texts published in the social sciences so that I can analyze the gothic discourses of racial ambiguity in the United States. The vast transnational history of gothic production has forced me to focus on a particular period, and I have chosen this one for two reasons. First, it was a time of great gothic output, not only from artists such as Brown, Poe, Melville, and Hawthorne, but also in the area of “racial science” which led up to, and followed, the dissemination of Darwinism; second, it was a period when the articulation of racial ambiguity and passing was infected by gothic discourse. In turning to analyses of racial ambiguity as a source of gothic production, I do not intend to replace the “black man” with the biracial figure as the proper subject of the American gothic. Instead, I wish to locate racial ambiguity in the foreground of gothic expression, charting its changes, fluctuations, and developments in the writing of ante- and postbellum writers. Gothic Discourse and Questions of Identity Many of the major developments in recent literary criticism and theory have been associated with the critique of the subject. Critics have been engaged in the deconstruction of the stable, autonomous “self” to explore the ways in which personal identity is dependent on language, concluding that there is nothing essential about the nature of the individual. Criticism of gothic production has yet to fully explore this avenue of analysis. When gothic analyses do touch on questions of identity, they usually only scratch the surface. For instance, Stephen Bernstein insightfully shows how the gothic genre is linked to a class-based notion of identity, in which concerns about the “rightful inheritance,” the “transference of property,”

xxiv i n t r o d u c t i o n and the “merger of classes” exist at the heart of the gothic text (165). But his reading falls short of considering the full impact of identity on gothic discourse. For example, it does not take a detailed analysis to see how Horace Walpole’sCastle of Otranto (1764) reflects on questions of identity: the villainhero Manfred, Prince of Otranto by virtue of his grandfather’s usurpation of the rightful owner, attempts to secure his lineage, thus placing stable class identity and primogeniture at the forefront of the text. Manfred’s desperate attempts to produce an heir in the wake of his son’s mysterious death, as well as his fruitless attempts to wed his daughter-in-law, lead to an unveiling of the true heirs to Otranto just before the castle crumbles into ruin. Identity, based on familial ties, is thus presented through what Fred Botting succinctly identifies as Walpole’s message: “The sins of the father are visited on their children” (49). This message is important if only because it raises the questions of identity that haunt gothic discourse. In the autobiographical “Custom-House” chapter of the The Scarlet Letter, for instance, Hawthorne is obsessed by the sins of his forefathers, who cast the specter of Puritan intolerance, witchcraft trials, and genocide over his notion of self (34). But even though he tries to cut himself off from the Hawthorne clan, he cannot free himself from the professional aristocracy of Puritan culture.5 He even goes so far as to take pride in his family’s long lineage: “Strong traits of their nature have intertwined with mine” (10). Like Manfred, Hawthorne is concerned with his bloodline. But whereas Manfred wants to secure a strong lineage for the future, Hawthorne casts his glance backward to consider the moral and biological decay of his family tree; that is, he wants to replicate, on a figurative level, good ancestral blood and, on a biological level, good hereditary genes. In “The Custom-House,” then, heredity can be read figuratively, as the curse of the fathers, or it can be read biologically, in terms of evolutionary genetics in which biological traits are passed from one generation to another (Elbert 259). What Hawthorne hints at in his gothic plots—incest, inbreeding, adultery—forces him to reflect obsessively on his own ancestry in the “The Custom-House.” Here, he worries about his New England heritage and his parental lineage, a worry that echoes the narrative itself, with its presentation of Hester’s perceived monstrous sexuality, Pearl’s demonic behavior, and the always absent father. Speaking of biological heredity, he warns about the degeneracy of American stock. “Materially,” Hawthorne says, “there was a coarser fiber in those wives and maidens of old English birth and breeding, than in their fair descendants, separated from

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them by a series of six or seven generations” (50). Clearly, he is anxious about the biological state of American women, who are seen to be diluting the stock from one generation to the next. And he adds that “every successive mother has transmitted to her child a fainter bloom, a more delicate and briefer beauty, and a slighter frame . . . than her own” (50). The “strong traits” of the Puritan ancestors, which Hawthorne has proudly inherited, are slowly dying out: impurities and imperfections are flowing in the blood of the younger generations. Hawthorne’s comments illustrate how gothic discourse is marked by the subjects of identity—through a consideration of family, genealogy, and sexuality—with an obsessive regularity. And in antebellum America, where one drop of African American blood separated slave from master, ancestral knowledge and proof of pure bloodlines was an anxious necessity. Such questions have yet to be fully addressed when criticizing the American gothic, and the instability of the “color line” as presented in the gothic fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Charles Chesnutt, and others needs to be considered beyond the bounds of previous studies. For establishing a bloodline acquires a specifically racial dimension in the United States, where miscegenation inspired the fear expressed in the racist discourse of the “affront to white womanhood” (as it does in the work of, say, Thomas Dixon), and an anxiety about the imagined moral and physical decay of the nation. Furthermore, the same kinds of identity questions found in gothic discourse—particularly those about ambiguity, paradox, and confusion—are present in Freud’s theory of the uncanny. The uncanny, for Freud, has to do with our sense of strangeness when the unfamiliar appears at the center of the familiar. This disturbance of the familiar is linked to identity when we note that the word familiar takes its root from the Latin, familia, ( family). This is consistent with Freud’s choice of the German, unheimlich (unhomely), for defining the uncanny experience. If the family and the home are important sites for developing selfhood, the breakdown of those sites through the recognition of something unfamiliar will trouble the smooth surface of identity. The uncanny, then, may prompt questions about the boundaries and limits of the self, as well as the very logic of identity. Freud cites the idea of the double, or doppelgänger, as an example of a strange kind of repetition that haunts the uncanny.6 Seeing one’s double inspires fear not only because it is, as Freud suggests, a harbinger of death; it also strikes at the heart of individuality and forces one to face the fiction of a stable self. In

xxvi i n t r o d u c t i o n Henry James’s “Jolly Corner” (1908), for instance, Spencer Brydon returns to his home after many years in Europe to find that a ghostly figure haunts his family home. After days of stalking this figure, Brydon comes to realize that the apparition is a revenant of himself; it is his American self, a self that he had left behind when he journeyed to Europe. This ghostly alter ego forces Brydon to consider the idea of “his other self” and this “ineffable identity” which is “effacing himself” (700, 702). James’s text is especially forceful in its conception of identity—its uncanny evocation of the “I” as ghost: the haunter and the haunted are one and the same. Brydon’s double, then, becomes a gothic presence that uncannily represents a splitting of the self and a reconceptualization of identity, once thought to be stable, unified subjectivity, as vulnerable to fragmentation and splintering. The specter of the double is, I suggest, part of a more general discursive pattern of fluid identity within the gothic. In The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (1986), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick touches on the idea of transmigrant identities when she links gothic conventions to an “insidious displacement of the boundaries of the self” that she elsewhere attributes to “the dilativeness and the permeability of the self” and to “the real shiftiness inher[ing] in the notion of identity” characteristic of a great deal of gothic fiction (33, 43, 111). Sedgwick’s ideas can be illustrated in Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), whereby the ambivalent and disturbing effects of one’s control over the self discloses an imbalance in notions of identity. That is, the ease with which Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde move from one identity to another reveals a troubling disturbance between surface and depth, deception and reality. What is Henry Jekyll’s “true” identity?, Stevenson asks.7 Is it the “respectable” Dr. Jekyll or the “shameful” Mr. Hyde? Jekyll himself answers this question with considerable ambiguity: “I was no more myself,” he says, “when I laid aside restraint and plunged into shame, than when I labored, in the eye of day, at the futherance of knowledge or the relief of sorrow and suffering . . . [M]an is not truly one, but truly two” (76). Here, Jekyll establishes the possibility of a self that is split between contradictory positions in which there are no fixed boundaries between self and other. Instead, the self is always ambivalent and the social codes of conduct that manufacture the distinctions of identity are revealed as mere fictions.8 Stevenson’s earlier tale, “Markheim” (1884), also uses the image of the split self—in the form of a murderous and repentant individual—to present identity as a fluid category.9 Here, Markheim’s experience when meet-

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ing his “other self” is articulated in the language associated with the uncanny: “A strange air of the commonplace” is said to overtake him as he witnesses the stranger who “knew him,” who “bore a likeness to himself,” and who triggers “a lump of living terror in his bosom” (126). Like Henry Jekyll, Markheim must confront his two selves: one defined by “generosity” and “good conscience,” the other by devilish “baseness” and unspeakable “cruelty” (127, 132). Personal identity is presented as strangely arbitrary: “evil and good run strong” in Markheim, and even he is unsure when one will exercise its strength over the other. Similar gothic discourses find their way into Poe’s “ William Wilson” (1839). Here, Poe’s protagonist finds himself pursued by a person with the same name, height, features, education, and date of birth. Wilson’s double, who is said to be a “perfect imitation” of himself, discloses Wilson’s transgressions until, in a fit of panic and anger, Wilson stabs his double only to find that he has killed himself. Like “Markheim,” Poe’s text uses identificatory ambiguity to explore moral transgression and redemption. But unlike “Markheim,” Poe uses racial, familial, and genealogical degeneration to explain Wilson’s doubled identity. Wilson, for instance, imparts his circumstances to the “detestation of his race,” a racial lineage that makes him a “slave of circumstances,” and he goes on to say that his “unspeakable misery” is connected to the “descenden[cy] of a race” that has passed on “constitutional disease[s]” from generation to generation (57, 65). His split self, then, is an “inherited family character” that derives from the defective “hereditary temper” of his race (58, 79). The horrors of a fragmented self are thus bound up with the gothic discourses of race and familial bloodlines. Passing and the American Gothic Such gothic discourses are also found in Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), a text that Leslie Fiedler calls Twain’s “most gothic book” (403), and that Eric Sundquist labels a “tale of miscegenation, doubling, and the legal fictions of color, ownership, and identity” (“Mark Twain,” 103).10 Indeed, Twain’s story of the “white” slave, Roxy (who was legally black because one-sixteenth of her blood was African and who exchanges her child, Chambers, for the heir to the family fortune), uses the gothic discourses of ambiguous racial difference, familial bloodlines, primogeniture, class divisions, and personal identity. As the two children have the same age and the same complexion, the switch goes unnoticed, and Chambers’s legal identity moves from an oppressed slave boy to a privileged child of

xxviii i n t r o d u c t i o n power and wealth. This exchange highlights the fiction of stable identities by calling into question the statuses of slave and heir as self-evident categories inscribed on body surfaces. Twain thus uses the arbitrary racial distinctions of color to dramatize the doubled figure of a biracial character who can live as both slave and aristocrat for more than twenty years without being detected. Eventually, though, Twain’s narrative moves in another direction when the aristocratic nurturing of Tom (really Chambers) gives way to the criminal side of his character. In the guise of a woman in blackface, Tom commits various crimes that lead to the murder of Judge Driscoll.11 The narrative movement suggests that Tom’s drop of black blood generates his criminal activity; Roxy, for example, ascribes Tom’s “vicious nature” to his African blood (21). Racial essentialism (based on the stereotypes of black viciousness and criminality) thus reasserts itself, and it is furthered when David Wilson compares Tom’s fingerprints with those of Chambers, concluding that Tom’s “true” race is indeed inscribed on his body. The unmasking of Tom’s “real” identity reestablishes the boundaries meant to stabilize racial and gender differences. Indeed, Tom’s transgression of the color line is presented with a gothic fear that must be contained. For the murder of Judge Driscoll—his father figure and unwitting master—reproduces the white antebellum gothic nightmare of black insurgency and brutal race violence. The narrative, then, subscribes to the dread of racial ambiguity that can be seen in the antebellum anxiety concerning slave uprisings and escape, as well as in the unstable climate and racial hysteria posed by Reconstruction. Tom’s passing, like passing in general, repeats the gothic discourse of the double through the split between the performed self and the former identity, the latter of which is based on family ties, loyalties, and a community ( James Davis 44). Charles Chesnutt articulates the severity of this split self in his statement that passing means “a severance from one’s former life almost as complete as that made by death; one must forsake home and relatives and friends must cease to see them, to communicate with them, to inquire of them” (Mandy 27). Passing, in other words, requires a severing of a historically based notion of self from a performative identity that is adopted by the passing figure. At the level of narrative, too, passing repeats this doubling by exposing a dual aspect of identity through the return of that which is repressed. That is, the passing narrative relies on the unveiling of a “true” identity even as it exposes the fictions of an authentic conception of self. Here, the dual aspect of identity consists of a masquerade

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that represses a so-called “core” self that is determined by social, familial, and legal constraints related to the individual’s body and bloodline. Law and social custom, then, insist on the relationship between racial or gender identity and an individual’s physical being. The passing narrative thus constructs a doubling whereby this relationship is subverted by a questioning of the fundamental “core” self, just as it discloses the legally constructed identity based on physical and ancestral characteristics. If, as I suggest, Tom’s passing is framed in gothic terms, it should come as no surprise to find that cultural criticism on passing has been infected by gothic discourse. For instance, Juda Bennett says that passing holds a “haunting and insistent” presence in American literature that is often characterized as a “twoness,” a “veil” or a “double consciousness,” thus reviving the trope of the gothic double (38, 54). And Marjorie Garber claims that the passing figure “haunts images of African Americans in literature and culture,” from “slave narratives and minstrel shows” to popular fiction (Vested 268). Passing, she continues, can be “a vehicle for social and political empowerment” and “it is one of the tools that does, in fact, help to dismantle the master’s house” (268). It “uncannily calls to mind Poe’s purloined letter, which became a signifier rather than a signified, something that produces certain effects rather than a unit of meaning, by a similar repression of its content” (268). Garber concludes by saying that the passing figure has the effect of “a phantom or a ghost” on American culture (269). The gothic images that Garber applies to passing are supported by a reading of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), which employs biracial characters as haunting presences who attack the hypocrisy of slavery.12 Stowe’s characters, Eliza and George Harris, for instance, are very light-skinned, nearly white in appearance. Although they are legally identified as black and thus slaves, Stowe suggests that one of the horrors of slavery is that these characters exist somewhere between the racial binary of blackness and whiteness. As Nancy Bentley points out, Stowe presents us with a form of “white slavery,” wherein “the novel represents slaves as white men with ‘Anglo-Saxon blood’” (503). Exploiting a pro-mulatto sentiment that privileged the slave of mixed race as the “house servant,” Stowe challenges slavery by focusing on characters who question the American racial binary: if Eliza and George are neither black nor white, then how should they be treated? How should antebellum culture define them? And where do they rank in the hierarchy of racial differences? Such questions challenge the legal identities of people of mixed race by rejecting the law’s

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“single axis framework,” which treats blackness and whiteness as “mutually exclusive categories of existence” (Crenshaw 57). Stowe’s characters, then, refute America’s legally restrictive notions of identity: Eliza escapes to Canada by assuming a male garb and a white identity, while George adopts a “Spanish disguise,” in which makeup and costume transform his race, nationality, and class (Stern 103). Such transformations disrupt the epistemological certainties of nineteenth-century American identities and generate fears and anxieties about the crossing of identificatory borders. Disruptions in the stable categories of race, nationality, class, and gender, I argue, result in a dread that is often represented by gothic discourse, contributing to the development of American gothic discourse. For example, gothic language arises in Uncle Tom’s Cabin when the narrator turns to a discussion of “mulatto rebelliousness” (274). Here, people of mixed race are described as impatient and angry, ready to revolt in their desire to fight against the dehumanizing effects of slavery. These characters lie in sharp contrast to the dark-skinned slaves (such as Uncle Tom) who are said to be patient, loyal, and obedient. “If ever the San Domingo hour comes,” says Stowe’s character, Augustine St. Clare, “Anglo Saxon blood will lead on the day. Sons of white fathers, with all their haughty feelings burning in their veins, will not always be bought and sold and traded” (274). In this passage, St. Clare invokes the Haitian slave revolt of 1791, which American proslavery forces feared as a bloody, violent event that foreshadowed a potential American nightmare.13 The haunting presence of San Domingo is, in its American context, framed by St. Clare in racially specific terms: the slave of mixed race will lead the revolution. Stowe’s narrative, then, ties the gothic image of the spilt “Anglo Saxon blood” to the mixed “bloodlines” of those slaves who are the “sons of white fathers.” They are the gothic return of the repressed who must be met with fear and trembling.14 Not only do Stowe’s biracial characters convey the gothic imagery of revolution, they also express the gothic discourses of confinement, sexual domination, mixed bloodlines, and unspeakable family secrets.15 Such imagery inspired antebellum racial theorists such as J. H. Van Evrie to discourage racial amalgamation by arguing that “mulattoism was an abnormalism—a disease. . . . [that was] mercifully doomed to final extinction” (161). For Van Evrie, the biracial person was a “deformed” and “monstrous” creature, whose inferior genetic composition would lead to the eventual death of “the mongrel” (167). This response serves as a counter-

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discourse to the rhetoric that privileged mulatto slaves: Van Evrie and other proslavery advocates at times paint biracial figures as the gothic Other, a source of extreme anxiety. Such biracial panic is partly explained by Elaine Ginsberg, who asserts that the mulatto can generate “cultural anxiety” by highlighting the closeness of “blackness” to “whiteness,” thus questioning the status and privilege accompanying whiteness (4 –5). Marjorie Garber corroborates this assertion by stating that “hegemonic cultural imaginary” must “guard against a difference that might otherwise put the identity of one’s own position in question” (130). Because biracial figures resist the polarity of American racial binaries, their physical presence provokes inquiries into, and a justification for, the rigid American parameters of racial difference. Van Evrie’s gothic response thus arises out of a frustrated desire to situate mulattos on a cultural map of race difference that throws his own privileged identity into question. At the heart of his writing, then, is a panicked voice that seeks to highlight the limits and boundaries of racial authenticity to avoid a breakdown in “real blackness” or “real whiteness” by way of racial amalgamation (170). But American racial ideology, of course, works to counter this biracial panic by suggesting that “authentic blackness” may have its foundations outside physical pigmentation (Favor 2).16 Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Roxy and Chambers are, for instance, “as white as anybody”: Roxy has a “fair complexion” and “fine soft brown hair”; Chambers has “blue eyes and flaxen curls like his white comrades” (32–33). But they are slaves “by a fiction of law and custom” that privileges their “single drop” of black blood over their white ancestry (33). Here, Twain sets in motion questions about “authentic blackness,” and, after Roxy exchanges Chambers for Tom, she even calls Chambers a “mis’able imitation nigger” (99). Chambers responds by saying, “Yah-yah-yah! jes listen to dat! If I’s imitation, what is you? Bofe us is imitation white— dat’s what we is— en pow’ful good imitation, too— yah-yah-yah!—we don’t ’mount to noth’n as imitation niggers” (99). This passage plays with the notion of racial authenticity by calling attention to the relationship between physical appearance and racial identity.17 To Roxy’s correct assertion that he is not an authentic black man, Chambers says that the biracial figure is always imitating both blackness and whiteness. Chambers suggests that he and Roxy, who have physical appearances that contradict the legal identities thrust upon them, are forced to perform the roles set forth by legal and cultural definitions of racial identity. But while the separation of physical appearance from an “authentic”

xxxii i n t r o d u c t i o n racial identity might stifle some of the panic associated with racial mixture, it does not eradicate the potential for misreading the race that is physically inscribed on the body. Indeed, if someone can be “externally” white but “internally” black, then how can race be visually identified? Chambers’s unauthentic blackness, like Tom’s unauthentic whiteness, is misread: initial readings of his skin do not reveal that he is a white man who is unknowingly imitating a black slave. Moreover, when Chambers’s body is misread, the distinctions that have been codified as naturally ordained fall away and are replaced by a gothic dread that must be either abolished or ritually proscribed. Chambers’s passing thus highlights the masquerade of “natural” identity and reveals the unnaturalness of what antebellum culture takes for granted: the ontological status of whiteness and blackness. An example of attempts to contain this dread arises in Uncle Tom’s Cabin when Mr. Harris brands his light-skinned slave, George. The “H” inscribed on George’s right hand not only identifies him as the property of Mr. Harris, but also functions as a visual sign meant to discourage George from passing. When George does finally escape, the posted handbill advertising his capture highlights the writing on his body: “Ran away from the subscriber, my mulatto boy, George. . . . A very light mulatto with brown curly hair; is very intelligent, speaks handsomely, can read and write; will probably try to pass for a white man, . . . has been branded in his right hand with the letter H” (178). Just as George’s branding is “a kind of hieroglyphics of the flesh” from which the horrors of slavery can be read, it also exposes how race is not necessarily a biological given but a social construction that requires language (Spillers 67). That is, the politics of American racial hierarchies stipulate an order that can be visually decoded through a set of signs. Breakdowns in the language of race, like those that arise out of the rhetoric of passing, bring into relief the inauthenticity of “authentic” identity. This engenders the contingency at the heart of identity that produces, in the dominant culture, endless attempts to naturalize its own position by positing the inauthenticity, or secondariness of what it will construe as its others. In the chapters that follow this introduction such questions will be addressed further. In addressing them, though, my intention is not to establish a norm of gothic literature or gothic discourse—the rhetoric of gothicism is far too complex for there to be a single norm—but to provide a context in which alternative patterns of gothic production in the United States can be compared. I have chosen to read these discursive patterns in diverse texts that might best be placed in the sweeping category of “Ameri-

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can gothic literature,” a category that has come to encompass everything from the fiction of Charles Brockden Brown to the poetry of Emily Dickinson to the novels of Toni Morrison.18 Because the gothic discourses used by these writers are far too vast to chart, I have decided to focus on nineteenth-century American gothic discourse in the context of racial ambiguity. This context has been chosen because of its gothic import in the United States and its intimate connection to the larger gothic discourses of transgressive sexuality, identificatory fluidity, familial genealogy, pure bloodlines, primogeniture, slavery, and many others. Focusing on this subject and limiting the historical period of analysis has still left me with a plethora of texts to discuss. My readings thus range from the traditional gothicism of Edgar Allan Poe to the nonfiction of William and Ellen Craft to the “sentimental” fiction of Frances E. W. Harper. The diversity of texts discussed in this study not only work to revise the gothic canon, but they also open a space from which gothic discourse can be viewed in its many incarnations. What brings all these texts together, though, is their participation in the thematic and rhetorical interface between gothic discourse, racial ambiguity, and passing. While American gothic literature is usually presented as a commodious signifier, providing everything from metaphysics to materialism, conservatism to radicalism, and corruption to fulfillment, the images of racial ambiguity remain a constant trope. The gothic landscape and its identificatory markers—whether they are in Melville’s description of Babo or in Chesnutt’s depiction of Rena Walden—are presented with the gothic currency that typically goes hand in hand with the motif of racial confusion. Nevertheless, recent studies of American gothic literature tend to gloss over this issue in favor of other gothic sources. This study, then, provides a sustained analytical reading of racial ambiguity and its rhetorical effects within gothic discourse in order to identify previously unnoticed or ignored (but nonetheless important) dimensions of American gothic writing from 1830 to 1900.

pa rt o n e

Creating a Self in the Antebellum Gothic Narrative

chapter one

Hybrid Bodies and Gothic Narratives in Poe’s Pym

I

n her insightful analysis of “gothic America,” Teresa Goddu calls attention to Poe’s comments on the black banditti in one of Monk Lewis’s plays (73). After questioning Monk about why he introduced black characters into a region where “black people were quite unknown,” Poe is told that “blacks would have more effect” on the audience of the drama (qtd. in Goddu 73).1 Lewis was, of course, preaching to the converted: Poe had been playing with images of blackness and whiteness since the onset of his literary career. But Poe’s invoking blackness in such stories as “The Black Cat” (1843) and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838) becomes more than a mere formal device; it forces the reader to confront the gothic color of slavery. Images of blackness and whiteness are thus effective sources of gothic production that are matched only by depictions of an unstable color line whereby the border separating black from white is not policed or strictly enforced. In this chapter, then, I shall argue that behind the gothic veil of Poe’s Pym—with its decaying bodies, bloody violence, and anthropophogy—are negotiations of antebellum racial discourses, negotiations that attempt to chart a course between dichotomies in order to call attention to the anxieties of potential bloody conflicts between blacks and whites, slaves and masters. Written at a time when the institution of slavery was vulnerable and being threatened by both white and black Americans, Pym can be read as an investigation of the peculiar attitudes to racial difference and hierarchies within the context of contemporary discourses in the popular field of racial “science.” Racial “Science” Pym reproduces the typical gothic conflict between defenseless victims and abusive tyrants within a racialized framework, endeavoring to capture American anxieties concerning racial uprisings as it deconstructs racial patterns through the exploration of a space between blackness and

4 c r e at i n g a s e l f whiteness. Representing “hybrid” bodies, for instance, was a way for Poe to both recognize and respond to the ongoing instability of the master-slave dynamic.2 While racism haunts much of Poe’s work,3 and Pym certainly contains racist discourses and bigoted expressions, the novel also tries to make sense of antebellum racial conflicts, while it repeatedly deconstructs racial essentialism. Such deconstructions sought to overcome the pitting of black against white at a time when David Walker’s Appeal (1830) and Nat Turner’s 1831 rebellion were foremost in the consciousness of many Virginians. And Poe’s Pym, haunted by the bloody images of a symbolic slave uprising in the form of a mutiny, turns to hybridized bodies—both physical and textual—to address the anxieties engendered by the revolutionary principles put forth by slaves such as Walker and Turner. The fear of slave rebellions—fueled by the Virginia slave uprising in the summer of 1800 —inspired arguments for the expulsion of blacks and the establishment of a white man’s country ( Jordan 542). As early as 1801, Virginia politician George Tucker suggested that the “race question” in Virginia was “an eating sore” that was rapidly infecting the body of the state and impeding the “progress of humanity” (33). He proposed suppressing the specter of slave rebellions by sending blacks to Africa, the West Indies, or even to the unsettled western lands of the United States. Virginia’s debate over colonization was furthered by what Tucker called a “spirit we have to fear,” a spirit of unrest that could wake the state with violent attacks; the only answer to this unrest was black removal (34). The debate continued during the early nineteenth century; in 1820, for instance, the Virginia proposition for expatriation was put forward by James Madison. He argued that free blacks should be forced to leave the United States, for “the repugnance of the Whites to their continuance among them is founded on . . . physical distinctions, which are not likely soon if ever to be eradicated” (76). Likewise, in 1826 Thomas Jefferson reiterated his belief in the colonization of blacks by stating: “I consider expatriation [of blacks] to the governments . . . of their own color as entirely practicable, and greatly preferable to the mixture of color here. To this I have a great aversion” (137). And a 1786 Virginia bill drafted by Jefferson actually proclaimed that “a marriage between a white person and a negro, or between a white person and a mulatto, shall be null” (557). Such comments seem odd in light of the recent DNA evidence supporting Jefferson’s intimate relationship with Sally Hemings, his slave and mistress, but his aversion to intermarriage and intermixture was shared by many of his contemporaries. The fear of miscegena-

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tion became a strong argument in favor of black removal; it was thought that racial mixing would mean a corruption of American “whiteness” and the loss of an “original” American identity. For instance, William L. Smith, a South Carolina politician, asserted that “a mixture of the races would degenerate the whites, without improving the blacks. . . . If they would intermarry with the whites, then the white race would be extinct, and the American people would be a mulatto breed” (qtd. in Jordan 544).4 Smith was claiming that white America would lose its “true” identity and disappear. Such fears were partly fueled by stories of “black erasure,” such as the one recounted in 1798 in the Weekly Magazine of Harry Moss’s transformation from black to white (qtd. in Gardner 461). The anonymous author pieced together the “facts” about Moss’s miraculous transformation from articles published a decade earlier. Jared Gardner notes that Moss’s case was well known during the early nineteenth century: born a slave in the 1760s, Moss “began to develop white spots on his body and by 1795 he was entirely ‘white’” (Gardner 460).5 Early American racial theorists used Moss’s conversion to argue against racial mixture, fearing that the case of racial ambiguity arose out of an “unnatural” mix of white, Native American, and black blood. But the Weekly Magazine article uses Moss’s transformation to argue against the evils of slavery. “The lines dividing the black from the white are not regularly defined,” the author states, “and the change from white to black must be as equally possible with the reverse above stated, it may be well for the white slave dealers . . . to consider . . . [that] they may ultimately be doomed to the wretchedness, to which they are now devoting millions” (110 –11). Here, Moss’s story generates abolitionist sentiment by relying on the fear of whites’ losing their racial identity and being plunged into the horrors of slavery. Charles Brockden Brown realized the gothic potential of this case when his Monthly Magazine (1800) published a similar article titled “Another Instance of a Negro Turning White.” The anonymous author of this piece states that “the change of color which Harry Moss has, within a few years, undergone, from black to white” has happened to another African American “in the town of North Hempstead” where he has transformed “not to the dead white of the Albinos, but is a good wholesome carnation hue. . . . How additionally singular it would be, if instances of the spontaneous disappearance of this stable mark of distinction between slaves and their masters were to become frequent!” (qtd. in Gardner 460).6 Gothic discourses are put forth here asserting that this slave did not transform into the “unnatural” albino, but he assumed a

6 c r e at i n g a s e l f so-called healthy color. The whiteness of the albino, that is, would have repeated a visual marker of difference that was lost in the fading of his “blackness.” But when a slave becomes indistinguishable from his master, a gothic fear is generated through the image of trespassers who can move freely over the borders separating blackness from whiteness. The retention of physiognomic identity and the fears of losing “true Americanness” were central to the early and mid nineteenth-century American discourses of miscegenation and hybridity.7 So-called evidence that the races should be kept separate, coupled with antebellum views on interracial sexuality, are outlined in Samuel George Morton’s Crania Americana (1839). Here, Morton presented his scientific view of polygenesis, claiming that blacks and whites, because of the relative size of their brains, belonged not to different races but to different species; he therefore called the products of interbreeding between races “hybrids” (260). For Morton, hybrids were inferior in that they lacked fertility and suffered from more sickness and disease than a product of pure racial stock, an absurd theory that exposes his anxiety concerning interbreeding as well as his profound desire to protect white purity (261).8 Morton, like Poe, thus borrowed from early nineteenth-century travel literature by Browne, Hawkins, Caillet, and others to argue that the two species were naturally repelled by each other. Africans, he claimed, had a “natural repugnance” for non-Africans similar to that of whites for Africans (115). Morton’s text had a profound impact on Josiah Nott’s 1843 essay, “The Mulatto a Hybrid—Probable Extermination of the Two Races if Whites and Blacks Are Allowed to Intermarry,” a pseudoscientific attempt at laying the groundwork for “the designation of species and the laws of hybridity” (252). This work was furthered by John Campbell, who published Negro-Mania: Being an Examination of the Falsely Assumed Equality of the Various Races of Men in 1851. Here, Campbell derides theories of monogenesis and exposes a defensiveness about slavery by turning to cultural and biological arguments in support of polygenesis. Campbell’s cultural argument denied the historical existence of a black civilization. Because one had never existed, he claimed, the black race was decidedly inferior to that of the white (58 – 65). Moreover, Campbell turned to a biological question by asking whether the hybrid offspring of unions between whites and blacks would be fertile. If not, Campbell claimed, this would be proof that blacks and whites were of different species and thus should never marry (146–50). The debates about hybridity during the 1830s— debates that continued

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to rage into the postbellum period—all maintained the uncomplicated racial divisions of blacks from whites by arguing that racial mixture was “unnatural.” This marked separation, placing blacks and whites in mutually exclusive categories, became the dominant theoretical model not only in the United States, but throughout much of the Western world (Robert Young 124). In America, then, degrees of difference between the races became discrete, constructing a racial schema that placed all nonwhite races in a general category, setting them apart from white Americans. Morton, Nott, and Campbell thus used these discrete racial categories to suggest that nonwhites constituted a different species. This model of absolute difference, with whites providing the norm from which all others could be regarded as deviations, served as proof that interracial sexual activity was a “crime against nature” (Campbell 149). People of mixed races, as a result, crossed a boundary that marked them as deviants; in turn, this boundary had to be policed with exceptional care. Nineteenth-century racial theories were significant in that they justified slavery within a nation that proclaimed the equality of all men. By marking the constitutive difference of the races, these “scientists” could claim that nonwhites were of a lower species and not “properly human,” thus precluding them from constitutional equality (Nott 255). The policing of miscegenation arose from a terror of hybridity. Nott’s intense anxiety is signaled, for instance, when he claims that the mixing of races would result in the merger of two distinct species and cause the United States to degenerate not only culturally but also physically (253). This imagined decay of the national body inspired antebellum legislators to pass state laws outlawing sex between races (Beth Day 12). Such laws were developed by the American body politic in response to the general anxiety that degeneration of Caucasian stock in the United States through miscegenation would eventually result in the death of the white race. Furthermore, the gothic discourses of death, impurity, and genetic contamination were complicated by anxieties about racial passing. Racist theories, then, depended on a binarized racial division, implying that whites could read the racial difference inscribed on black bodies. Because hybrid bodies resisted binary categorization, the theory of visually separating whites from nonwhites faced collapse, as did the discrete racial categories theorized by Nott and Campbell. The ambiguous nature of the hybrid body thus engendered legal and cultural ruptures in the context of racial passing, threatening to disrupt the slave’s socially constructed status. Therefore, it was feared that

8 c r e at i n g a s e l f miscegenation might result in racially ambiguous slaves who could pass for white in order to flee from bondage. It did not matter that the passing slaves’ physical appearance made it obvious that their legally invisible white ancestors likely outnumbered them and that other whites would regard them as white, presumably free, people. The law and the social custom that defined the passing slaves privileged their African heritage—invisible on the surface of the body— over the obviously dominant and visible ancestry that would cause strangers to view them as white and free. Poe turns to the subject of identities inscribed on body surfaces in the opening section of “The Man of the Crowd.” Here, Poe’s narrator sits in a café scrutinizing an urban mob and classifying its members according to occupation, class, and ethnicity. His gaze thus taxonomizes the urbanites based on their physical appearance: “The gamblers,” he says, “are easily recognizable” due to their “swarthiness of complexion” and their “filmy dimness of eye” (110). Likewise, the “Jew peddlers” can be identified by their “hawk eyes” and “expressions of abject humility” (110). The narrator, then, identifies men of various ranks by their physical appearance, concluding that he can discern an essential physical difference between categories of people. Such physical demarcations echo the essentialism of the racial theories of Morton, Nott, and Campbell, who attempted to rank different races in terms of intelligence and to offer scientific proof of the relationship between physical appearance and essential character (O’Malley 369). Poe’s knowledge of this strain of polygenesism is signaled in his 1845 story, “Some Words with a Mummy,” in which the famous Egyptologist, George Gliddon (who collaborated with Nott on Types of Mankind ), is present during the resuscitation of, and conversation with, an Egyptian mummy. During the conversation, Gliddon and the others are shocked to hear that nineteenth-century America has degenerated from earlier ages. The mummy, then, contradicts the learned men’s social, cultural, and racial theories by suggesting that Egypt and other ancient civilizations were far more advanced than the United States, thus throwing the scientists’ theories of teleology, evolution, and modernity into question. More interesting, though, is that this tale raises intriguing questions about attitudes on race, for it challenges separate race origins. Although the text does not resolve the issue of polygenesis, it leaves open the possibility that “civilization” arose from dark rather than light-skinned Egyptians, a possibility that Gliddon had worked hard to contradict (Nelson, “Haunting” 516).

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Black or White? Similar questions are addressed when Poe turns to the depiction of racial hierarchies during Pym’s adventures. When Pym arrives on the island of Tsalal, for instance, he discovers that racial distinctions are used to structure the landscape and its inhabitants. Reminiscent of Poe’s Virginia, Tsalal is presented through narrative devices that frame black and white images as contrasts that never merge. In fact, on the island there are “no light-colored substances of any kind,” and on seeing the white crew of the Jane Guy, the natives “recoil” in disgust, fear, and horror (185, 189).9 As a result, “natural” racial divisions are normalized as mutually exclusive categories which, in turn, work to justify racial politics based on segregation.10 The narrator’s initial (incorrect) assumption of absolute racial separation on Tsalal might be read as a utopian vision of antebellum America, a place free from the threats posed by hybridity. Within this bipolarized system, there is no terror of bloody slave revolts, no trepidation regarding racial passing, and no fears of miscegenation; the “natural” black and white divisions cannot be transgressed. Such an imagined space where racial difference is accepted and cannot be misread calms the threats to and the anxieties of American slave owners at a time when bloody slave revolts are foremost in their minds. Pym’s account of his escape from Tsalal reinforces the binary racial opposition between whites and blacks: Pym and Peter’s Tsalalian hostage, Nu-Nu, is horrified by the whiteness that confronts him as the threesome travel southward. He recoils from the “white birds” and the “milky water” and becomes hysterical when Pym tries to gain his help with a piece of white linen. Nu-Nu’s aversion to whiteness may be read as a segregationist parable. But within the structure of Poe’s gothic narrative, Nu-Nu’s fear of whiteness inverts the gothic trope in which blackness, not whiteness, inspires terror. If Nu-Nu fears whiteness as Pym fears blackness, then perhaps aversion to blackness is merely a cultural construction, with no essentialist basis. Inverting this trope then opens up the possibility of potential misreadings of conventional gothic literary patterns: Is it possible to derive “real” meaning from blackness and whiteness? The themes of reading and misreading also apply to the racial identities of the Tsalalians. Poe’s Tsalal natives, in fact, combine images of Native Americans with those of African American slaves and Polynesians. Although the Tsalalians are “jet black,” they have the ordinary “stature of

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Europeans or Indians” (189). Native American imagery, moreover, is present in their garments and possessions: they wore “skins of an . . . animal . . . made to fit the body with some degree of skill,” and they possess canoes, which the “tribes” manipulate based on the commands of the “chief” (190). These descriptions characterize the Tsalal natives as a confused racial farrago; they are an interesting mixture of Africans, Indians, and Polynesians. Thus, principles derived from American narratives about racial hierarchies are appropriated and deployed here to justify the spurious logic that prioritizes whiteness on the nineteenth-century scale of racial difference. These representations depart from the conventional American racial scale of gradation put forth in the pseudoscientific theories of Morton, Nott, and Campbell: the racial mixing exhibited by the Tsalalians conflates the hierarchy of human types, in which Native Americans occupy a rung above the darker races on the racial ladder. These hybrid bodies, moreover, inspire disgust and terror in the narrator: the Tsalalians are called “the most barbarous, subtle, and bloodthirsty wretches that ever contaminated the face of the globe” (205). Pym’s claim that these “black Indians” contaminate the Earth echo polygenesist theories suggesting that hybridity has the potential to contaminate genetic evolution, leading to racial impurity. In addition, Pym states that the Tsalalians are “the lowest of the savage races with which mankind are acquainted” (195). The rhetorical mixing of Indian and African American in Pym’s descriptions of the Tsalalians accounts for his fear and loathing. Such comments, combined with the brutal Tsalalian attack, imply that the savagery of these hybridized natives are indeed “unnatural” and “impossible to understand” (192). Pym’s Peters The Native American images presented in Pym’s descriptions of the Tsalalians suggest that Poe’s concern with the questions of racial hybridity are not limited to discussions of blacks and whites, slaves and masters. During the period often referred to as the decade of Indian removal, Poe’s 1830s America pushed its way across the continent, asserting white racial superiority in the wake of native genocide. On the surface, Dirk Peters, Poe’s portrait of an “Indian half-breed,” represents the ways in which American natives were ideologically and biologically “indentured to the colonizers’ values” (Rowe 131). To Pym, Peters is the “hybrid” (106)—part white, part Native American—who is subject to servitude; Pym, at times, even plays the part of Peters’s white master.11

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But, on meeting Dirk Peters, Pym is stricken with terror. “The son of an Indian squaw . . . and a white fur trader,” Pym states, “Peters . . . was one of the most purely ferocious-looking men I ever beheld” (84). Such comments are inspired by Peters’s deformed body: He was short in stature—not more than four feet eight inches high—but his limbs were of the most Herculean mold. His hands, especially, were so enormously thick and broad as hardly to retain a human shape. His arms, as well as legs, were bowed in the most singular manner, and appeared to possess no flexibility whatever. His head was equally deformed, being an immense size, with an indentation on the crown. (85)

Peters’s disturbing features are, the narrator implies, products of his hybrid genealogy. Pym even asserts that a mixture of Euro-American and Native American stock produces a “naturally ferocious” offspring with “long and protruding teeth” that would cause any casual observer to “shudder” as if he or she had seen a “demon” (85). Peters, then, is not the “stately” ancestor of the “noble savage”; he is a monstrous “half-breed,” who generates fear and loathing rather than admiration and respect. The narrative thus conflates hybridity with gothic discourses, wherein Peters symbolizes the hybrid bodies that haunt the collective imagination of antebellum America.12 Connections between Peters’s “demonic” body and the features of African American men are made clear when the narrator observes that the indentation on the crown of Peters’s head is “like that on the head of most Negroes” (85). Such descriptions of Peters’s “dark” appearance and “ferocity” foreshadow the “black Indians” that Pym meets on Tsalal; in fact, Peters combines white, Native American, and African American characteristics. And, as with the Tsalalians, Peters’s complex hybridity threatens the white American characters, for his strength and brutality at times engender bloody violence. During a confrontation on Tsalal, for instance, Peters uses “his great personal strength” to pick up “a club from one of the savages who had fallen . . . [and] dash out the brains of the three who remained, killing each instantaneously with a single blow” (231). Here, the troubling conflicts of race are expressed in gothic discourse, reminding us of Leslie Fiedler’s well-known claim that American gothic expresses national “obsessive concerns,” especially “the ambiguity of our relationship with Indian[s] and Negro[es]” (xxii). Thus, the violent threat posed by Peters can be read as a result of the hybridization of Peters’s body, which conflates

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fears of both Native American and African American civil unrest by rewriting the history of American guilt within a gothic narrative. But Peters’s hybridity also offers an alternative to the “savagery” of the black cook. The cook, who is described as the “perfect demon,” instigates the mutiny, and, reminiscent of the language used in white responses to Nat Turner’s rebellion, inflicts a “diabolical villainy” upon the white crew (83, 84).13 Images of “horrible butchery” and “bloody labor” in the name of racial injustice sanction the cook’s actions, images that symbolize Freud’s rubric of the return of the repressed (84). Whereas the cook is defined by his uncontrolled racial hatred, Peters, as a “half-breed,” is able to take on various identities. For example, Peters’s ferocity and demonic qualities transform into kindness and companionship: “Dirk Peters,” according to Pym, “treated him with some degree of kindness, and on one occasion saved him from the brutality of the cook” (85, 87). In fact, throughout the text, Peters’s brutality and savagery are repeatedly undermined when Pym’s life is “preserved through the interference of Dirk Peters” (87). It is hard to argue with John Carlos Rowe’s assertion that the Pym-Peters relationship comes to echo that of master and slave, but I suggest that Peters’s fluid identity—his movement from a threatening demon to a loyal companion—speaks to the transformative powers of hybridization and serves as a counterpoint to the black cook’s fixed racial identity. Pym’s narrative confirms this assertion in the conclusion of chapter 21, when Pym states that he and Peters are “the only living white men” on Tsalal (212). Some critics have attributed this passage to a technical mistake by Poe, but it seems appropriate to suggest—based on the text’s conclusion that reasserts Peters’s status as “half-breed”—that Peters’s racial transformations are in keeping with contemporary concerns about miscegenation and racial passing.14 Interestingly, though, the narrative disrupts antebellum fears of hybridity by showing that arbitrary racial delineations can work to Pym’s advantage: when confronted with an island of angry blacks, Peters transforms into a white man, thus becoming Pym’s ally in the racial conflict. Peters’s transformative power, like that of Queequeg in Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), reasserts notions of the hybrid body as an incomprehensible sign; his racial identity is not clearly written on his physical features. But Dirk Peters is not the only fluidly transformative character in Poe’s text. The survivors of the shipwreck also begin to blur the boundaries between “civilized men” and “barbarian hordes” by confronting the specter of cannibalism, a literary trope in antebellum texts that was often associated

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with the “uncivilized” peoples of the South Pacific. In chapter 12 Pym, Parker, Peters, and Augustus draw lots to decide whose body will feed the others. The lottery constitutes a performance in which the American characters can differentiate themselves from the “natural” South Pacific cannibals. And Pym reinforces this performance by insisting that it is the weakness of their minds that forces them to entertain these “bloody and cannibal designs” (143). Moreover, Pym, “in the name of everything which he holds sacred,” implores Parker to give up any cannibalistic ideas; but Parker prevails even though it later becomes clear that the cannibalism was unnecessary since the four men are floating on an abundant food source. By participating in a cannibalistic ritual, the survivors dissolve the cultural distinctions separating them from “uncivilized” cultures; in effect, by eating Parker, they “go native,” for the walls separating Americans and South Pacific natives have been demolished. The blurring of the boundaries separating black from white is further written into the narrative when Pym, Peters, and Nu-Nu advance toward the whiteness of the South Pole. For Nu-Nu, the terror inspired by the changing landscape is too much, and he wastes away and eventually dies as the black landscape transforms into “gray.” In fact, during the final stage of the journey, Pym is confronted with a gray southern vapor—a blend of black and white so pervasive that it engulfs him. Here, black and white are not antithetical but form a union that destabilizes the strict disparity commonly acknowledged between the two; the whiteness of the southern locale—the milky hue of the water and the fine white powder that falls on them—is combined with the black imagery of the increasing sullen darkness. Black and white symbols thus merge, collapsing the narrative’s system of binary opposites. This merger forms a “hybrid” landscape that provides a backdrop for the hybridized bodies of Peters and the “black Indians.” Such a transformation from the jet-black environment of Tsalal to the muted grays of the southern pole suggests that the narrative is unable to discern stable racial identities based on opposites. Black and white, the narrative implies, are not mutually exclusive categories; they are able to unite in the formation of gray. At the heart of Poe’s text, then, is an examination of racial difference that reveals binaries as self-collapsing at the epistemological level. In this respect Poe’s representation of hybridity speaks to Homi K. Bhabha’s theory of the subversion of authority; hybridization, Bhabha suggests, exposes the dialogical situation of colonialism, a process that “reveals the ambivalence

14 c r e a t i n g a s e l f at the source of traditional discourses on authority” (110). For Bhabha (like Poe), hybridity becomes a moment of “epistemological splitting” that disrupts authority and exposes false claims of coherence and unity. Bhabha thus defines hybridity as a “problematic of colonial representation” that “reverses the effects of colonialist disavowal,” so that the dominant discourse becomes fragmented by other “denied knowledges” (156). Just as Poe uses hybridity to expose the absurdity of distinct racial categories, Bhabha asserts that the hybridity of colonial discourse reverses the structures of domination in the colonial situation. But, where Bhabha sees hybridization as a subversive and liberating discursive production, Poe often views hybridity with gothic terror. Textual Bodies, Gothic Narratives The “epistemological splitting” central to Bhabha’s notion of hybridity assumes that the language of colonial discourse is always ambiguous and thus vulnerable to textual strategies that can destabilize authoritative language. Such linguistic failures construct a bridge that connects Bhabha’s theory of hybridity to the questions of misreading and misunderstanding addressed in Poe’s Pym. Literary critics since the 1960s have correctly pointed out that Poe’s novel “betrays authorial carelessness in its so-called patchwork construction,” which calls attention to the difficulties of deciphering its meaning (Kennedy, Abyss 12). In 1963, for instance, L. Moffitt Cecil claimed that Pym resisted unified readings because it is structured around a “two-part scheme” (232). Sidney P. Moss refined Cecil’s argument by stating that the narrative consists of two discrete stories that are filled with “errors and inconsistencies” that render thematic readings fallacious (305). More recently, John T. Irwin has argued that the notion of Pym as a “split,” fragmented narrative illustrates the limits of knowledge and the limits of written discourse (117). And J. Gerald Kennedy’s Poe, Death, and the Life of Writing addresses issues of interpretation in Pym as a “hermeneutic perplexity,” arguing that Poe demonstrates the profound indeterminacy of all texts (157). I invoke these Poe scholars to illustrate the critical consensus concerning Pym’s unstable structure. As well as linking Poe’s Pym to Bhabha’s conception of epistemological splitting, the terms used by these critics to describe Pym’s lack of unity—terms such as split, fragmented, inconsistency, and patchwork—remind us of antebellum eugenic theories about hybridity.

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Nott and Campbell, for instance, agreed that the hybrid was a fragmented being, a being that was split between two distinct species. Hybrid bodies, they claimed, lacked unity. Poe’s literary critics, then, speak to Poe’s concerns with race issues; the fragmented indeterminacy and multi-schematic composition of Pym provides a hybridized structure that reverberates with the complexities of racial hybridity. Pym’s textual body is thus consistent with contemporary discourses of hybridity. Furthermore, these Poe scholars all point out that Pym’s narrative interrogates language, knowledge, and understanding. Reading and misreading— questions central to the literary critic who attempts to decipher the text’s coherence and determine its meaning—are subjects confronted by Pym’s narrative. As early as chapter 3, for example, Pym, while confined in the ship’s hold, is sent a note from Augustus, a message that is “impossible to read” (76). After a moment of frustration, in which Pym hastily shreds the note, he is able to reconstruct the paper and shed some light on the letter. The note is a mere fragment which includes the cryptic message: “blood —your life depends upon lying close” (76). Although Pym “ascertain[s] the entire contents of the note,” he cannot comprehend “the full meaning of the admonition” (76). Determining meaning from Augustus’s note proves impossible. We later learn that the word “blood,” which introduces Augustus’s letter, is merely a piece of the original note: “I have scrawled this with blood ” (78). Such fragmentation is akin to the fractured nature of Pym’s narrative, and the note signals the potential for gaps in the linguistic transference of knowledge. Moreover, Augustus’s use of his blood as an ink brings the body to bear on the greater textual concerns of the narrative. The link between Augustus’s body and the textual body of the note highlights the theme of reading racial difference, for Pym’s ineptitude when deciphering his friend’s note reverberates with the indecipherable racial characteristics inscribed on the bodies of Peters and the Tsalalian natives. The textual body of Pym’s narrative, then, includes incomprehensible texts that are as unfixed as the races of those characters surrounding him. Images of race and textuality are also explored in the figures that accompany Pym’s description of the chasms on the island of Tsalal. In the aftermath of racial violence, while imprisoned in these chasms, Pym and Peters discover markings of a “hieroglyphical appearance” (241). Pym dismisses these “indentures” as “the work of nature” (225). The post-narrative section

16 c r e a t i n g a s e l f of the text, however, informs us that Pym misreads these signs; the markings, we are told, actually correspond to an Arabic root meaning “to be white” (241). Here again Poe plays with images of language, misreading, and racial identity to suggest that Pym is unable to read whiteness: just as he cannot read the race inscribed on the bodies of others, he is unable to decipher a text about blackness and whiteness. We are also informed in Pym’s post-narrative section that the illustrations of the chasms can be taken together to constitute the Ethiopian verbal root meaning “to be shady” (241). It is not surprising that Pym is unable to recognize this inscription. To be shady, of course, assumes a merger of white and black to form a hybrid— one that has confounded Pym throughout the course of his travels. In accounting for the link between Pym’s breakdown in the transference of knowledge and antebellum fears of racial hybridity, it seems appropriate to conclude with Freud’s theory of the uncanny (das Unheimliche). As Freud demonstrates, unheimliche means both homelike and unhomelike, thus casting the specter of the haunted house on his notion of the uncanny. The ship’s hold in which Pym is imprisoned during the text’s opening pages is seen to move from Freud’s pleasant homelike space—a “little apartment” with comfortable blankets, abundant water, sea biscuit, Bologna sausages, and so on—to an unhomelike “trap” that threatens to take Pym’s life (62, 68). But, more important, Freud’s 1919 essay, “The Uncanny,” reveals the gothic origins of his conceptual lexicon as something that has a double aspect: it is always at least two things at once. Like antebellum discourses of hybridity, then, the uncanny’s multiple sides and ungoverned pattern are part of its gothic import. Seen in this light, hybrid bodies are central to Poe’s gothic narrative in that they represent an uncanny otherness that moves from the visible to the invisible. On the one hand, Poe tries to undermine such fears by making his hybrids visible through their deformed and grotesque appearances. On the other hand, though, such visualizing strategies further repress anxieties about hybridization, because the racial identities of hybrids always remain muted and transformative. To conclude, the theory of the uncanny is as much about reading, misreading, writing, and language as it is about the return of the repressed. Indeed, Freud’s theory of the uncanny seems to confirm the participation of psychoanalysis in gothic epistemology and narrative structures by laying bare certain hidden forces of terror. In other words, Freud gestures toward an inquiry into the discursive materialization of such hidden forces in narrative (Savoy 10). But Poe’s narrative relies on a poetics of the ephemeral

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and the indistinct to present the haunting return of the Other and the fragile binary oppositions of racial difference. A hybrid such as Dirk Peters can transform from a deformed mix of Native American and Anglo-American features to a white man. We can thus imagine Poe anxiously speaking from the grave, asking us if language can ever lay bare the hidden forces that compromise the Other.

chapter two

Gothic Travels in Melville’s Benito Cereno

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hen placed alongside Poe’s Pym, Melville’s Benito Cereno (1855) is strangely familiar. Like Poe, Melville stages a mutiny in order to confront racial hierarchies and antebellum fears of bloody slave revolts. More important, though, both authors use many of the literary conventions of the traditional travel narrative to investigate these themes. In fact, travel texts served as important sources for Pym: Benjamin Morrell’s Four Voyages (1832) and John Cleves Symmes’s piece of travel fiction, Symzonia (1820), about a voyage to the South Pole, both influenced Poe’s Pym.1 Likewise, the primary source for Benito Cereno is Amasa Delano’s Narrative of Voyages and Travels (1817), which chronicles a slave uprising aboard the Tryal.2 This chapter, then, examines Melville’s negotiations of conventional travel discourses, his attempt to map out a region between traditional travel text and gothic novel. This will help us consider Benito Cereno as an investigation into the peculiar psychopolitics of the antebellum imagination played out within the framework of a hybrid textual form: the gothic travel narrative. Another link connecting Benito Cereno to Pym is the diverse and contradictory critical history of both texts: Carl Van Doren claims that Benito Cereno “equals the best of Conrad in the weight of its drama and the skill of its unfolding” (622), and Stanley T. Williams writes of its “perfection of form and the subtleties of its insights” (61); on the other hand, F. O. Matthiessen claims that the text’s symbolism is disappointing, for it raises too many unanswered questions (373), and Newton Arvin rejects Benito Cereno completely, claiming that it is labored, trite, trivial, obvious, and vastly overrated (238 – 40). More recent criticism continues in this contradictory strain: Charles Neider, Joseph Schiffman, and Sidney Kaplan all argue that Melville’s text disseminates racism, while Eric Sundquist, Carolyn Karcher, Marvin Fisher, and Charles Swann assert that Melville’s racial politics are

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progressive. Readings of Benito Cereno, then, are as fraught with inconsistencies as Amasa Delano’s reading of the racial hierarchies aboard the San Dominick. Perhaps what is needed is a reading of Benito Cereno that charts a territory between the accusations of racism on the one hand and a celebration of Melville’s liberal racial politics on the other. I suggest that Benito Cereno moves in both directions, fluctuating between a condemnation of racial hierarchies and a reinscription of the very racism that it denounces. Here, we can see the Bhabhaian notion of racial ambivalence functioning as it does in Poe’s Pym. Just as colonial discourse speaks with a forked tongue and contains the rhetoric that contributes to its own destruction, Melville’s repudiation of racist ideologies at times repeats the language of white supremacy. This form of discourse was not new to Melville in the 1850s: his earlier texts—Typee, Mardi, and Omoo—all reject the racism of colonial expansion while repeating the discourses of imperialism. Indeed, this ambivalence within travel writing often participates in the tradition of the anti-conquest narrative, which simultaneously critiques and participates in imperial projects of conquest (Pratt 7). The narrator of Typee, for instance, condemns the Western “pollution” of the “poor savages” of the South Seas, but the language of difference—the separation of “savage” and “civilized”—speaks to the very notion of the anti-conquest narrative: the voice that condemns imperial expansion uses the very rhetoric associated with the colonial project (50).3 Racial ambivalence is perhaps not surprising in Benito Cereno when we consider that Melville’s source, Amasa Delano’s Narrative of Voyages and Travels, uses the conventional rhetoric of the nineteenth-century travel text. Delano, for example, describes the Pacific Islands as exotic and sensual, a place of erotic otherness; moreover, he describes the “Oriental islands” as home to effeminate natives, whose dark features are “delicate and sensitive” (239). In fact, some of Melville’s more patronizing comments on racial difference come directly out of Delano’s descriptions of the gentleness and kindness of the many foreign cultures he visits. But the violence and hostility of the slave uprising also take us back to Delano’s narrative, for Melville uses Delano’s description of the slave revolt as a skeleton for his own work. Such repetitions reveal a déjà vu of travel that can be understood in part through the notion of the uncanny. Often within the conventional travel text, the lands journeyed through are haunted by ghosts lying below

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the surface of the text. This often arises out of the fact that many of the places written about by travelers are already familiar to them through a great many representations in various media. Reading Benito Cereno alongside Delano’s Voyages illustrates a textual familiarity, for the specter of the travel text is cast upon Melville’s narrative. Benito Cereno, like Freud’s theory of the uncanny, is strangely familiar in that it repeats passages from Delano’s voyages, while it also changes scenes from Delano’s account—such as heightening the horrific imagery of the rebellion—to make them strange. For instance, according to Voyages, the blacks of the Tryal refrained from murder after Cereno signed a document promising them safe passage to Senegal (337). Aboard the San Dominick, though, the rebels are said to be much more barbarous, because members of the crew are killed long after the agreement has been reached. Such a revision makes the rebels more bloodthirsty and points to the Freudian notion that the structure of the uncanny is tied to that of repression. Phenomenologically, the uncanny is experienced as a frightful feeling: it “belongs to all that is terrible,” Freud says, “to all that arouses dread and . . . creeping horror” (19). This uncanny emotionality, however, functions within an economy of knowledge. On the one hand, “the ‘uncanny’ is that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar” but now forgotten (20). On the other hand, “everything is uncanny that ought to have remained hidden and secret, and yet comes to light” (28). The uncanny, then, signals the return of something repressed, and Melville’s fierce rebels take on the uncanny’s signifying character. For the rebels are those who, in the eyes of Delano, ought to remain repressed by accepting their place within the racial hierarchy. Gothic Journeys Dennis Porter’s Haunted Journeys: Desire and Transgression in European Travel Writing (1991) argues that travel writing is intimately tied to the gothic because it contains an impulse that compels the author to express the “mysterious,” “menacing” and “unbidden qualities” of the foreign place described in the narrative (12). Indeed, as early as 1786, travel writer and gothic novelist William Beckford published Vathek, An Arabian Tale, the story of a character’s journey into a “frightening, dark universe” with demonic forces ready to destroy him at every turn (33). Beckford combines the travel text’s unquenchable thirst for exotic places with the gothic’s penchant for the black arts, homosexuality, incest, and necrophilia. As a result,

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critics have correctly argued that “Vathek is not easily ascribed to one literary genre,” because it is an idiosyncratic mixture of oriental tale, gothic novel, and travel narrative ( Jack xxi). This textual hybridity produces a gothic text that employs orientalist qualities in the contemplation of racial, ethnic otherness, and even slavery. As Kari Winter argues, the eighteenthcentury British gothic’s structural alliance with slavery is not coincidental (3). Many male gothicists of the period—such as Matthew Lewis and William Beckford—were either slaveholders or were proslavery; indeed, the development of gothic literature in Europe occurred during the heightened debate about abolition, a debate in which William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, both authors of gothic novels, actively participated. In the American context, where racial difference is even more central to the travel narrative and gothic genres, the connections between the two textual forms are highly significant. For Melville, I suggest, the coupling of the two forms was possible because they were both filtered through a racialized lens. For instance, the structures of difference that are central to nineteenthcentury travel narratives—the narrative necessity of providing a gap between “us” and “them”— can also be found at the heart of Benito Cereno (Sara Mills 23). And it is the very structures of difference through the inversion of racial hierarchies—the bloody violence that accompanies this inversion and Delano’s inability to read the new power structures—that provide the narrative with a source of fear and anxiety. That is, Melville’s tale of Babo, the revolutionary black who orchestrates the slave uprising and seizes control of the Spanish slave ship, relies on (and plays with) the same structures of difference as the conventional travel text: Babo must persuade Captain Delano, the American officer who stumbles on the San Dominick in the aftermath of the revolution, that he is Captain Cereno’s valet. Babo’s part is played almost to perfection, for, as Cereno’s ex-slave, it is a part that Babo is well versed at playing, and his “passing” is revealed only when Cereno declares the truth to Delano. Here, the anxiety rendered by the slave revolt is bound up with fears of an upheaval in the structures of difference and power that cannot be visually revealed; Delano, that is, cannot distinguish between a mutinous slave uprising and a crew that has maintained the conventions of lawful hierarchies. Delano’s misreading of the crew’s status based on the racial difference inscribed on their bodies contests the assumption of a “natural” binary difference, suggesting that such a difference is in itself a construct. Another technique that Melville inherits from Beckford is the gothic

22 c r e a t i n g a s e l f travel writer’s desire to take us somewhere mysterious and unbidden— both physically and conceptually—through the impulse that impels one at a given time to go somewhere where one is not required to go. Although this trait is tied to narratives of travel, it is also found in the gothic: the reader of the gothic narrative is often compelled to say to the characters: “No, don’t go there.” On the opening page of Benito Cereno, Delano is faced with this very crisis when, by a “small, deserted island,” he is compelled to investigate the “strange” foreign ship that shows “no colors” (217). The unreadable nature of the ship, its identificatory uncertainty, anticipates Delano’s inability to read the hierarchy of colors—in racial terms—aboard the “strange” vessel. Delano’s curiosity leads him to explore the San Dominick in order to (in the tradition of every traveler) uncover its mystery; but in doing so, he must also contend with the “deeper shadows to come” (219): the threat that is embedded in the gothic elements of the text. For Freud, the traveler’s desire to unveil mystery is accompanied by anxiety. He argues that the longing to seek out new spaces, like the desire to return to the security of home, is universal and can never be fully satisfied. The experience of the journey, he goes on to say, is linked to the uncanny because every voyage is both familiar and unfamiliar. Desire and fear are thus central to the experience of the traveler: the desire to return to a familiar world is accompanied by the fear of uncovering something unfamiliar. This formulation of the uncanny helps us read Delano’s emotions aboard the San Dominick. The unfamiliar ship—initially made so by its lack of colors—results in an “uneasiness” and “uncertainty” (218), a concern which is calmed only when Delano meets Benito Cereno and incorrectly discerns that, although “the Spaniard’s authority was impaired,” the ship was not deteriorating into “misrule” (224). Familiar images work to convince Delano of this fact. For instance, Babo’s performance as Cereno’s “servant” and “devoted companion” persuades Delano that the hierarchical order of the ship has been preserved and that the crew is following Cereno, confirming the rudely painted sentence on the ship’s hull: “follow your leader” (220). Likewise, the performance of Atufal’s bondage is a familiar image to Delano (a citizen of antebellum America), suggesting that the lawful hierarchies aboard the ship remain intact. But the uncanniness of the text develops when these familiar images mix with the unfamiliar. Delano’s “uncertainty” returns when the “perverse habits” and the “mental disorder” of Cereno disrupt the familiar surroundings (226). The increasingly unfamiliar climate generates anxiety in Delano, who

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eventually fears he may be “murdered here at the ends of the earth, on board a haunted pirate-ship by a horrible Spaniard” (256). Delano’s response to these fears is to reinscribe the familiar by turning to the rhetoric of imperialism and racial divisions: he asks, “ Who ever heard of a white so far a renegade as to apostatize from his very species almost, by leaguing in against it with negroes?” (254). Here, the language of speciesism and the racial theories of polygenesis are used by Delano to reestablish order and a sense of the familiar; Delano cannot conceive of two distinct “species” uniting in order to destroy him. He can conceive only of blackness and whiteness as mutually exclusive categories; however, this conceptual reassurance is limited, because the ship remains an “unreal,” “unusual,” and “strange” place, and Delano’s perception of race relations on the San Dominick continues to fluctuate between the familiar and unfamiliar. Hybridity: “Vitriolic Acid into Black Broth” Delano’s passing reference to the distinct “species” of blacks and whites follows in the wake of Josiah Nott and George Gliddon’s “racial scientific” book Types of Mankind (1854). During the mid nineteenth century, Gliddon sought to demonstrate a theory of polygenesis by proving that the types of men existing in 1850s America also existed in antiquity. A retired Egyptologist, Gliddon turned to Egyptian cultural artifacts in an attempt to illustrate that blacks and whites developed from distinct species (54 –96). His project was meant to refute evidence that Egypt was a product of black or even mixed culture: for the polygenesists, it had to be a white civilization that imposed the same racial hierarchies as antebellum America (Robert Young 128). The discourses disseminated by Gliddon and Nott are linked to Benito Cereno when we consider that Atufal is described as “one of those sculptured porters of black marble guarding the porches of Egyptian tombs” (86). Here, Atufal is seen as part of the Egyptian serving class—the guard—in order to preserve the racial hierarchies of American culture. But the adhesive that affixes Gliddon’s Types of Mankind to Melville’s text is also present in the orientalist tropes grafted onto Francesco, Cereno’s mulatto servant. Egypt, which Said refers to as a focal point of orientalism, is employed by Melville as it is done throughout Beckford’s Vathek (84).4 Francesco, the “hybrid,” is said to be “a tall, rahjah-looking mulatto orientally set off with a pagoda turban formed by three or four Madras handkerchiefs.” The Indian references in this description are consistent with Gliddon’s claims that Egyptian civilization was a product of

24 c r e a t i n g a s e l f Aryans from India, who caused their own decline by mixing with Arabs and Africans. But, whereas Gliddon and Nott see racial mixing as a source of contamination, Delano views the “hybrid” as being “improved” by his “adulterated” bloodlines (270). He says that Francesco is more “graceful” and displays greater “elegance” than the “full-blooded African.” Such orientalism constructs the mulatto as the effeminate other, the slave who must be distinguished, according to Delano, from the “inferiority” of Africans like Babo (270). It is here that Melville’s narrative participates in the nineteenthcentury debates over racial hybridity. Delano asserts that Francesco’s “rajah-like” feminine demeanor mixes well with his more classically European features to produce a “dignity” and “self-respect” that is superior to the “pure” African. As if directly contradicting Gliddon and Nott’s fears that the merger of blacks and whites will produce deviant and dangerous slaves, Delano asserts that the “mulatto” is far from “a devil” (270). After soliciting a faltering confirmation from Cereno that Francesco is indeed a “good man,” Delano states: “Ah, I thought so. For it were strange, indeed, and not very creditable to us white-skins, if a little of our blood mixed with the African’s, should, far from improving the latter’s quality, have the sad effect of pouring vitriolic acid into black broth; improving the hue, perhaps, but not the wholesomeness” (271). Delano’s almost erotic attraction to Francesco refutes the scientific theories of hybridity marked by degeneration, and Delano even implies that hybridity is a form of genetic progression: “The mulatto [Francesco] was [a] hybrid” whose nobility resembled “King George of England”; he was “the king of kind hearts and polite fellows” (270). But Delano’s interpretive limitations, his inability to read Francesco’s body, are exposed in the ultimate section of the text. The testimony of the court reveals that “the mulatto, Francesco, was among the first band of revolters” on the ship, and that, although he was the “tool of the negro Babo,” he was one of the cruelest rebels in the uprising (300). Delano’s inability to decipher the seemingly transparent surface of Francesco’s identity is furthered when we discover that Francesco had plotted to poison Delano’s food and that it was only Babo’s ulterior motives that saved the captain’s life. Delano, then, must reverse his opinion of Francesco; the hybrid, from his perspective, thus moves into the category of the monstrous Other, the disguised demon that passes for the noble, dignified, and elegant man. Delano’s opinion of Francesco, then, becomes consistent with the image of the mu-

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latto put forth by his acquaintance, the Barbados planter, who asserts that “when a mulatto has a European face, look out for him; he is a devil” (270). By discursively allying Francesco with a devil, the narrative connects hybridity to Gliddon’s and Nott’s fears of the mulatto: anxiety about miscegenation, the crossing of bloodlines, and an ability to pass threaten the stable surfaces of racial hierarchies and inspire white trepidation that perhaps the hybrid is the devilish Other. There is another reason why Francesco—the figure of the hybrid—is imbued with gothic and orientalist discourses. By connecting him to contemporary racial theories about Egypt, the narrative reminds us of Gliddon’s comments on Egyptian hybridity and his gothic fears of racial “contamination.” That is, in asserting that Egyptian civilization was the product of Aryan people, Gliddon was faced with the problem of explaining the racial identities of mid nineteenth-century Egyptians. Nott provided Gliddon’s way out by arguing that the Caucasians of ancient Egypt mixed with “various inferior tribes,” and, as a result, “the blood of her people became adulterated” (Two Lectures 16). This argument supported Gliddon’s thesis and developed Nott’s own theory of hybridity, which asserted that interracial bonds were detrimental to all civilizations: because of racial mixing, Nott claimed, the Egyptians sank to a “barbarism” that led to the decline and fall of ancient Egypt (17). Francesco’s devilish nature thus speaks to the “barbarism” derived from the discourses surrounding racial mixture and the “contamination” of bloodlines. The gothic imagery of Nott’s text foregrounds the decaying physical body through miscegenation and the corrupted national body through the decline of a civilization. With respect to the American national body, Joseph Gobineau’s Essai sur l’inegalité des races humaines (1853)—which was translated, edited and rewritten by Nott in 1856—turns to similar rhetoric.5 Gobineau predicted America’s inevitable degeneration on the grounds of “ethnic chaos” resulting from the dissolute mixed race that would develop out of the mixture of Caucasian, Native American, and African peoples (54). For him, the body of the American nation had been corrupted and contaminated by miscegenation, and he argued that it would not be long before the great body of the American republic would erode at the hands of hybrids. The body of the hybrid, then, became a blank page on which to inscribe the gothic fears of racial difference and miscegenation in antebellum America. Francesco’s threat to Delano reenacts these fears by placing the symbol of American manhood—the innocent and naive Delano—in the hands of

26 c r e a t i n g a s e l f the monstrous Other, the threat to the nation. Likewise, Delano’s inclination to read singularly, a “native simplicity” that makes him “incapable of satire or irony,” enables the threat of the hybrid to go unnoticed (218). Melville thus locates the power of horror—the power of the hybrid—in an ability to pass; Francesco is able to sever the connection between inner character and outward appearance and play within the identificatory logic of surface and depth (Halttunen, Confidence Men 42). Such logic displaces a narrative quest for identity and ontological “truth,” for identities are not unmasked through a plumbing of depths, but they are presented as surfaces that provide the possibility for self-styling and performance. Although Babo and the other revolutionaries participate in similar kinds of self-styling, the hybrid’s body is unique because it is at once familiar and unfamiliar: Delano describes Francesco as mixing the familiar “European physiognomy” with the unfamiliar and exotic oriental features, which “set off” the hybrid from the other slaves and Europeans on the ship (270). The specter of Freud’s uncanny is thus cast over Francesco, distorting Delano’s lens of racial qualities and serving as the symbolic threat to the nation. By contrast, Delano’s account of the slave who nurses her child sentimentalizes racial purity. While wandering the ship’s deck, Delano meets a “slumbering negress . . . [who] lay with youthful limbs carelessly disposed, . . . like a doe in the shade of a woodland rock” (251). Her child is “sprawl[ed] at her lapped breasts” like a “stark naked fawn . . . its hands, like two paws, clambering upon her; its mouth and nose ineffectually rooting to get the mark” (251). At this sight, Delano is inspired to say, “There’s pure nature, now; pure tenderness and love” (251). For Delano, this woman is imbued with the qualities of the “uncivilized” world: she is as “unsophisticated as [a] leopardess,” and she reminds Delano of “the very women whom Ledyard saw in Africa, and gave such a noble account of” (251). This woman takes Delano back to the origins of racial identity: he sees her bloodlines as being pure, as if he is seeing her in Africa as described in John Ledyard’s travel diaries.6 Although Eric Sundquist claims that Melville’s narrative “contains no invocation of noble savagery,” I suggest that this scene does just that (Sundquist, To Wake 145). In fact, Delano turns to Rousseauistic racial discourses in order to sentimentalize otherness and establish the importance of the familiar through stereotypes of blackness. When faced with this woman, Delano’s fears of death are calmed, for “these natural sights somehow insensibly deepened his confidence and ease” (251). This familiarity,

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however, is short-lived; when Delano finally discovers the true nature of the blacks’ position, he shifts effortlessly from sentimentalizing them to brutalizing them as monsters. I say “effortlessly” because the seed of the uncanny is planted within Delano’s original description. That is, Freud theorizes the uncanny as a movement back to the primal state, to the origins of existence (17). Such oceanic impulses move us outside of modernity, transporting us back to a place that surmises the sensation of coming face to face with our apparent past in both its pristineness and menace. The slave mother and child engender this movement for Delano: his description of their primal state takes him back to a previously surmounted system of beliefs that are premodern in their “uncivilized” and “naked” state. Delano’s journey, then, is not to a place that is new at all; by seeking reassurance in “pure nature,” he searches for homely images by sentimentalizing the connection between mother and child. Within the Freudian model, Delano’s description constitutes a homesickness for something he has lost, for whenever one is in a strange place and is put at ease by saying, “This is familiar to me. I’ve seen this before,” Freud interprets this as a return to the lost world of the mother’s body, the original home. The familial image of mother and child thus speaks to the homely and unhomely character of the uncanny. To Freud, the uncanny is a subspecies of the heimlich, in which fluidity exists between the homely and unhomely; as Samuel Kimball puts it, “The question of the uncanny is the question of the home, of the unhomeness of the home” (529). In Delano’s eyes the homely image of the mother and her child sets him at ease, making him feel at home. This homeliness, however, moves into the unhomely when the mask of slavery is thrown aside to reveal the return of the repressed in all its primal states. Babo’s Black Face The fluid movement between the performative qualities of the familiar and the unfamiliar is also present in the figure of Babo. Babo’s ability to play the familiar role of the contented slave, a mask which is torn off in the fury of his violent uprising, enables him to pass, at least in the eyes of Delano, as the ideal devoted slave. This familiarity is present in Delano’s repeated descriptions of the devotion between slave and master: Babo is said to “perform . . . [his] offices with an affectionate zeal,” and he is referred to as “the most pleasing body-servant in the world” who is “less a servant than a devoted companion” (224, 225). In fact, Babo performs the role of the contented and happy slave so well that Delano revises his claim

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that slavery makes brutes of both master and slave by offering to buy Babo. But once the “mask [is] torn away” and the “centered purpose of his soul is revealed,” Babo moves—within the field of the uncanny—from the familiar subservient figure to the unfamiliar figure of the self-governing African, asserting his own power and independence (284). The narrative focus on Babo’s “centered purpose” calls attention to the text’s uncentered notion of the self and the artifice of racialism. Here, a fluid conception of identity is contained within Babo’s performance; it is a form of minstrelsy that is staged to deceive Delano, but which is also meant to strike terror in the heart of Benito Cereno. By placing the black man on the minstrel stage rather than the white man in blackface, Melville’s narrative shows how Babo can control both men by conflating the violent rebel and the passive servant into one character. The double-edged sword that characterizes Babo’s performance presents minstrelsy not only as an assertion of the black subject’s given place in the social order, but also as an act of power. Babo puts on blackface stereotypes and performs the familiar acts of the slave in order to prove his authenticity, while concurrently calling attention to the artifice of these stereotypes. By performing authentically, that is, Babo uses masquerade to show the absurdity of authentic racial categories. Blackface minstrelsy had always been linked to questions of authenticity. Paul Gilmore correctly points out that “the minstrel stage attempted to invoke the ‘reality’ of the Southern plantation by capturing and reproducing the ‘truth’ of black life in the slave South” (746). Although the audiences of minstrel shows were conscious of minstrelsy as an act of performance, they still desired an authentic presentation of what they believed to be true blackness. Ironically, white performers such as Edwin Christy and Dan Emmett were said to be “the negro par excellence,” “the best representative of our American negro,” “the perfect representative of the Southern Negro Character” (Wittke 37). Whites, then, were considered the most authentic performers of blackness, for, in playing to a white audience, the representations of black character had to be familiar. Stereotypes provided the performer with “authentic” material, and, as a result, minstrel shows have often been characterized as an extremely racist caricature of blacks and black lifestyles in order to legitimate slavery and racial prejudice. But scholars such as Eric Lott and Robert Toll have shown that, despite its racist content, the minstrel show was a complicated production in which ambivalent racial images came into play (Lott 111, Toll 101). That is, at the heart of the minstrel show is a revealing of the markers of blackness and

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the performative nature of race, which flies in the face of racial essentialism. The strict equations of racial difference are stripped away, because the audiences’ desire for black authenticity (in the face of white performers) meant that the viewer’s perception of the show oscillated between authenticity and artifice. This fluid movement provided a space in which the minstrel performer could be simultaneously white and black. The blacking-up process, then, offered the performer an opportunity to become an “authentic” black, while never losing touch with his own whiteness. Racial authenticity is thus produced through counterfeit; it depends on an oscillation between acknowledgment of its performative nature and acceptance of its unmediated authenticity. The minstrel performer, like Babo, must fool his white audience into believing that he is depicting valid tropes of blackness and upholding American racial hierarchies; but the act of passing for black exposes the constructedness of the very racial distinctions that the performance seeks to uphold. Such contradictions collapse any attempts at revealing a “true” representation of blackness, and the performance, which derives strict racial distinctions based on stereotyping, renders these distinctions nonsensical. Perhaps the best example of this arises in the accounts of the most famous black minstrel entertainer of the 1840s and 1850s, William Henry Lane. In the early 1840s, because white audiences would not have accepted a black man on the stage, Lane “greased” and “rubbed his face with a new blacking of burnt cork” before each performance (Lott 113). Lane, a black man, had to become a white man in blackface in order to perform black authentically. I invoke the story of Lane because it echoes Babo’s performance of blackness. Babo, a black man, must perform the tropes and stereotypes of blackness in order to convince Delano of his authenticity. Like Lane, Babo must become counterfeit in order to reveal himself as a real black slave. Yet this implicit recognition of the performative nature of race not only reveals race as an illusion, but it also leads to the strict racial divisions of 1850s America. In appearing as the “real” thing, Babo uses a form of masquerade that reveals race as an illusion, as a mask that he puts on, while acknowledging the ways in which that mask makes race very real. In narrating his own complicity with slavery by seemingly helping Benito Cereno control the ship, Babo becomes the caricatured black figure of the minstrel show who uses the very racial divisions he wishes to destroy in his act of rebellion. Racial divisions thus become part of Babo’s resistance to slavery

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in that they are central to his acts of subterfuge and masquerade: the strict racial definitions and the various masks that he is able to wear allow him to redefine his place within the racial hierarchy. Melville’s narrative seems to recognize the political possibilities and constraints of the minstrel performance. The ambivalence associated with minstrelsy—making the differential markers of blackness and whiteness interchangeable while creating notions of essential racial difference and authentic racial identity—made it possible for performers to represent the possibility of slave resistance. In fact, the minstrel song, “Jim Crow,” expresses a desire for freedom by any means necessary: “Should dey get to fighting, / Perhaps the blacks will rise, / For deir wish for freedom, / Is shining in deir eyes” (Dennison 56). This song, first performed in New York less than a year after Nat Turner’s failed revolt, is similar to another minstrel song, “Uncle Gabriel, the Darky General,” which makes explicit reference to Turner’s revolt and the Gabriel Poser-led conspiracy of 1800: “He was the chief of the Insurgents, / Way down in Southampton. / Hard times in old Virginny” (Christy’s 45). Turner’s rebellion is presented in these songs as a possibility for change, but this possibility also has dire consequences. For the final verses focus on the punishment of the insurgent slaves and the brutal suffering that may arise out of rebellions. The endings to these songs attempt to contain the fear of slave uprisings by limiting the specter of the slave revolt through a reinscription of the slave as either submissive or disempowered.7 If Nat Turner’s rebellion (among others) is a central source for Benito Cereno, then Melville’s narrative participates in a reenacting of slave uprisings similar to that of the minstrel songs. The fear of the text is generated through Babo’s ability to move between the identities of submissive slave and revolutionary man—in a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde–like fashion—to show that bodies cannot be read. The return of the repressed walks alongside Delano, but it goes unnoticed and unrecognized. However, like the ending of “Jim Crow,” Melville’s conclusion contains the horror of a potential slave uprising by disempowering Babo and the revolutionaries through the machinations of the Spanish court. Although the narrative ultimately questions the justice of these proceedings, Babo is silenced, stripped of all power, executed, and left to haunt Lima, for his head is “fixed on the pole in the plaza” to “unabashedly” meet the “gaze of the whites” (307). Babo’s rebellion, like those described in the minstrel songs, has dire con-

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sequences; instead of acquiring self-determination, he is left “voiceless” and “weak” in the vengeful hands of the court (307). Voices and Signification This concluding section of the text, which reproduces the “authentic” court documents of Babo’s trial, reminds us of the ultimate breakdown of conventional narrative in Poe’s Pym. The narrative of Benito Cereno reaches a point of inertia, where past and present, as well as black and white, come together (Nelson, The Word 127). Instead of seeing these mergers as states of resolution, the narrative shies away from them, fearing them as forms of uncertainty, spaces where the ground is too unstable to tread. Although Benito Cereno acknowledges the inadequacy of binary logic, it fails to pose an alternative. Rather, what is presented in the face of essentialist predicaments is simply a reinscription of the language of racial division that exists in the form of the court documents. Melville’s hybrid textual body thus joins a narrative of indeterminacy—Delano’s inability to read beyond surfaces and Babo’s ability to move fluidly between the identities of master and slave—with a narrative imposed by a legal system devoted to maintaining hierarchies and the existing institutional organization. Here, Melville returns to the conceptual framework that he rejects in the “grey” and “hazy” epistemological uncertainties of the text’s opening section; when he arrives at the court scene, his ambiguities and inconsistencies vaporize, and everything is “whitewashed” (218 –19). For instance, the court documents establish identities as fixed certainties: “On the testimony of the sailors alone rested the legal identity of Babo” (307). Such testimony forces Babo into his “legal identity” as slave, and the court even renames him “the negro” or, at times, “the negro Babo” (306). This identity leaves Babo voiceless because, as a slave, he is unable to give testimony at his own trial. The court thus strips him of his subjectivity and essentializes him in order to undermine his uncanny presence; he is constrained within a familiar identificatory mold and his unfamiliar fluidity is cast aside. By depriving him of a voice, the court not only avoids a testimony on the horrors of slavery, but it also negates the signification necessary for a movement between various masquerades or performances. Denied is his ability to revise a given tradition or frame of thought within the troping dimension of signifying. Henry Louis Gates describes signifying as a rhetorical strategy through which “a second statement or figure repeats,

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or tropes, or reverses the first” (52). Babo’s ability to repeat the tropes of slavery in order to reverse them in the act of rebellion is denied by the court. The slave’s tactics of indirection, then, are suppressed as characteristics of cultural and political resistance to slavery. Whereas Babo’s signifying aboard the San Dominick revises the text of slavery and racial difference by subverting cultural assumptions that racial identity is inscribed on his body (something that can be read— or misread—by Delano), the court displaces Babo’s “discursive universe” through the familiar language of a legal system to which he has no access (53). Order, based on structures of difference, is thus imposed by the court. And the order of nature becomes self-evident, for its signs are not contingent on complex interpretations; they rely on assumptions about the essential nature of color and the template of a racial pattern that must be maintained. Melville’s reactionary move in the concluding section of Benito Cereno differs greatly from his 1857 text, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, which sustains interpretive uncertainty in the face of racial identities. Here, the character Black Guinea, “a grotesque negro cripple,” is confronted by a man who claims that Guinea’s deformity is “a sham, got up for financial purposes”; he is, according to this informant, a “white operator, betwisted and painted up for a decoy” (10, 12, 14). Once this accusation is made, the other characters begin to question Guinea’s true identity and his bodily form is rejected as self-evident proof of identity. Instead, the crowd demands that Guinea produce “a plain paper,” a document, that would provide definitive evidence of himself (16). As a result, Guinea’s blackness and his deformity all become dependent on a text that will confirm or deny the identity that he maintains; his physical being, then, becomes dependent on interpretation, something constructed by a text and a reader. His lack of identity papers—which he cannot (or refuses to) produce—means that his body must serve as the text whose interpretation will establish its reality as an identity. Bodies and texts become inseparable, indistinguishable and inconclusive; as such, they are hardly sufficient evidence for racial distinctions or even the very idea of a unified and consistent self and the interpretive process that would disclose it (Bellis 558). By contrast, the court documents of Benito Cereno highlight racial distinctions and the notion of a unified self that can be read on the body: the language of identity is inscribed on body surfaces that hold no hidden texts or subtexts. Melville’s narrative does, however, recognize the injustice of such surface readings, because Cereno’s experience with such readings

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leaves him silent when faced with the court’s legal idiom. Like Babo, he is unable to participate in the language of the court: “Before the tribunal he refused. When pressed by the judges he fainted” (307). Likewise, Cereno’s discussion with Delano regarding the events of the mutiny result in “muteness,” for there were topics “upon which he never spoke at all” (307). While Babo’s “voiceless end” arises out of his disempowered status as slave, Cereno’s silence is determined by a lack of ability to speak the language of surfaces. Freud identifies silence as a form of the uncanny; but, in Lacanian terms, Cereno suffers from a form of hysteria whereby the subject becomes spoken for by the Other due to a fundamental lack of control over linguistic structures.8 Lacan defines hysteria as the lack of a signifier or representation for ordering one’s existence, and a lack of identity due to a breakdown in the binary system of signification (56). Cereno’s condition thus derives from a breakdown in language whereby the imaginary can no longer distinguish between self and other, between blackness and whiteness. The final sentence of the novel warns us against the breakdown of binaries; here we see Cereno in the monastery—a place outside of language—where he does indeed “follow his leader,” Babo, in a voiceless end that holds no alternative to the binary language of racial identification. Ending Benito Cereno in this way calls attention to a gothic fear located in glimpsing the erasure of boundaries: the fluid movement between the familiar and unfamiliar, blackness and whiteness, slave and master, surface and depth are seen to erode the self, forcing a decay of body and mind that echoes the gothic trope of the rotting corpse. Cereno’s descent into hysteria leaves him with no voice to express the epistemological spaces between identificatory dichotomies. Instead, we are left with silence.

chapter three

Passing and Abjection in William and Ellen Craft’s Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom

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t the beginning of The Narrative of William Wells Brown, A Fugitive Slave (1848), Brown recounts the “bloody horrors” of slavery— whippings, torture, and rape—in order to capture the “degraded” condition of antebellum America (34, 108). For Brown, the deterioration of the American nation does not come from the so-called contamination of racial mixing; it is based on the institution of slavery and the horrific acts it engenders. As a slave, Brown performs the role of the contented servant, while simultaneously searching for an opportunity to escape to “a land of freedom” (59). Like Babo, he does what whites expect a loyal slave to do: he obeys the orders of his master, he attends church, and he makes money for his employer when he is “hired out” (41). By disguising himself as the happy house slave, Brown is rewarded with an opportunity to escape, for his master trusts him enough to send him to St. Louis alone for a week. Here, he throws off the mask of the contented slave and escapes to freedom. I begin this chapter with Brown’s Narrative not only because of Brown’s intimate ties to the lives of William and Ellen Craft, but also because stories similar to Brown’s can be found in a number of accounts of slavery. For instance, Thomas Gray’s so-called “Confessions of Nat Turner” (1831) tells of how Turner camouflaged himself as a trusted house servant in order to conceal his “dreadful conspiracy” and his plans of “rebellion and murder” (128, 131).1 Likewise, the Crafts’ slave narrative, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860), describes William and Ellen’s privileged position as dependable house slaves and how their performance of “obeisance and loyalty” was a “safeguard” against the suspicions of a planned escape (McCaskill, Introduction xi). Such narratives illustrate the power and possibility of the performative: the slave can pass for the passive house servant, just as he or she is plotting revenge or flight. As William Craft tells us, these performances were feared and resented by whites, for they illustrated the ease with which a Nat Turner or a William Wells Brown could exist in

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any family, in any home (40 – 41). In a flash, the homely, domestic space of the slave master could transform into an unhomely place: the house could be abandoned by the slave or the abode could be converted into a bloody death chamber, as is described in Gray’s “Confessions.” Fluid descriptions of identity and the fluidity associated with the uncanny are, as I have argued, central to the gothic texts of Poe and Melville. This chapter, though, turns to an African American text to see how the gothic horrors of slavery are represented alongside questions of passing and identificatory fluidity. I suggest that Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom—which tells the story the fair-skinned Ellen (in the guise of a white male planter), and her husband, William (posing as her slave), escaping from slavery—serves as an African American intervention into the discourses of racial ambiguity previously developed in Pym and Benito Cereno. Like Poe’s and Melville’s texts, the Crafts’ slave narrative presents passing and racial ambivalence in several ways: on the one hand, it is the conduit to freedom and self-determination, their passport to selfhood; on the other hand, it supplies a glimpse into the abyss of abjection and identificatory uncertainty that inspires William Craft’s fear and trembling. Such perspectives on identity constitute a significant gothic element of the Crafts’ text, but before understanding its machinations we must take a short detour through the generic conventions of the slave narrative. Gothic Slave Narratives The American gothic is traditionally located within the genre of the romance. As a result, it is often read as being exempt from the forces of history; instead, it is viewed as an imaginative product of the unreal or the sensational, conjuring up images of the supernatural and the spiritual rather than the material effects of history. From this perspective, the generic conventions affiliated with the gothic seem to be in direct opposition to the slave narrative’s: the documentary form of the fugitive slave text insists on authenticity and the rejection of imaginative rendering. However, recent critics such as William L. Andrews and Charles L. Blockson have pointed to the slave narrative’s “mongrel” form, which mixes the generic conventions associated with autobiographies, travel narratives, historical documents, and novels (Andrews 54, Blockson 23). The more novelistic aspects of the slave narrative frequently incorporated the gothic—not the gothic’s supernatural elements—but its descriptions of slavery as a feudal institution, its horrifying scenes of bloody violence and imprisonment, its secrets of mixed

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bloodlines and primogeniture, and its images of rape and adultery. Indeed, it is easy to see how the slave narrative might be read like a gothic romance; but there is one crucial difference: the scenery is not staged but real. Criticism of the Crafts’ Running points to this generic mongrelism by stating that it is at once a historical document, a gothic romance, a travel text, and a slave narrative. R. J. M. Blackett, for instance, states that Running combines poetry and history to form a riveting story that inspired writers like Georgia Douglas Johnson and Harriet Beecher Stowe to incorporate the Crafts’ escape into their fictional texts (58, 74).2 In fact, the excitement of this documentary tale gained popularity in nineteenth-century Britain and America precisely because of the melodrama and romance of the escape, and the Crafts’ narrative is no exception: its popularity was based in part on its connections to the classic nightmare version of the family romance. The melodramatic and romantic nature of the story compelled William Craft to remind his readers of Running’s authenticity: he states repeatedly that the narrative is “a history” and a truthful “account of their escape” (8). Here, Craft’s comments call attention to his fears that the text’s melodramatic qualities might overshadow its documentary nature and abolitionist politics. But such assertions of authenticity, I suggest, add to the text’s gothic horror: we cannot simply dismiss the “monstrous” acts of the violent slave master as an imaginative product. We are forced to face the material effects of slavery and recognize the haunted reality of American history. Furthermore, William Craft’s insistence on the reality of his story is compatible with the strain of gothic literature developed in the United States. If we take our lead from critics who claim that the American gothic is always tied to representations of racial difference, then we can see this genre as intimately connected to historical material, particularly slavery (397). The gothic, then, does not necessarily dematerialize history; it has the power to rematerialize the ghosts of America’s racial past. The narrative of Running serves as a salient example of this textual process, for it includes numerous historical referents that embody horror. In the opening section, for example, Craft tells of slave women who are beaten and raped by overseers: They [the overseers] severely flog the women; and I am sorry it is a fact, that the villains to whom those defenseless creatures are sent, not only flog them as ordered, but frequently compel them to submit to the great-

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est indignity. Oh! . . . [it is] horrible enough to stir a man’s soul, and to make his very blood boil . . . [to think of ] his dear wife, his unprotected sister, or his young and virtuous daughters, struggling to save themselves from falling a prey to such demons! (7)

This paragraph is typical of Running’s narrative voice in that it stresses the fact of the scene, while simultaneously evoking gothic imagery to represent the brutal conditions of slavery. That is, by casting the specter of bondage, violent assault, and sexual violation on this historical referent, Craft presents the authentic scene through the typical gothic conflict of the “heartless tyrant” and the helpless woman (8). A virtuous woman is “prey” to their monstrous “demons” and other inhuman “villains” who torture the “struggling” victims in “horrible” ways. For Craft, then, gothic tropes become a way of articulating historical injustices without necessarily sliding into the imaginative realm of the romance. The gothic pattern of this quotation is enriched by Craft’s use of language. From the opening pages of Running, gothic diction is evoked to articulate the unspeakable realities of slavery. He begins by describing the restrictive chains and shackles that have “haunted us for years,” and the “horrible trammels of slavery” that hold the “bones and sinews” of the slave in perpetual bondage (3). Craft goes on to disclose the “incessant cruelty” inflicted upon Ellen in the house of her master (who was also her father). Ellen, who is “physically white” and has features resembling her master, serves as living proof of miscegenation and infidelity; as a result, Ellen is considered a haunting presence in the house, and her master’s wife thus mistreats and abuses her (3– 4). This introduction—which highlights the gothic discourses of mixed bloodlines, rape, and abuse—also focuses on Ellen’s whiteness and the constructedness of racial difference. In a section reminiscent of Benito Cereno, Craft continues this theme by reproducing a document that recounts the mid-1840s celebrated court case of Salomé Müller. Müller was a German immigrant who successfully testified that she was not a slave by birth, but had been wrongly set to work as one for twenty-five years. Rhetorically, this passage is effective: it places the white reader of Running in a position of imagined jeopardy, because it shows that whiteness does not necessarily mean exemption from the horrors of slavery. Like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853), which suggests that white orphans are being sold into slavery as octoroons (43), Craft uses “white slavery” as a political

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and gothic tool.3 Politically, he implies that racial difference is no more than a social construct, thus contradicting the proslavery argument that blacks are naturally inferior and that slavery is a natural institution. And, using a gothic tool, Müller inspires antebellum fears that race is fluid, not fixed: how could a “perfectly white” person like Müller, whose skin is meant to entitle her to privilege and protection, be subjected to the degrading horrors of slavery? The only plausible answer to this question is that whiteness and blackness are not as rigidly distinguishable as many supporters of slavery claimed. Literary treatments of the Müller case, many of which appeared in abolitionist newspapers, were akin to the ideologies espousing the breakdown in racial categories put forward by, among others, William Lloyd Garrison and Lydia Maria Child. In A Romance of the Republic (1867), Child, who at times unintentionally exposes some racist assumptions, paints a utopian picture of the United States as a multiracial egalitarian republic. Indeed, the word romance in the title gestures toward intermarriage and a resulting interracialism that would influence the dissolution of racial categories to which Child attributed the antagonisms that fractured the nation. An advocate of misecegenation as a solution to America’s race problems, Child introduced interracial unions as a literary theme in Hobomok (1824). And despite white terror during Reconstruction over the threat of intermarriage, Child remained committed to her vision of freeing the republic from racial divisions; during the 1840s, she and Garrison campaigned against the Massachusetts intermarriage ban so successfully that it was repealed in 1843 (Sollors, Interracialism 9). The mixing of blood, she argued, would be a positive step toward obliterating racial categories completely; intermarriage was thus essential for the eradication of race and prejudice. Sharp visual distinctions, she imagined, would blur into imperceptible gradations, and the multiple variations would make any racial classification, as espoused by the polygenesists, impossible (Karcher, First 512). Documents arguing in favor of racial categorization and the “natural” institution of slavery were introduced to William Craft in 1852 while he was learning to read and write at the Oakham School in Surrey, England (Blackett 71). In that country, where Ellen and William had settled in 1851, theories supporting slavery on the basis of so-called African inferiority had been in incubation for some time. For example, Thomas Carlyle’s “Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question” was first published in 1849; its proslavery politics use pseudoscientific discourses to suggest that Africans

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are an inferior “species” who need the “earnest guidance” of benevolent slave masters (351). Africans are inferior, Carlyle argues, because of their “animalistic” characteristics: they have “horse-jaws,” “muzzles,” as well as “grinder and incisor teeth” (350). Such physical qualities, according to Carlyle, demonstrate that Africans are animals and should be utilized as Europeans use horses and other work animals (355). If this is not done, Carlyle continues, Europeans will suffer from “black Anarchy and Social Death,” because the Africans will “devour us” with their “strong teeth” (350). Here, the images of cannibalism and social decay are reminiscent of the gothic diction used in American proslavery texts and the racial debates over speciesism: Carlyle’s essay places Africans on the level of animals and considers them a threat to the “human species” as represented by white Europeans. Racial mixing, then, is a grave danger for Carlyle. He says that those “immoral citizens” who participate in miscegenation “will give birth to progenies and prodigies . . . [who will be] dark extensive moon-calves, unnameable abortions, [and] wide-coiled monstrosities such as the world has not seen” (354). Carlyle characterizes intermixture as “a nightmare dream” that will become a waking reality if abolitionists are not stopped: “Philanthropic Liberalism . . . [has] wrought a huge woe for us, and for the poor civilized world, in these days! And sore will be the battle with the said moon-calves; and terrible the struggle to return out of our delusions” (354). One way to read Craft’s Running is as a response to proslavery diatribes by authors such as Carlyle (McCaskill, “Yours” 511). But William’s response to proslavery people did not end with the publication of Running: he continued to challenge such arguments in his responses to the 1863 lectures of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. In 1863 Craft was asked to participate in this association, where he heard papers by John Crawfurd, president of the Ethnological Society, and James Hunt, president of the Anthropological Society (Blackett 80). These papers expressed racist scientific theories that were popular in 1860s England: such theories justified British colonial expansion in Africa in the name of the “white man’s burden.” 4 Hunt’s paper, “On the Physical and Mental Character of the Negro,” reiterated much of the racial theory expressed in Robert Knox’s The Races of Men (1850), which measured various features (such as the size of the skull and the thorax) to demonstrate his theory of “the blacks’s unalterable inferiority” (379). Hunt, under the pretense of confining himself to “science and pure fact,” asserted that there was sufficient evidence based on anatomical, physiological, and intellectual differences to

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prove European supremacy over the African (1). His position on hybridity was typical: he argued that “Mulattos and others of mixed blood” were subject to “intense immorality” and physical degradation (Negro’s Place 34). This opinion was shared by John Crawfurd, whose paper, “The Comixture of the Races of Man as Affecting the Progress of Civilization,” argued that all superior races that had mixed with their inferiors inevitably witnessed the decline of their civilizations. It was reported that Craft verbally responded to Crawfurd’s paper by stating that the special degradation of Americans of mixed blood was not because of inborn traits; rather it was social oppression and discrimination that impeded people of mixed race from demonstrating their intellectual ability and rising to high positions in society (Blackett 82). To prove his point, Craft offered himself as evidence that, given the opportunity, a person of mixed blood could develop himself intellectually and socially. He had learned to read and write soon after arriving in England, he had become successful in business affairs, and he had fathered a number of healthy children. Problems of intellectual inferiority, ill health or infertility were completely foreign to him. His body thus became a text that formulated a counterargument to contemporary racial science: William was living proof that intermixture did not produce the “monstrosities” that Carlyle and others had predicted. Passing and Identity Proof of the Crafts’ intellectual and social equality is also presented throughout Running. But here William lets the narrative itself construct the argument. From the opening pages, he and Ellen are described as devising their clever plan of escape: they gather men’s clothing for Ellen to disguise her as “a most respectable looking gentleman” (24); they organize a time and place that will not immediately call attention to their absence; and they construct the believable lie of Ellen’s being an invalid seeking medical advice in Philadelphia. Intellectually they are able to outwit their white masters; socially Ellen is able to pass for a gentleman of high standing. And each time their identities are questioned they are able to devise insightful ways of evading detection. For example, Ellen solves the problem of how to avoid signing documents by putting her arm in a bandage. Furthermore, evidence of their intellectual growth is highlighted when William reminds us that the law forbade slaves to read or write. By calling attention to his literacy, William contradicts theories about the assumed

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degeneracy of racial mixture: it is made clear that William is the author of the narrative, implying that he learned to read and write soon after his escape. The textual craftsmanship and literary allusions of Running are also meant to call attention to William’s intellectual development. Perhaps most astonishing is Craft’s dexterity with literary symbolism and complex imagery, a salient example being his discussion of Ellen’s predicament when asked to sign the hotel register. Here, William symbolically conveys the themes of identity that are developed throughout the text: the inscription of a signature—an act that Ellen cannot perform—is an expression of identity, a sign that indicates a stable self. As slaves, William implies, they have neither the language nor the legal status to maintain this stable self: they are reduced to the level of nonbeings by an unjust institution. Ellen’s absent signature, then, metonymically conveys the fact she and William have yet to find a means to gain identity, and thus transform from nonbeings to beings. The complexity of this metonymy is furthered when we consider that Ellen uses her nonidentity to her advantage: she fluidly moves from the destitute slave woman to the wealthy slave master. It is this fluidity that engenders the search for that stable self (acquired through freedom) that is lacking in the absent signature. The signature can be produced only when freedom has been found, and this is eventually achieved through the production of the slave narrative itself. This is not surprising, for the slave narrative constitutes, by definition, the narrator’s desire to underwrite his or her very being: in the lettered utterance of the narrative is an assertion of identity, and in identity is freedom—freedom from slavery and nonbeing (Olney 157). The absent signature plays a central role in Ellen’s identity performance. It is a role that is supported by disguise and masquerade: “I can make a poultice,” Ellen explains, “and bind up my right hand in a sling, and with propriety ask the officers [of the hotels] to register my name for me” (24). This veil adds to her costume, which includes a head bandage to cover her “beardless chin,” a “pair of green spectacles” to cover her eyes, as well as a gentleman’s clothing and a “square” masculine haircut. In her disguise, Ellen is “made” into a white gentleman: race, class, and gender, then, are seen as artificial categories, and much of the narrative illustrates this point. For instance, her performance is so effective that at one point Mr. Cray—a man whom Ellen has known since her childhood—boards her train and takes the seat beside her. Ellen, though, is able to pass herself off as a deaf gentleman, and Mr. Cray is none the wiser. Likewise, in another section, the

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captain of a steamship, convinced that Ellen is an upstanding Southern gentleman, asks her to dine at his table. During dinner, Ellen is compelled to listen to “the three great topics of discussion in first-class circles in Georgia, namely, Niggers, Cotton, and the Abolitionists” (30). After this discussion, her dinner companions unknowingly give her advice on how to perform her duties as a slave master: “Never take your nigger across the Mason’s and Dixon’s line,” says one man; another acquaintance tells Ellen that she should refrain from saying thank you to her slave, because it “spoils” a good servant by elevating him beyond “his place” (32, 33). Ironically, such comments help Ellen refine her performance and avoid future suspicion. Ellen’s acting is complemented by William’s performance as her devoted slave. Like Babo, William must convince the white travelers not only that he is Ellen’s slave, but also that he has no intention of escaping when they near the Mason-Dixon Line. It is a part that he plays almost to perfection: William cuts her meat when Ellen is forced to dine with others, he never forgets to call her “master” in the presence of white men, and he performs the duties of nurse to an ill patient. His act is so convincing that the captain of the steamship says to Ellen: “You have a very attentive boy, sir”; another man offers to buy William at any price “with hard silver dollars” (31). But William’s act is not always flawless, for his disguise upsets one man. William states: For the purpose of somewhat disguising myself, I bought and wore a very good second-hand white beaver. . . . [But] an uncouth planter, who had been watching me closely, said to my master, “I reckon, stranger, you are ‘spiling’ that ere nigger of yourn, by letting him wear such a devilish fine hat. . . . It always makes me itch all over, from head to toe, to get hold of every d—— d nigger I see dressed like a white man.” (43)

While this scene generates suspense in which the reader fears the unveiling of their slave identities, it also conveys the ease with which Ellen is able to move from black to white and thus trick her fellow passengers. Indeed, although Ellen is the one who is “dressed like a white man,” William is the one who is accused of racial passing. This section points to the antebellum fears associated with the transgression of identity. William, that is, has no intention of passing for white, but his hat is read as a marker of class position that elevates him beyond the status of slave. Such an elevation results

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in social anxiety, for it is feared that the movement between the borders of class, race, or sex could engender a movement from slavery to freedom. White anxiety about crossing these physical borders is also present in the final section of Part 1. Here, the couple is on the final leg of their journey, going from Baltimore to Philadelphia. They are stopped at the Baltimore station and asked to produce a passport or other supporting documents that would confirm William’s identity as Ellen’s slave. “If we should suffer any gentleman,” an officer tells Ellen, “to take a slave past here to Philadelphia; and should the gentleman with whom the slave might be traveling turn out not to be his rightful owner . . . we shall have him to pay for; and, therefore, we cannot let any slave pass here without receiving security to show, and to satisfy us, that it is all right” (46). This passage, with all its suspense, continues the linguistic playfulness of the earlier sections by punning on the words pass and passing. For, as Juda Bennett has shown, the etymology of the term passing comes from “the ‘pass’ given to slaves so that they might travel without being taken for runaways” (36). Indeed, the pass was a slip of paper—a kind of passport—that allowed free movement by confirming the slave’s identity through ownership, a confirmation that the Baltimore officer seeks from Ellen. So a pass is a document that reads a person’s identity and fixes his or her position in society. Unlike William, though, Ellen’s “pass” is her skin color, which is taken for evidence of her legal identity as free man and slave master; her body, like the document, is read (and misread) to confirm her identity. As far as Ellen is concerned, the fixity supplied by the written pass is cast aside; in fact, her passing requires the fluidity of identity to gain the same freedom of movement that would be supplied by the written document. As a result, her body serves as a text that is hardly sufficient for deciphering race or legal status. Although William does not explicitly connect the written pass and the visible pass of color, he hints at the merger of bodies and texts, just as he relishes in the ambiguities of face and race.5 Craft’s play on racial ambiguity also arises when he pokes fun at the antebellum fears of miscegenation. At one point, two Southern ladies in a railroad car in Virginia appear to have fallen in love with the disguised Ellen. One of the women turns to her father and exclaims: “Oh papa, he [Ellen] seems to be a very nice young gentleman.” But before papa can speak, the other woman quickly says, “Oh! dear me, I never felt so much for a gentleman in my life!” To use an American expression, “They fell in love with the

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wrong chap.” (39) Indeed, not only have they fallen for the wrong chap, but they have also fallen for the wrong race. Here, once again, William questions the legitimacy of assumptions based on reading body surfaces: Ellen’s body, combined with her disguise, provides inconclusive evidence for establishing her identity as a woman or a slave, enabling William to present the contemporary fears of miscegenation in a comic mode. These comic portraits of the double crossover figure—as seen in Ellen’s performance as a white man—would have been familiar to nineteenthcentury readers of Running. Because most nineteenth-century minstrel troupes were all-male, the performances often included scenes in which white men would portray black women. These were meant as highly comic affairs: the female impersonators would tell jokes in black dialect and act as “mammy” or “tragic mulatto” stereotypes (Dickens ii). For Ralph Ellison, such performances reduced black men and women to “negative signs” whereby the minstrel mask worked to veil the humanity of the slave, absolving the white audience from the guilt of slavery (63). But Ellen’s performance turns the dehumanizing strategy of the minstrel show on its head: her humanity is not only valued by these women, but she exerts power over those who “fall in love” with her. Instead of further disenfranchising the slave, Ellen’s double crossover is empowering without losing its comic flavor. The Crafts’ powerful staging of gender identity was continued after their arrival in England. In 1851, William and Ellen joined William Wells Brown’s British lecture tour, during which Brown would speak first on the development of American slavery, often illustrating his analysis with “Panoramic Views of the Scenes in the Life of an American Slave” (Gilmore 760). After this presentation, William would appear on stage to give a suspenseful and witty account of his escape from Georgia. Finally, in a tear-jerking scene, Ellen was invited onstage. This performance was carefully orchestrated to inspire sympathy for the victims of slavery and to provoke strong antislavery sentiment. But the appearance of Ellen on the stage— dressed as a woman—also complicated notions of gender identity. That is, the audience would have been familiar with images of Ellen’s masculine disguise from the widely circulated sketches of her dressed as a man during her escape. The audience, then, would have seen her body as an exhibit of the tensions between blackness and whiteness and the constructedness of gender and racial identities. However, Ellen’s participation in the lecture tour must be read as a com-

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plex performance. On the one hand, it is an illustration of what Judith Butler calls the cross-dresser’s ability to fully subvert “the distinction between inner and outer psychic space” and “effectively mock the notion of true gender identity” (137). From this perspective, her appearance would show that gender can fashion itself as an imitation, thus contesting the notion that gender reveals an original identity. On the other hand, though, her silent presence onstage would have commodified and merchandised Ellen as an exhibit and a prima facie endorsement of her narrative’s truth. As a result, Ellen’s body has been likened to what Houston A. Baker calls the “Negro Exhibit,” whereby the slave appeared on the lecture stage and “turned his back to the audience and displayed his wounds and scars from floggings at the stake of slavery” (McCaskill, “Yours” 13). Such political exhibits relied on gothic imagery for their effectiveness. The audience was compelled to read the horrors of enslavement on the bodies of the African American man on the stage: scars, lacerations, and wounds were signs that combined to construct a politically charged gothic narrative, calling attention to the bloody violence of an unjust institution. Likewise, Ellen’s body, with its presentation of ambiguous skin color and gender identity, highlights the realities of miscegenation through the sexual exploitation and abuse of slaves by masters. In such a performance, Ellen’s body is an explicit substitute for words; she forces the audience to visually confront the terrible and taboo topic of race mixing and sexual servitude in antebellum America. For inscribed on her body is the gothic narrative of slavery that replicates the gothic tropes of sexual domination, rape, and bodily violence. Abjection and Identity But in Running, the power of the performative is furthered by William’s apologetic tone. He repeatedly stresses that Ellen’s disguise was adopted out of a necessity forced on them by the oppressive horrors of slavery. “My wife had no ambition whatever to assume this disguise,” William states, “and would not have done so had it been possible to obtain liberty by more simple means” (21). In fact, when William first proposes that Ellen dress as a white man, “she shrank from the idea . . . [and] she thought it was almost impossible for her to assume that disguise” (21), and on reaching Philadelphia “she threw off the disguise and assumed her own apparel” (51). By maintaining Ellen’s aversion to cross-dressing, William tries to reassure his audience of Ellen’s respectability and “proper” place within the nineteenth-century cult of true womanhood. In restoring Ellen’s “true”

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femininity, William successfully contains the antebellum anxieties about cross-dressing and the fear in nineteenth-century society that all feminine gender characteristics would disappear when a woman or girl wore the clothes of the opposite sex.6 William, then, must defend Ellen for her violation of the strict boundaries of gender (not to mention those of race and class) that would be considered improper, unnatural, immoral, or destructive. Such fears of transgression were undoubtedly based on the fragility of these boundaries; the shattering of them, it was thought, might lead to national deterioration and corruption. But William’s reassurance of his wife’s status as a true woman also establishes a stable and fixed identity that contradicts the performative notions of identity disseminated by much of the text. Ellen’s “degendering process,” William suggests, was a product of slavery, which turned slaves into the most egregious examples of “false” womanhood and manhood (Hoganson 561). Ellen, he implies, must be excused for taking on a false gender identity because she exercised virtually no control over her life. Such assertions, though, rely on one of the categories that his text seeks to complicate, while William’s insistence on Ellen’s womanhood continues the performative nature of gender by illustrating how it is not merely descriptive. That is, the language used to assert Ellen’s womanhood creates her gender rather than simply describes it. William’s insistence on the restrictive notions of gender is linked to another conservative strain in his narrative, for Ellen’s disguise relies on sickness and disease to conceal her position as a slave of mixed race. At one point in Running, for instance, William is questioned by an “old gentleman” about his master’s (Ellen’s) condition; William states, “He wished to know what was the matter with him [Ellen], and where he was going. I told him . . . he was suffering from a complication of complaints, and was going to Philadelphia, where he thought he could get more suitable advice than in Georgia” (38). This scene is complemented with others that describe Ellen’s “bandages and poultices,” as well as her mask of “inflammatory rheumatism” (38). Not only do these ailments enable Ellen to avoid writing, but they also provide her with an excuse to retire early each evening to avoid socializing with fellow travelers who might detect her masquerade. However, it is important to recognize that this coupling of Ellen’s “hybrid” body with the images of sickness and disease would have been strangely familiar to nineteenth-century readers: strange because of the slippage that occurs between Ellen’s hybridity and the performance of her illness, and familiar because of the contemporary racial “scientific” theories that merged hy-

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bridity with physical decay. Ellen’s physical ailments, that is, correspond to the theories of physiological degeneration about racial mixture put forward by Crawfurd and Hunt. The fact that Running highlights these images shows how Craft comes to argue against himself and bears witness to the tenacity of racial scientific discourses on the production of identity in antebellum America. William’s use of the conventional discourses of hybridity and gender would have spoken to his audiences’ expectations about the “true” nature of gender and racial mixture. But these conventions also have another purpose: they calm William’s fears concerning his own gender identity, because Ellen’s shifting identity destabilizes William’s subjectivity. That is, in disguising her as his owner, William is forced into the powerless position as a slave to his wife (his new master), and Ellen dislodges his place within the structure of their marriage as he moves from husband to slave “boy.” For instance, when a woman mistakes William for her runaway slave, Ellen responds by saying: “No; that is my boy” (40). William is then compelled to explain to his reader that “Every man slave is called boy till he is very old” (41). In addition, once Ellen puts on her disguise, William’s choice of pronoun changes in his description of his wife: “He [Ellen] was seated at the right hand of the captain, who, together with all the passengers, inquired very kindly after his health” (31). And William consistently refers to Ellen’s position as his master: “My master (as I will now call my wife) took a longer way round. . . . He obtained a ticket for himself and one for his slave” (28). The shift in pronoun and title textually reproduces the attention to detail and the vigilance against slips that would have been necessary on their journey to freedom. However, this linguistic shift also signals a change in William’s gendered position in relation to his wife: he becomes infantalized and effeminized as her “boy” and slave. This transfer of power and gender gestures toward William’s anxiety about losing his “true” self; it also provides us with a multivalent reading of William’s assertion of Ellen’s “true” womanhood. Not only does his assertion make Ellen more respectable in the eyes of his antebellum audience; it also calms William’s fears about his own sexuality in the face of Ellen’s self-divided subjectivity. In other words, William must reassure himself (and his audience) of his own identity by reclaiming Ellen’s place within the realm of the feminine. Such a reassurance defines William’s inferior position as a short-term necessity, something which he will overcome once he and Ellen have gained freedom. By taking this stance, William also undermines his fears of transgressive

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sexuality in the face of his wife’s gender fluidity. If, as Marjorie Garber suggests, there is an intimate connection between cross-dressing and samesexuality, then homoeroticism can be read into Ellen’s questionable femininity (56). William consciously touches on the same-sexual dimension of Ellen’s gender performance in his description of the young Virginian women who fall in love with Ellen. But William’s shifting pronoun also highlights a fear concerning his own sexuality; by referring to his wife as “him” and “he,” William calls attention to the unstable ground upon which his sexual identity rests. His wife becomes a man, while he is forced into the position of boy. That is, through an inversion whereby the dominant role is played by the woman in disguise, Ellen’s gender performance replicates the relationship between the Greek man-boy pair. For William, then, the assertion of his wife’s “true womanhood” suppresses the taboo of same-sexuality, thus containing homosexuality as the potential gothic return of the repressed. At such moments, William’s text speaks against itself, for he attempts to reestablish the comfortable binaries of identity that he has already broken down. The failure of distinguishing between the categories of identity— white and black, man and woman, heterosexual and homosexual, slave and master—results in a fear of erasure that must be contained. Such a fear is based on the implication that these categories might have merely the value of unstable signs that are broken up and impossible to unify. A crisis of identity thus arises when the self and its surroundings lose their ontological consistencies, thus all remaining notions of identity are forced onto unstable ground. Indeed, because the trajectory of the gothic is mobilized in part by mystery, the problematic identity of Ellen (and by extension William) takes us near the heart of that narrative trajectory. For, as I have suggested, Ellen’s uncertain lineage, when masked by her disguise, suggests a heritage equally traceable through black and white blood; she therefore inhabits a space between identities that are never decidable within the binary logic of American racial structures. Ellen’s identificatory fluidity, then, questions the truthful determination of identity—a questionable determination that William fears and thus attempts to renounce by reclaiming Ellen’s “true womanhood.” The gothic import of Running is, in part, derived from both the horrors of slavery and the troublesome identification of subjectivity. William, the ex-slave who haunts white America, is himself haunted by the structure of a gothic identity that must be suppressed. His fear derives from what Julia

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Kristeva unveils as the problematic nature of the relationship between subject and object: the power of horror, she states, derives from a form of abjection that “disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in between, the ambiguous, the composite” (4). For Kristeva, the abject is the gothic identity that highlights the permeability of borders and that permits the passage from one category to another. From this perspective, William sees Ellen’s passing as an anxious crossing of physical and conceptual borders: a physical movement from South to North (or from bondage to freedom) that threatens her life, as well as a conceptual movement from one identity to another (blackness to whiteness, woman to man, etc.) that threatens her stable sense of self. William views these passages as upsetting the binarisms that constitute the grounds of distinction between “this” and “that,” “black and white.” Within the gothic context, then, Ellen’s identity treads a constant line of disavowal and negation, moving between the mystery of a void—seen in the breakdown of binary signification—and the desire to unveil the gothic mystery of the text by structuring identities within a binary system that will set things “straight.” Ellen’s “in between” identity may be seen as a site of abjection that she (and William) must expel or repress in order to attain a place within the symbolic order. She must imagine herself (and be imagined by William) as a stable subject who is not eternally trapped in the process of becoming. But what William’s narrative fails to glimpse is that overcoming abjection, in whatever form, presents to identity an equilibrium where none actually exists. The mysterious darkness and horrific suspense of the gothic narrative—and here Running is no exception—tells us that we never do get past our feelings of instability, that the reality of abjection will always exceed our best imaginative attempts to stabilize it. Ellen’s process of becoming, then, participates in the abject’s eternal provocation of identificatory attainment, which will always leave open the process of subjective construction to continual articulation. Elizabeth Grosz puts this quite succinctly when she states that “even at times of its strongest cohesion and integration the subject teeters on the brink of a gaping abyss . . . [which] is the locus for the subject’s generation and the place of its potential obliteration” (89). This statement explains, in part, why the narrative of Running comes to speak against itself, for Ellen’s fluid identity is at once a creation of the self—a process of generation—and a catalyst for her loss of self through the obliteration of identificatory stability. As a result, the text must move in both directions: William must illustrate Ellen’s generation of a new self while he

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also needs to contain the horror of the abyss by maintaining that such a generation does not obliterate Ellen’s “core” identity. Similar to William’s double bind when faced with his depiction of Ellen is Running’s illustration of the complexities of gothic discourses. That is, Running shows how gothic discourses were manipulated by both sides of the debate over slavery and racial divisions. On the one hand, gothic language was used by proslavery social critics such as Hunt and Crawfurd, who feared the haunting presence of racial mixture and the so-called degeneration of the national body. On the other hand, abolitionist texts like Running used the gothic to attack the supporters of slavery as the “monstrous demons” who unjustly suppressed and tortured a whole race of people. William’s coupling of this latter form with the discourses of disease, corruption, and fears of a loss of identity illustrates how the two were intertwined in antebellum America, thus speaking to the mutability of the gothic. For writers such as William Craft, the appeal of the gothic form was its variation, its resistance to meta-narrativity, or even a coherent generic form; it constitutes a series of narratives rather than a single story. The gothic, then, is a textual body that shadows the hybrid body of Ellen Craft: it has no intrinsic identity, but is seen as consisting of surfaces and external signs that can be appropriated by various subject positions. But this textual fluidity— the use of gothic conventions by pro- and antislavery writers—also contributes to the anxiety that lies at the heart of Running. That is, the breakdown in meaning, definition, and binary logic generates a fear of the void, themise-en-abîme, which is glimpsed by William from his position on the edge of an epistemological abyss. And like the voiceless conclusion of Benito Cereno, William’s narrative comes to speak against itself, for it is unable to pose an alternative to the binary logic that it dislodges and questions.

pa rt t w o

Exploring Identity in Postbellum Gothic Discourse

chapter four

The Epistemology of the Body; or, Gothic Secrets in Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy

I

n 1892, almost thirty years after the passing of the Emancipation Act, Frances Harper turned to the gothic horrors of slavery as a metonym for the oppression of blacks in the wake of the 1883 Supreme Court decision that declared unconstitutional the Federal Rights Act of 1875 forbidding separation by race (Williamson 97). As Iola Leroy says in Harper’s novel of the same name: “Slavery . . . is dead, but the spirit which animated it still lives” (217). Slavery, in other words, may have expired, but its spirit has risen up specter-like to haunt the nation in the form of the “lawless white men who murder, lynch and burn their fellow-citizens” (217). Indeed, the haunting persistence of slavery lies at the heart of Iola Leroy, for the plot focuses on the revealing of Iola’s African American ancestry, the powers that force her into slavery, her experiences during the Civil War and Reconstruction, her commitment to racial uplift, and her racial ambiguity. This latter subject is particularly significant for the text’s gothic import, because it enables Harper to play on the American fear of passing and white slavery. That is, Harper’s depiction of Iola, a white woman who is unaware of her mother’s black blood until she is forced into bondage, speaks to the images of passing and white slavery found in Craft’s and Stowe’s representations of Salome Müller. By presenting Iola as both a slave and a “white lady” with “Anglo-Saxon blood,” Harper transforms the discourses of sentimentality into an antithetical language of sublime terror by suggesting that any white woman can be forced into subjugation (62). It is possible that a source of Harper’s depiction of Iola’s bondage was George Washington Cable’s “Salome Müller, the White Slave” (1889), which, like Craft’s and Stowe’s texts, presents the Louisiana court trial of Müller and the subsequent appeal of 1844 – 45 to convey the horrors of slavery and race prejudice to a predominantly white audience. As a first-person narrator, Cable captures the history of Müller’s German immigration and unlawful bondage by quoting the newspaper accounts and court documents of the case. By

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weaving historical documents with a fictional heightening of the courtroom proceedings reminiscent of Benito Cereno, Cable questions Southern notions of racial identity. Müller, the narrator states, was mistreated in bondage even though “she had every appearance of being . . . white, without ever having seen the shadow of a title for anyone to own, and with everything to indicate that there was none” (177). The visual confirmation of racial identity is exposed by the narrator as an absurdity, because the details of appearance based on skin color do not reveal an essential racial self. The boundaries of the color line are thus thrown into question by exposing them as arbitrary, inconsistent, and blind. Ironically, though, the court arrives at a decision when Salome’s family establishes the authenticity of her racial status through a reading of the birthmarks inscribed on her skin. Although Salome’s complexion cannot determine her blackness or whiteness, her body still possesses a text that, when sufficiently decoded, can establish her true bloodline. Reconstruction and “Reconciliation” I invoke Cable’s text as a possible source for Harper’s Iola Leroy because it shows how the gothic formulation of white slavery—as best illustrated in the repetitions of Salome Müller’s biography by Craft, Stowe, and Cable—remains a constant gothic trope. This is significant because, at the level of narration, it expresses an anxiety that doubles, contests, and problematizes the conventions of surface narrative patterns that can be read on the body. Moreover, in reading Harper’s text alongside Cable’s “Müller,” we are also forced to recall the double structure of his “‘Haunted House’ in Royal Street,” which combines the gothic discourses of slavery with those of Reconstruction. This hybrid narrative tells two stories: the first focusing on the deranged Madame Lalaurie’s sadistic torturing and confinement of slaves in her mansion; the second on the institutionalization of segregation during Reconstruction, when the Lalaurie house is used as a high school for white and black students. The school is said to be haunted by the ghosts of the chained, tormented souls who burned to death in the mansion (Butcher 101).1 The latter part of the text, then, incorporates historical material about the December 1874 mob of White Leaguers who descended upon a New Orleans school for both white and black girls, intent on evicting the black students. In Cable’s text, those students who are white but acknowledge some African ancestry are forced to leave the school, while those who are “pure” white and those obviously of black ancestry are

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allowed to stay. The desire to drive out the students with “tainted” blood dominates the mob’s actions; it is a desire that overwhelms their fears of white children learning alongside students of obvious African ancestry. This part of the story highlights a gothic dread of integration and racial ambiguity during Reconstruction: those students who have their racial identities inscribed on their bodies are considered “safe,” but those who have the ability to pass for white are immediately expelled. Furthermore, Cable’s use of quotation marks to isolate the words “haunted house” in the title signals his use of haunting not as a metaphysical phenomenon, but as part of the history of slavery that, like Harper’s specter-like images of slavery, continues to haunt the postbellum United States. The house thus becomes “a ghost-ridden monument” of past violence and horrors that are repeated by the white mob (219). Segregation, then, is presented as prosopopoeia, repeating the “darkness” of slavery’s “horridest possibilities” in the classrooms where torture and other racial crimes were committed (222).2 Cable’s text, as we will also see in Iola Leroy, illustrates the Southern white perception that Reconstruction would make the social order of the South a monstrosity (Williamson, Crucible 79). Indeed, Reconstruction threatened the imagined homeliness of Southern life by displacing the trope of blackness from bondage to freedom. The gothic discourse of unhomeliness, then, came to be associated with a racially mixed and so-called mongrel society that was consistent with the reconceptualization of Southern space to include African American subjects. Such spatial rhetoric was tied to a physical grounding on Southern soil—a physicality that was accompanied by fears of losing “taintless” bloodlines, the assumed “purity” of whiteness, and aristocratic primogeniture. For Southern white racists, Reconstruction became a physical matter that manifested itself not only in the redistribution of land and power, but also as a germ that threatened to infect the bloodlines of future generations. The racial ideas associated with Reconstruction thus generated horror due an intense fear of distorting race and class hierarchies (Gaston 17–18). One response to these fears came in the form of “separate but equal” segregation laws, which Cable described as a repetition of slavery. Anticipating Iola’s comments on the haunting presence of slavery, Cable made the following statement: “The New South is only the Old South re-adapting the old plantation idea to a peasant labor” that “has broke with human progress” (Negro Question 52). Cable goes on to cast the specter of medieval cruelty over the “New South” by pointing out its “elitist dictatorship,” the idea of

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caste, and the survival of a “semi-barbaric” plantation system with African American tenants instead of slaves (Turner, George 21). Cable’s gothic images, though, were appropriated by conservatives such as Henry W. Grady, whose reply to Cable declared that “race mixing” would lead to miscegenation and a “fusion” of the races, which would subsequently contradict the natural “racial instinct of separation” (909). Cable countered the argument of an “inherited instinct” for separateness by calling Grady’s attention to the large population of biracial American citizens: if there were a “natural instinct” for racial separation, Cable asked, why did so many white slaveholders have illegitimate black children? (“Silent” 674 –75). Cable went on to play upon racist fears of “impure” bloodlines by suggesting that segregation would not result in a separation of the races but would generate further amalgamation by forcing light-skinned African Americans over the color line in search of liberty (679). A similar debate takes place in Anna E. Dickinson’s novel, What Answer? (1868), when a minor character supports segregation by arguing that “an instinct repels an Anglo-Saxon from a Negro always and everywhere” (194). Jim, one of the main characters in the plot, dismisses race instinct by pointing to “all of the mulattos and the quadroons, and the octoroons” in the United States (195). “’Twan’t the abolitionists,” he says, “ ’twas the slave holders and their friends that made the race of halfbreeds . . . they showed nature hadn’t put any barriers between them” (195). Like Cable, Dickinson’s text captures white fears of racial amalgamation in the postbellum period by having the narrative revolve around a relationship between the biracial character, Francesca, and a wealthy white man named Willie. After the two marry, they move to New York, where they are exposed to a general anxiety about amalgamation, such as that expressed in a newspaper headline declaring, “Miscegenation. Disgraceful Freak in High Life. Fruit of an Abolition War” (190).3 In addition, Willie’s family refuses to accept the marriage, viciously rejecting him out of a fear that he will produce “colored offspring” (118). Gothic discourses are furthered in the novel’s climax, in which Willie’s blood is spilled in the streets when he is caught at a black friend’s home and beaten and tortured by a mob that has gathered during the racially motivated New York draft riots. The gothic import of this scene is heightened when Francesca is shot just as she finds Willie’s mutilated body on the brink of death; they are left to die by the side of the road. Texts published during Reconstruction continued to merge racial mixture with gothic discourses.4 Rebecca Harding Davis’s Waiting for the Verdict

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(1867) presents the dilemmas that beset an eminent Philadelphia surgeon, a man well established in white society, when he reveals his African American ancestry. Davis’s text captures the contemporary white attitudes concerning people of mixed race by opening the narrative with a description of a mulatto boy whose “dirty yellow skin” sickens the other characters, one of whom even calls him a “yellow monster of a boy” who “has the insolence of a devil” (10, 12, 13). Another character, speaking more generally of “half-breeds,” says that they are “terribly diseased in body and mind,” so that they cannot rise beyond the level of “little animals” (13). The continuation of these discourses into the postbellum period is not surprising when we consider that many writers from this era—including Cable, Dickinson, Davis, Harper, Chesnutt, and many others—turned to the subject of slavery in their gothic fiction. As a result, the close of the Civil War did not mean that blacks and whites alike quickly swept slavery’s skeleton aside; as John David Smith points out, “slavery assumed a whole new significance after the war . . . [when] well over six hundred books and articles on slavery [were] published in the years 1865–1889” (4). For Harper and others like her, slavery was identified with the broad social, political, and racial issues of her day. Harper’s witnessing of Reconstruction and the rise of segregation influenced her to turn to slavery as a crucial metaphor, a comparative model for what she perceived as a repetition of that “peculiar institution.” Racial control through mob violence, often culminating in torturing, burning, disfiguring, and hanging of blacks, replaced slavery as an instrument of social control and racial suppression to the same effect: African Americans remained slaves to the cult of white supremacy. Gothic discourses thus continued to be used in texts attempting to justify racial violence. For instance, lynchings and beatings were often justified through the rhetoric of untamed African American sexuality—rhetoric that helped construct the myth of the black man as a genetic monster, fanning the flames of negrophobia during the 1890s (Kinney 153). The gothic trope of the evil man forcefully corrupting innocent women thus acquired a racial dimension, generating a fear of interracial rape and violent miscegenation. Harper saw these discourses as repeating the strategies of oppression that were forced on blacks before the Civil War. She thus appropriates gothic discourse to depict the horrors and indignities of slavery as a way of describing the conflicting relationship between blacks and whites in the postbellum period. By turning to the horrors of slavery, Harper was also responding to what

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Jay B. Hubbell has called a postbellum idealization of the antebellum South (700). Hubbell notes that by the late 1870s and early 1880s the South had become the most popular setting for American fiction, a development motivated in part by the resurgence of the romantic plantation novel. Narratives about Southern belles and benevolent slaveholders mythologized slavery as a paternalistic institution, in which the slave owners’ kindness and civility overshadowed the violence of the institution. Moreover, such novels painted a binaristic portrait of African Americans: slaves were portrayed as either evil and shiftless monsters or as harmless and innocent children. Thomas Nelson Page’s fiction, for instance, contributed to this racial binary, fueling nostalgic, romanticized illusions of antebellum institutions that sought to paint an idealistic picture of slavery to counter contemporary discourses of integration and civil rights. Page’s position was motivated by an intense fear of miscegenation, which he saw as potentially tearing a hole in the fabric of American (particularly Southern) society (Andrews 14 –15). Indeed, Page’s Red Rock (1898) uses black stereotypes and racial mixture as important themes in order to defend racial discrimination. The novel opens with a depiction of the prewar years, in which the slaves are portrayed as “happy darkies” who live in whitewashed cabins with nice gardens (29). Random violence, torture, rape, and humiliation are far removed from this utopian scene, and when Dr. Cary (the paternal slaveholder) offers one of his slaves freedom and money, he is met with an immediate refusal (41). Slaves, we are told, are happy on the plantation. But this Elysium is soon destroyed by the war and Reconstruction, throwing Dr. Cary and his slaves into poverty, hardship, and depravity. The Ku Klux Klan is then presented as a saving grace, protecting whites and blacks alike through a restoration of the “proper” racial order of “civilization,” with a special emphasis on the protection of Southern white womanhood (230). Red Rock thus illustrates a postbellum Southern rape complex, whereby Southern white women came to symbolize the mythological caste system that had been violated by the Northern army (Cash 118). Page’s text confirms this symbolism, for he conflates Southern women with the South itself, implying that any insult or attack on a white woman symbolized the rape of the South during Reconstruction. By veiling Northern aggression in images of rape, Page justifies the actions of the Ku Klux Klan as a defense of Southern womanhood. The need for such defenses was furthered when it was feared that the violations perpetrated by northerners could

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also be carried out by African Americans. The question of miscegenation, then, increased the anxieties surrounding the Southern rape complex, and white fears of blacks raping Southern women pressed this complex into the realm of heredity and bloodlines. If, as Page believed, Southern women were the “perpetrator[s] of white superiority in legitimate line,” the threat of blacks’ raping white women generated a terror of corrupting pure bloodlines and destabilizing whiteness, the only basis for superiority (162). The rape complex, then, arose not only from an outrage against the violence and brutality inflicted on women; it also came from a fear of forced amalgamation of blackness and whiteness. Interestingly, it is the biracial character in Red Rock, Moses, who attempts to rape a white woman. Perhaps to illustrate the threats posed by a “corrupt” bloodline, Page has Moses trick Ruth Welch into riding through the woods with him (354). Once there, he seizes her horse’s bridle and tries to drag her from the saddle (356). But as she screams and beats him back, Steve Allen, the leader of the Ku Klux Klan, hears the struggle and comes to her rescue (358). Although Moses’ motives are never uttered, the narrative implies that Steve saves Ruth from rape. Page thus paints the biracial figure as morally and physically corrupt, someone who must be feared as a threat to the social order that the Ku Klux Klan must work to maintain. Such ideologies cast light on the political position Page held during Reconstruction: he believed that the conflict between blacks and whites was not just a Southern problem—it was a universal struggle for racial domination and cultural progress. For Page, the merger of blackness and whiteness through racial amalgamation threatened to stunt the growth of the “civilization of the Anglo-Saxon” (viii). Page appears to have internalized racist theories disseminated by social scientists such as Joseph LeConte, who wrote that the Civil War had corrupted “social evolution” by upsetting the natural hierarchy of the races (“Race Problem” 353). The advance of civilization, he argued, was suppressed in the United States through a Civil War that was blind to “natural progress” (“Scientific Relation” 429). LeConte explained his position by stating that African Americans were “unaccustomed to freedom” and “far lower on the scale of evolution than the Caucasian” (qtd. in Haller 158). And because blacks were intellectually and morally inferior to whites, LeConte suggested, the master-slave relationship should be replicated by developing laws that kept blacks from holding U.S. citizenship or voting (“Race Problem” 361). For LeConte, maintaining control

60 e x p l o r i n g i d e n t i t y over ex-slaves was necessary because African Americans were unable to care for themselves in freedom; if not controlled, he claimed, they would further impede the progress of civilization (362). LeConte’s arguments illustrate the ease with which the polygenesist theories of racial ranking and social ordering transposed into late-century social Darwinism. And it is in this context that Harper writes Iola Leroy. She thus uses her novel to counter the depictions of slavery put forth by Page and LeConte, depictions that reinforced the so-called natural order of racial difference.5 Iola Leroy, then, needs to be placed in the context of an opposing strand of 1890s writing that presented slavery as reinforcing the existing structural framework of race relations. Indeed, Harper understood the ethnological theories of her age and the increasingly deliberate and influential attempts to dress racism in the authoritarian garb of science (Ernest 501). Racist scientific theories fueled by the dissemination of a kind of racial Darwinism, which cast African Americans in a weak and inferior mold, were challenged by Harper’s strong black and biracial characters, as well as by her direct treatment of racial science (Fredrickson 251). In Iola, for instance, the white Dr. Latrobe borrows from LeConte’s theory by suggesting that Caucasians “belong to the highest race on earth and the Negro to the lowest” (227). Latrobe’s racial taxonomy leads him to argue that whites “cannot amalgamate with the Negroes” because such a merger would be “a death blow to American civilization” (228 –29). Harper thus grafts LeConte’s fears of racial mixture and the advance of civilization onto Latrobe in order to argue against them: to Latrobe’s claim that “tainted blood” would impede cultural and biological progression, Harper reveals the respected and accomplished Dr. Latimer to be of mixed race (228). Latimer, who has recently met Latrobe, has been passing for white since their introduction and gaining Latrobe’s professional respect in order to illustrate racial equality. The narrative goes on to expose Latrobe’s gothic fear as being the prime motivation for the dissemination of racial science when Rev. Carmicle claims that Dr. Latrobe’s racist theories are based on a “dread” of the black race (221). Latrobe confirms his gothic anxiety by asserting that he “dread[s] . . . the balance of power” that will make the African American population “dangerous” and damaging to white citizens (222). Harper is thus able to use this discussion to refute racist science; she exposes Latrobe’s position as motivated not by scientific evidence, but by the fear of empowering blacks and by the return of the repressed.

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Gothic Sentimentality The gothic discourses I see in Harper’s text depart from the conventional criticism that places Iola Leroy within the mid nineteenth-century domestic “woman’s novel” and sentimental traditions, substituting generic white characters for African Americans (Carby, Reconstructing 62). Claudia Tate, for instance, effectively argues that Harper uses sentimental literary conventions in order to focus on marriage because “voting and marrying were . . . twin indexes for measuring how black people collectively valued their liberties” (103). And Marilyn Elkins notes that “Harper’s plot allows Iola . . . to serve simultaneously as an appropriate heroine for a sentimental novel and as a positive role model for her black audience” (45).6 But recent work by Elizabeth Young breaks away from the analytical limitations of reading Harper’s text in a sentimental light by arguing that “Iola Leroy rewrites the conventions of the war narrative” to highlight black heroism and courage on the battlefield (Young 274). What all these critics neglect, though, is the gothic discourses at the heart of the novel, discursive forms that do not negate the war narrative, the sentimentality, or the domestic ideologies of the text, but incorporate them all. That is, Harper’s use of gothic discourse is consistent with her weaving together multiple generic conventions, so that her novel forms a heteroglossia of genres and languages in order to negotiate the contradictory but intersecting textual and ideological demands of various generic modes. Like others before her, Harper made the most of the adaptability of the gothic by speaking in many voices and incorporating many textual forms into Iola Leroy. The hybridity of the narrative allows her to sound multiple voices and maintain a disparate set of interests without abandoning her political commitment to the “uplift” of African American culture. She refuses to repress any particular textual form—the passages of poetry, say, or the sections in black dialect—in order to present one voice in as pure a form as possible. Instead, she affirms them all. For instance, Harper, a prolific poet and speechwriter, disrupts the narrative flow of Iola Leroy by incorporating sections from her speeches, poetry, hymns, and African American songs. In fact, toward the end of text the prose narrative breaks down completely when Miss Delany reads a two-page poem, “Rallying Cry,” which encourages the “children of the tropics” to overcome their “pain and wrong” not by “music, dance and song,” but by “turning to Christ’s dying face” in order to “see the only light” (251–53). This poem

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serves both as an example of Harper’s genre mixing and her commitment to a number of political agendas. For instance, the poem’s overt Christian ideology combines with the language of sentimentality when the poetic voice turns to the “weary ages” of black history that inspire “dripping tears” to fall from the “toil and hardship,” the “pallor and anguish” of the African American experience (252). The political dimensions of the poem are furthered in the gothic discourses that express the “cry of anguish” in the physical pain of past “injustices” that have contributed to “our longdishonored name” (252). Physical images in this stanza invoke the “dishonoring” of black bodies through rape, torture, servitude, and murder, leading the poetic voice to “count life a dismal failure” (252). The mixture of voices and literary conventions in this poem reflects a greater discursive mixing throughout the narrative. Harper, for instance, weaves sections from her many political speeches into her novel as a way of counterbalancing the sentimental and gothic rhetoric with a lucid and didactic political voice. A specific example of this arises when Harper has Iola deliver a paper at a conversazione where important essays such as “Negro Emancipation” and “Patriotism” are read and debated. Iola chooses to talk about the “Education of Mothers,” arguing for the need of education to disseminate “moral” motherhood to a generation of women who are overly impressed by science rather than religion or ethics (253).7 Perhaps with contemporary racial “science” and social Darwinism in mind, Harper uses the speech to weave an overtly political prose style into her novel. Such textual stitching shows Harper’s novel to be a study of discursive systems. The text, that is, goes beyond a simple combination of sentimentality and the rhetoric of the romance by moving into the psychological and sociological dimensions of mimetic representation (Ernest 500; Bell 58). Indeed, there are multiple discursive systems in the novel, all of which combine to situate the novel on a point of textual intersection that reflects the crossroads of racial discourse whereby the biracial figure can move fluidly over the color line. Harper’s transition from one textual pattern to another thus provides a foundation at the level of narrative structure from which she can build a text about racial passing. Harper’s text of miscegenation, with its intermixture of generic qualities and techniques, recognizes that gothic and sentimental fiction share a common genealogy. In fact, the dialogic structure of Iola Leroy plays upon the fact that the sentimental and the gothic are interdependent, not essentially different. Valdine Clemens supports this observation by arguing that what

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nineteenth-century “women novelists called ‘Gothic’” was in fact “two different modes: the Gothic novel as inaugurated by Walpole, and the novel of sentiment and sensibility” (42). And Kari J. Winter corroborates this claim in her assertion that “sentimental novels like Uncle Tom’s Cabin gained some of their social effectiveness by employing literary strategies from the female gothic and slave narrative traditions” (42). Indeed, Harper uses the sentimental tropes of extended sympathy, melancholy, domesticity, and “true” womanhood; however, such textual strategies are at odds with the novel’s images of slavery, racial violence, and war, which disrupt the pleasant fictional world of domesticity and the domestic poetics of the sentimental novel (Bentley 502). Slavery, for instance, is seen to violate the domestic worldview: it separates Iola from her mother and brother; it supports Alfred Lorraine’s right to sell Iola into the horrors of bondage; and it produces biracial characters who complicate the “true” portrait of the antebellum family, just as they remind the reader of antebellum sexual scandals that were responsible for so many illegitimate children. Harper’s biracial characters thus cast the specter of slavery and miscegenation over the stability of the nineteenth-century American family and become figures who split apart the imagined natural order of bourgeois life. Harper’s images of the blood relations that tie Africans to Europeans, in other words, subvert the idea of a natural binary difference between blacks and whites, just as they call attention to the scandalous sexual and familial genealogies that shake the foundations of U.S. racial ideologies. By turning to such subjects, Harper is able to adopt (and adapt) the gothic discourses of inheritance that date back to The Castle of Otranto. In fact, Iola Leroy works through a plot of inheritance and kinship in which Iola is the heiress, even though her relation to the inheritance is based on the concealment of her identity as a black woman. Indeed, at Eugene Leroy’s death, the question of who is the legal inheritor of his estate is debated and found to be Eugene’s cousin, Alfred Lorraine, whose family is said to have “guard[ed] the purity of its blood” so that not “one drop of Negro blood” flows in Alfred’s veins (66– 67). Questions concerning the white bourgeois family and the rightful order of inheritance, property, and patriarchy are thus explored within the context of slavery and antebellum legal forces. Eugene Leroy’s marriage to his ex-slave, Marie, is found to be “null and void,” and she and her children are remanded into slavery (95). Harper, then, shows how the question of inheritance is answered in order to restore the stability of the white family and the racial hierarchies supported “by the

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authority of the law,” all of which declare that “Leroy’s legal heirs are his white blood relations” (95). In so doing, the narrative stretches the bounds of credulity and reduces the basis of white supremacy and the bourgeois family to a forced social construct that is not naturalized through anything but antebellum legal precedents. For instance, Alfred confronts Marie by telling her that legal forces have conspired to rob her of her possessions, dignity, and freedom. “Judge Starkins,” he tells her, “has decided that your manumission is unlawful; your marriage a bad precedent, and inimical to the welfare of society; and that you and your children are remanded to slavery” (96). Such a decision is presented as “unnatural,” as a manifestation and restitution of an old order, and a cultural law that is inappropriate and unjust. The injustice presented in this passage places Alfred within the discursive rubric of the gothic tyrant who captures, imprisons, and inflicts cruelties on his innocent female victims. But, politically speaking, Harper also uses this passage to expose the hegemonic structures maintaining white fraternal superiority in the name of law and the welfare of Southern society. Judge Starkins supports Alfred’s claim of primogeniture if only because it furthers the purity of whiteness in the disenfranchising of the text’s biracial women. The decision highlights a general fear of losing the inherited power of patriarchy, disseminating impure bloodlines, and diluting whiteness. Moreover, implied in the judge’s comments is the ideology of racial mixture as an imagined physical degeneration from which society must be protected. Harper responds to such discourses by depicting Marie’s reaction to the court’s ruling as making her “stricken with a brain fever,” a fever that is said to slowly “consume her life” (96). Such diction reverses the conventional discourse of hybridity that framed intermixture as a sickness inflicted on, and consuming, society; Harper, instead, shows that sickness—in the form of Marie’s “brain fever”—is spread by the corrupt powers of whiteness and the legal institutions that support the horrors of slavery. She suggests, by extension, that sickness is not spread through the racial mixing that defines Marie’s identity, but by the gothic forces of the peculiar institution. Such a reversal of discourse also arises during the political discussions and debates over the Civil War. In these passages, Harper rejects miscegenation as the sickness that threatens the nation; instead, she presents the “plague” of the law as the threat to a united North and South (86). Anticipating the Civil War, for instance, Eugene tells Marie that leading lawmak-

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ers in the South “have come to the conclusion that North and South had better separate, and instead of having one to have two independent governments. . . . We are realizing that we are two peoples in the midst of one nation” (87). While Eugene is referring here to the division between North and South, his language forms the image of a national separation that reflects the 1890s segregation laws. Harper continues this conceit when she has Eugene claim that the “conflict between freedom and slavery is irrepressible, and that the country cannot remain half free and half slave” (88). Under slavery, Eugene argues, the national body is a hybrid body: half of it is free and white, the other half is enslaved and black. Through such comments, Harper is able to appropriate the language of hybridity and respond to the gothic fear of white supremacists such as Page; hybridity, she states, arises from slavery and segregation, not from abolition and intermixture. Furthermore, Harper’s rhetorical appropriation is presented through the gothic trope of yellow fever. That disease, which is used by Charles Brockden Brown in Arthur Mervyn (1800) as a metaphor for social sickness, racism, and corruption, infects Eugene and threatens to become a Southern epidemic. The specter of the disease is said to “creep slowly but insidiously into his [Eugene’s] life, dulling his brain, fevering his blood, and prostrating his strength. He had no armor strong enough to repel the invasion of death” (92). Eugene has been infected by yellow fever, and his abolitionist values have been polluted by slavery and the Southern opposition to the Northern call for abolition. He has no more strength to resist the disease of white supremacy; it eventually kills him. The gothic import of yellow fever as a national metaphor is hard to miss. The very title of this chapter, “The Plague and the Law,” merges the narrative of disease, infection, decay, and degeneration with the corrupting effects of the nation’s laws. Iola Leroy, then, sees the fever issuing from the nation’s racial divisions and injustices, and yellow fever comes to represent social corruption and sickness generated by slavery and the coming national conflict: “Yellow fever was spreading in the Delta, and that pestilence was breathing its bane upon the morning air and distilling its poison upon the midnight dews. . . . [Southerners] filled with terror . . . were fleeing from death, when death was everywhere. They fled from the city only to meet the dreaded apparition in the country.” (92) The spreading disease renders the nation severely ill, giving a concrete form to the injustices of black disenfranchisement. It cannot be avoided or ignored; it threatens to infect the nation, thus generating a gothic dread among its citizens.

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Gothic Secrets This appropriation of gothic discourse is also present when Harper draws on the trope of the gothic secret in her depiction of Iola. A gothic text, that is, often calls our attention to the secret as a central trope within the narrative: subterranean passages, hidden inhibitions, secret identities, and proper familial bonds are central to the development of the gothic narrative. Indeed, Iola Leroy opens with a series of secrets located in language that must be decoded and deciphered. The first chapter, set on the Gundover plantation during the Civil War, presents the slaves using a coded language to disguise the news of the advancing Union army. This “invented phraseology” uses discussions of fresh eggs, butter, and other market items as a way of disseminating the news of a victory by the Northern troops: if the Union army won a battle, the market produce was fresh and ripe, but if “defeat befell them, then the butter and other produce were rancid or stale” (9). While Harper reveals the power of these words to her audience, the market discussion relies on the secrecy of coded discourse, African American support for the Union army, and black literacy. That is, just as the state of the eggs must be read in order to illegally disseminate a true meaning, Southern newspapers must be illegally and secretly deciphered by the slaves to provide information about the advancing army. The narrative thus begins by exploring the subjects of secrecy, language, and reading which, as we have seen, marks other gothic texts about racial ambiguity. The coding and decoding of language in the first chapter is part of the text’s greater interest in the process of reading and deciphering signs. Throughout the novel, Harper includes political and didactic passages that remind her audience of the antebellum laws prohibiting African American literacy. And, in the novel’s conclusion, Iola feels it is her duty after the war to travel throughout the South teaching ex-slaves to read. Iola’s belief in literacy is more than a political commitment to her race, for at the level of narrative it speaks to the process of reading and the gothic secret. That is, Harper develops the notion that every narrative structure involves the practice of unfolding and revelation, what Roland Barthes refers to as the “hermeneutic code,” whereby the narrative creates an enigma that is eventually explained and clarified through the teleology of reading (19). In the gothic narrative, where things are deliberately hidden from us, such processes are exaggerated through mysterious occurrences, thus posing hermeneutic questions that beg for interpretation and decoding.

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The subtitle of Harper’s text—“Shadows Uplifted”—illustrates this point. The metaphor of the shadow is used not unlike Melville’s “shadow of the Negro” in Benito Cereno to suggest a haunting black presence within Euro-American society. By coupling “shadow” with “uplifted,” Harper implies that the haunting darkness of slavery, war, and the ignorance of racism can be eradicated through abolition, peace, and enlightenment. But the image of the shadow also conveys the process of veiling or concealing that which is hidden from us: it implies a form of darkness that impedes one’s vision and thus gestures toward secrecy. And the notion that the shadow will be uplifted implies both the “racial uplift” of postbellum liberal discourses and the promise of a moment of revelation or epiphany through the teleological development of the narrative. Shadows, moreover, may be read as a culturally prominent metaphor for incomprehension or for otherwise incomplete understanding, which Harper’s subtitle uses to this effect, implying that the shadows will be lifted from previously darkened minds (Ernest 502). But if Harper’s title promises a revelation, and if the gothic secret or an answer to the problems of race conflict is pledged in the subtitle, then it must be read as either misleading or concealing. For although Iola believes in education as the answer to racial uplift, solutions to racial injustice and prejudice remain an invoked absence: even the poem that concludes the novel tells us that “there is light beyond the darkness” and “a brighter coming day,” but it refuses to enlighten us as to the path that will lead us toward this light (282). The definitive and absoluteness of the final lines at once reveal yet conceal this secret. Harper, then, dramatizes the paradoxical status of the secret. For Derrida, this paradox derives from the notion that when “there is something secret . . . it does not conceal itself” (21). Such a paradox is explained when we consider that a secret is something usually discoverable and potentially unveiled. Barthes’ “hermeneutic code,” for instance, makes sense only in these terms: the formula of the code can always be cracked and deciphered to generate closure whereby all is revealed. But the paradoxical nature of the secret derives from the fact that a “true secret . . . is not hidden somewhere. . . . A true secret is all on the surface. This superficiality cannot by any hermeneutic procedures, material or linguistic, be gone behind. A literary text . . . says what it says” ( J. H. Miller 17). Like other passing narratives, Harper’s text both conceals and reveals the secret of racial difference on the surface of the body. Iola, for instance, lets her body say what it says: in the latter section of the novel she does not tell her employer that she is

68 e x p l o r i n g i d e n t i t y African American, but neither does she attempt to conceal her family from him. Moreover, she does not introduce herself to her fellow employees by identifying herself as white or black; instead, she lets the surface of her skin provide the text for reading her identity. But when Iola is asked by the other workers if she is African American, she does not deny it. By making language the determining factor in the identification of Iola’s racial difference, Harper can play upon the paradox of the secret of race as that which lies on the surface, remaining simultaneously concealed and revealed. Harper, then, masks Iola in a veil of secrecy that does not involve any concealment at all in order to present race as something that has no depth and cannot be “gone behind” through any “hermeneutic procedures.” The notion that a hermeneutic code can be applied to race is put forward by Dr. Latrobe. During his conversation with Dr. Latimer, he asserts that “there are niggers who are as white as I am, but the taint of blood is there. . . . Oh, there are tricks of blood which always betray them. My eyes are more practiced than yours. I can always tell them. Now, that Johnson is as white as any man; but I knew he was a nigger the moment I saw him. I saw it in his eye” (229). As in other passing narratives, the racist Latrobe assumes that the “taint of blood” is always displayed on the other’s body. And he believes that his eye is sufficiently trained to read body traits to determine racial difference, as he illustrates in his diagnosis of Johnson’s white skin and black identity. For Latrobe, race is read on the body’s surface and reveals the blood that lies beneath it. Harper’s interest in the coding and decoding of signs refutes this position by showing that, in deciphering whiteness and blackness, the process of reading can skid into misreading. That is, Harper challenges Latrobe’s assumption that he is “clear-sighted enough to detect the presence of Negro blood when all physical traces had disappeared,” for Latimer proudly reveals that “the blood of that race is coursing through . . . [his] veins” (238 –39). Latrobe’s misreading of Latimer’s body is made visible. And unlike the “mystery of the market speech,” which can be solved by learning the coding of the phraseology, Latimer’s body visually remains secretive by simultaneously concealing and revealing his race. In so doing, Harper uncovers the absurdity of applying hermeneutic processes to the surface of the body or to the binary of blackness and whiteness. We are told that it is “both by blood and choice” that Latimer lives as an African American man; thus, his skin holds a secret that only his words can reveal. His race, then, may be read as the secret or enigma of the text, something that can be revealed through utterance or concealed through silence.

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Such a reading of race deconstructs the restrictive framework of race within U.S. legal identities by illustrating how race is a product of the surface effects of language. Language has the power to make Latimer into a white or an African American man. By presenting racial identities as a choice, as a product of either utterance or silence, Harper repeats the image of passing as a gothic dread for those who wish to police the division of blackness and whiteness. More interesting, though, is that Harper presents passing as inspiring a gothic dread among her biracial characters. For Iola, that is, passing means living “under a veil of concealment, constantly haunted by a dread of detection” (266). She explains her thoughts on passing to Dr. Gresham: “I am not willing to live under a shadow of concealment which I thoroughly hate as if the blood in my veins were an undetected crime of my soul” (233). Once again invoking the image of the shadow, Harper’s language frames passing as more than a challenge to racial uplift; it paints passing as a haunting presence whereby the specter of blackness threatens to reveal itself at any moment. The passing figure is haunted by his secret, for the specter of its unveiling generates a fear that cannot be denied. Moreover, gothic discourses are present in Iola’s description of the “darkness” of passing: the secret, she says, would cast a shadow of darkness over her life through the rejection of her family, the changing of her name, the move to a new city, the denial of her heritage, and the constant fear of being identified as black (234). The darkness of passing is tied to the Leroy family secret, which withholds the knowledge of Marie’s African genealogy from Iola and Harry. Like Harper’s other descriptions of passing, this secret is described through the gothic import of a “doom suspended over their heads,” an “unseen evil” (76, 82). For Marie, the secret that conceals her blackness is an “oppressive silence” that reminds us of the unspeakable family secrets found in the gothic texts of Walpole and Radcliffe, wherein the bourgeois family is the scene of ghostly return, where guilty secrets of past transgression and uncertain class origins are the sources of anxiety (82). In fact, if we substitute the word “race” for “class” in this quotation, then the sentence could be applied directly to the “ghostly return” of Iola’s suppressed identity. When Marie is finally forced to reveal to Iola that she was once a slave, Iola is said to have a “fearful awakening” in which “horror and anguish swept over her,” making her “wild with agony” (105). This “dreadful dream,” this “fearful nightmare,” frames the family secret and its disclosure within the haunting mode of the return of the repressed, and gothic discourse unveils that

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which was formerly repressed—not to clear away the shadows through enlightenment, but to throw Iola into her most “miserable” and “darkest hour” (107). However, the disclosure of the text’s secret does not put an end to secrecy; it underscores how the entire narrative has been tainted with the gothic discourse of secrecy and appearance. Although the utterance of Iola’s race discloses the secret of her heritage, it does not unveil the darkness of mystery that, in the eyes of the other characters, constantly shadows her. The conversation between Col. Robinson and Dr. Gresham illustrates this point: “Some great sorrow has darkened and overshadowed her [Iola’s] life. . . . It is a mystery I cannot solve,” said Dr. Gresham. “I think I can,” answered Col. Robinson. “ Will you tell me?” queried the doctor. “Yes, on one condition.” “ What is it?” “Everlasting silence.” “I promise,” said the doctor. “The secret between us shall be as deep as the sea.” “She has not requested secrecy, but at present, for her sake, I do not wish the secret revealed. Miss Leroy was a slave.” “Oh, no,” said Dr. Gresham, starting to his feet, “it can’t be so! A woman as white as she a slave?” “Yes, it is so,” continued the colonel.

Iola’s silent sorrow, then, gestures toward a secret that compounds secrecy. That is, her silence is read as a sign of the unspeakable, something that, when it is disclosed by Robinson, cannot be repeated or disseminated. By pledging his silence, Gresham generates more secrecy even as the secret that clouds Iola’s life is unveiled. Mystery is also compounded by Gresham’s disbelief: his repulsion from thoughts of white slavery forces him to dismiss her bondage by invoking her whiteness, so that even when it seems to disclose all, Iola’s skin continues to contain a secret. By complicating the relationship between surface and depth, Harper has Iola show how disclosure produces hidden layers of secrecy; including the secret implies the secret history of miscegenation in antebellum America. While Harper uses Iola Leroy to collapse racial binaries at a time when

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separation of the races was being institutionalized, her narrative shies away from endorsing further amalgamation as a possible solution to U.S. racial conflict. Throughout the text, Iola refuses to marry Gresham, the white doctor, claiming that such a union would not be fair to him or to her commitment to racial uplift. Instead of marrying the white-identified doctor, Iola chooses to marry Dr. Latimer, the light-skinned—but black-identified— man, and they move south to work for the “best welfare of the nation” (282). Harper then implies that union to a white man is not the correct means of clearing the shadows of racism, just as she challenges claims posed by racial science that blacks wanted to merge with whites at all costs. Such a challenge also counters the 1890s academic and popular sociologists who proclaimed, as Philip A. Bruce did in 1889, that the black family was inherently corrupt (9). Those racist commentators claiming that the “failure” of the black family was a sign of racial degeneration were put in their place by Iola’s choice of the black doctor and the stable middle-class life implicated in the decision. Harper thus reaffirms the homely conditions of the bourgeois black family in the tradition of gothic sentimentality as the medicine for healing a sick nation.

chapter five

Genetic Atavism and the Return of the Repressed in William Dean Howells’s An Imperative Duty

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n the New York chapter of The American Scene, Henry James describes his return to the city of his youth. The self-reflexive James transcribes his impressions and visions of this “terrible town” in gothic terms: the “monstrous” skyscrapers have “cruelly overtopped” the “felicity of simplified gothic,” he says, and the “noble preeminence” of the Trinity Church is no longer visible (57, 61). Here, James laments the death of the gothic architecture of New York at the hands of the “monstrous phenomena,” the modern buildings that have “no history,” and which are “ferociously” consuming the city (65). These skyscrapers—these “monsters of the mere market”—haunt his return and provide a setting for another “monstrous” presence: the “ubiquitous alien” (63, 68). That is, James’s contempt for modern architecture fades into the background when he begins to describe the immigrants of the city (the so-called “inescapable aliens”), who generate an anxiety about “the American character,” an essentialist American identity (92). When faced with this “great ethnic question,” James fears the racial and ethnic mixing of a “cauldron” that has the power to mix together a “hotch-potch of racial ingredients” to form a new “American world” that has an “ethnic outlook” (92, 99). James goes on to express his horror at the “effect of infusion” of the ethnic character into American identity, for he states: “ What meaning . . . can continue to attach to such a term as the ‘American’ character?” (92). By placing quotation marks around the word American, James suggests that the term does not convey a self-evident, obvious, or essential identity. New York’s modern buildings and recently arrived “aliens” cause him to question what it means to be an American. In this context, the American identity becomes an ideological or rhetorical figure, a concept that exists only in language as a figure of speech. But this figure of speech is, according to James, unreadable, for the multiplicity of racial and ethnic differences in the United States makes an American iden-

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tity “illegible,” something that “hangs in the vast American sky . . . belonging to no known language” (93). I evoke The American Scene in the introduction to this chapter on William Dean Howells because James’s gothic return to the United States after a long absence in Europe recalls the return of Dr. Olney in Howells’s 1892 novella, An Imperative Duty. Howells’s text begins with a description of Olney’s walk through Boston’s streets, which he sees for the first time after his “long sojourn in Europe” (4). Olney is surprised at how the city of his youth has changed; he is overwhelmed by Boston’s “mixed humanity,” the Irish, Italian, and African American citizens whom he, like James, refers to as the “aliens” of the city (6). He is disturbed by these “adoptive citizens” who surround him, people who are, in his words, “hardly American.” For instance, he describes the Irish Bostonians as “old-world peasants” who are “thin and crooked with pale, pasty complexions” and other “physically delicate” features (4). As in The American Scene, Howells’s narrator questions American citizenry by asking what it means to be American in a country of immigrants.1 Olney is said to look at these people “scientifically,” as if he is forming a medical opinion of them; his diagnosis is that these Irish “aliens” lack the handsome features of the “elder American race,” for their physical constitutions are “coarse,” “weak,” “awkward” and “undeveloped” (4). The medical eye with which Olney examines the Irish community then turns to survey the American immigration policy that welcomes these “aliens”; after some contemplation, he concludes that the “transition from the Old World to the New, as represented in them [the Irish], was painful” (4). The pain of this transition is literal: the text suggests that an illness has infected the “physically delicate” Irish immigrants. But such comments also suggest that the Irish integration into the American body politic was also a painful development for the nation. The naturalization of these “aliens” is, the text implies, an unnatural phenomenon, for it causes a pain that, from Olney’s perspective, could infect the health of the national body. The narrative’s focus on Boston’s Irish community is significant for introducing a novel about racial passing and the anxiety generated by the breakdown of ethnic and racial categories. Indeed, in 1890s America the whiteness of the Irish was questioned and their appearance was often compared with the so-called simian features of African Americans. At this time, theories about the “Irish race” abounded: some ethnologists argued that it originated in Africa, while others claimed that the Irish were neither

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black nor white yet both (Roediger 133–35). Still other American racial theorists maintained the whiteness of Irishmen (the term “Irishman/ men” as used herein applies to Irish people of both sexes), arguing that they must be categorized as white in relation to the Native American and African American population of the United States (Dyer 53). In Duty, Dr. Olney expresses similar questions about Irish identification: There is something very puzzling to us Teutons in the Celtic temperament. We don’t know where to have an Irishman. We can predicate of a brother Teuton that this will please him, and that will vex him, but we can’t of an Irishman. . . . They can’t understand the simplest thing from us. . . . They seem more foreign to our intelligence, our way of thinking than the Jews— or the negroes even. (18 –19)

Here, Howells’s narrative articulates the racial confusion of Irish identity alongside issues of class and social status: Where does the Irishman belong in the social network of American society? Olney is unable to formulate a response to this question because, from his perspective, the Irish are beyond understanding; there is a tremendous gap in communication and intelligence that separates the “Teutonic” from the “Celtic.” This makes the Irish community not only “puzzling” and “foreign,” but also illegible, for Olney is unable to read the Irishman’s position in American racial hierarchies (they “seem more foreign . . . than the Jews— or the negroes even”). But Olney’s thoughts here pose more than mere social questions; they also have scientific ramifications. That is, they echo the theories put forward by the racial scientist Nathaniel S. Schaler, who, in the 1890s, argued that American immigration policies should privilege the “Teutonic branch of the Aryan race” because its genetic constitution was better acclimatized to the North American environment (738).2 Irishmen, he stated, lay outside this “Teutonic branch” and therefore the Celt’s physical constitution was not given to “industrious” hard work; because of this, he argued, Irishmen were too “lazy, immoral, and shiftless” to warrant access to American citizenship (739). The narrator’s description of the Irish community in Duty further illustrates the instability of whiteness as a racial indicator: his descriptions inquire as to who is included in and excluded from the privileged category of whiteness. Such queries reveal differentiations within the very classification of whiteness, even among those whose racial identity is not in question. The

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Irish, that is, may very well have fair skin, but this does not necessarily give them access to white privilege. In fact, Howells’s narrative seems to recognize that it is this unstable and unbounded category of whiteness that provides its strength, for such fluidity enables whiteness to be presented as an apparently attainable, flexible, and varied category, while setting up an always movable criterion of inclusion. On the other hand, though, we must remember that the flexible nature of whiteness, particularly in 1890s America, was also a source of anxiety. For during a historical period of increased immigration, the shifting category of whiteness forced people to question what American citizenship really meant. American identity, then, was anxiously placed under a microscope to determine who fit the mold of “Americanness” and who did not. This determination was, of course, intimately linked to determining who was white. But because the borders of whiteness were unbounded, the question of American citizenry was difficult to define, thus creating an anxiety about what it meant to be American (Dyer 56–58). By introducing Duty with this discussion of the “Irish race,” Howells sets in motion questions about racial difference: How do we categorize the Irish in terms of race? Olney asks, and What color are they, black or white? Structurally, these questions foreshadow the larger racial question of the text: What is Rhoda’s race? She is a woman who has lived her life as a white American, unaware of her African American heritage until it was revealed to her by her aunt, Mrs. Meredith, who fears that Rhoda’s marriage to a white man will have tragic consequences if Rhoda gives birth to a darkskinned child. Once this exchange between aunt and niece has taken place, Rhoda is faced with a profound identity crisis by her transformation from “white” to “black,” and Olney, who has fallen in love with her, must confront the realization that he loves a woman of “negro descent” (31). Gothic Duties The focal point of the text—the revealing of Rhoda’s African American heritage—takes the form of the unveiling of the gothic secret. That is, the language surrounding this scene expresses the “horror” and “terror” of the moment (50). While Rhoda’s response to her aunt’s admission is partly that of “disgrace,” she also expresses a “sudden fierceness,” which Mrs. Meredith interprets as an “outbreak of her [Rhoda’s] ancestral savagery” (49). Once the truth has been uttered and Mrs. Meredith is released from her “haunting secret,” Rhoda is struck by silence, because she

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cannot “realize this evil” that has changed her life (50). The “pathetic fear” that consumes Rhoda in the wake of her knowledge leaves her “inarticulate,” and she remains “unable to speak” (51). In Lacanian terms, Rhoda’s terror results in a breakdown in identity whereby she cannot speak for herself: she is forced into a state of abjection in which she can identify neither with the object position associated with blackness, nor with the subject position that she associates with whiteness. But Rhoda’s silence reveals more than horror in the face of racial ambiguity; it also illustrates how race is grounded in language. That is, prior to the unveiling of her past, Rhoda lives as a white American, a woman of privilege and social standing; thus, it is only her aunt’s words that make Rhoda an African American woman. Race, in this context, is not produced by skin color; it is produced by language (Clymer 47). Because Rhoda’s body cannot be read as black, the simple utterance of the family secret holds the power of transformation. As Howells’s narrator tells us, “The girl felt through all that her aunt had made it so”—in Rhoda’s eyes, Mrs. Meredith has the power to make her black (88). Social forces such as language, then, determine matters of identity, creating a new life for Rhoda. Here, the text gestures toward the gothic pattern employed in Shelley’s Frankenstein: Mrs. Meredith creates a new life (not through scientific procedures, but through language), which is, from Rhoda’s perspective, horrific and terrifying. As a result, the narrative illustrates how blood and skin color are socially constructed as language. For instance, her aunt’s revealing words convert Rhoda’s skin into a “primordial hue,” for “her face showed quite black” as if her black heredity was only now “burnt into her” (51, 89). This linking of language and race also accounts for Rhoda’s silence. That is, when faced with a new racial identity, she is confronted with a new language—a new way of signifying and a new way of being read that she must acquire through her newfound position on the margins of American culture. Although it is through language that Rhoda is defined as black, the inscription of blackness on her body leaves behind painful markers of its presence. For example, following her conversation with Mrs. Meredith, Rhoda is left symbolically “bruised and bleeding” as if she has been “scathed by . . . the cruelest foe” (54). Judith Berzon reads Rhoda’s melodramatic comments here as part of Howells’s “excellent satire on the tragic mulatto character” (104). But the generic qualities of the melodrama and the satire are also accompanied by gothic qualities. That is, by locating Rhoda’s wounds in both a spiritual blow and a physical affront, Howells turns to the bloody

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imagery of the gothic narrative to portray Rhoda’s reaction. The physicality of this scene continues when Rhoda regains her speech and likens her aunt’s confession to that of a doctor revealing a threatening disease to his patient: “It’s as if—as if—you were to come to a perfectly well person, and tell them that they were going to die in half an hour” (52). This metaphoric affliction is followed by a passage in which Rhoda states that she feels “like a mutilated man who looks where his arm was, and cannot believe it gone” (56). Physical suffering, illness, mutilation, and degeneration are used to articulate Rhoda’s identity crisis, thus linking her damaged psychological state to corporeal torture. Here, Rhoda echoes the medical discourses connecting miscegenation with bodily decay and sees the truth of her racial mixture in terms of a corrupted body that “medicine cannot fix” (52). Rhoda’s new body image sends her toward a crisis of subjectivity. On the one hand, by denying her black heritage, she refuses “to accept the loss of her former self” (59). On the other hand, though, she has moments when she stops and says “I am black,” at which point she wants to “rid herself of this shame . . . by tear[ing] out the stain . . . and spill[ing] it with the last drop of her blood upon the ground” (59). This gothic image of selfmutilation and spilled blood is combined with the gothic trope of the split self in which Rhoda’s identity crisis forces her to conceive of herself as two distinct people: one white and one black. As a person who has unknowingly passed for white all her life, Rhoda now sees herself as “two selves,” one that existed prior to the conversation with Mrs. Meredith and one after the words were uttered. But this split between the former and latter self is not a clean break, for she remains in what the narrator calls a “double consciousness” that haunts her “like a ghost” (60). Contrary to other African Americans (such as Ellen Craft) who saw mixed blood as a passport to liberation, Rhoda considers her racial mixture to be a haunting presence, something that limits her social mobility and restricts her class privilege. Rhoda’s racial confusion, mixed with a recognition of her newly degraded social status, forces her onto Boston’s streets in search of an African American neighborhood. This section of the text is filled with gothic symbolism. Her search pushes her into the “darkness” of the streets—an image that reflects what she sees as her new “dark” skin and “dark” past—where she immediately becomes lost. Rhoda’s troubled passage through the dark Boston streets parallels her psychological confusion and her search for a path to lead her through her new life. Out in the “nightmare of these streets,” she is “whirled round and round” in the “turmoil of

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horror” until she finds herself immersed in “colored people” (59). The gothic import of this scene is furthered in her descriptions of African Americans in monstrous terms: she calls them “hideous creatures” who are “worse than apes” and “grotesque” in appearance (58). Rhoda’s racism here is fueled by her tortured psychological state, because her journey outward, toward the black district, is paralleled with her journey inward, toward a recognition of her own African American heritage. Gothic Realism? My placing Duty within a gothic tradition may come as a surprise to those who see Howells’s literary production as limited to the development of realism. But I would argue that Howells’s gothicism is not surprising when we consider that, during the 1880s and early 1890s, he began to express ideas less overtly social and more complexly psychological. Indeed, some critics have argued that, between 1880 and 1907, Howells’s fiction captured an American unheimlich, an exploration of haunting psychological disorders, nervousness, and emotional breakdowns (Lutz 166). In 1890, for instance, Howells published The Shadow of a Dream, a novel that represents Faulkner and his wife Hermia as suffering from haunting presences and neurasthenic conditions. Here, Howells moves into the realm of the consciousness and the psyche to study a character under the stress of invisible forces and the effects of dreams. His interest in the workings of the mind—particularly in the source of psychic fears and nervous collapse— can also be seen in fragments such as “Geoffrey Winter” and “The GhostMaker,” both of which capture the occult aspects of inner life.3 In addition, Martha Banta cites a passage in Howells’s 1883 notebook in which he urges himself to write “A Realistic Ghost Story” (xii). These texts point to Howells’s departure from a social realist aesthetic; during the 1890s, he was clearly interested in exploring the psychological modes of expression that we associate with writers such as Henry James. The publication of The Shadow of a Dream marked Howells’s move toward a more Jamesian style, for the text captures the dominion of natural laws and occult psychological forces without falling into romantic or sentimental forms of writing. As one reviewer put it, The Shadow of a Dream is a “success as a psychological study” because it captures the “multitudinous chimeras that haunt the half-sick mind” (qtd. in Banta xix). The haunting of the mind—a theme that can be traced back to Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798), Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart” and James’s Turn of the Screw—was

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for Howells an experimental topic and, as he put it, “not quite like me” (qtd. in Banta xx). But even though he saw the motive as “rather romantic,” Howells still completed Shadow, and its publication marked a movement away from his realist fiction. Indeed, Shadow is not a scientific expression of outward actions that takes the everyday and the external as the criteria for reality; rather, it expresses Howells’s increased interest in psychology and spirituality, which he wrote about in a letter to Aurelia Howells in 1898: “Outer life no longer interests me as it once did and I believe I can find a new audience for my studies of inner life” (qtd. in Banta xx). And Howells did continue to write about the “inner life”: the publication of Shadow was followed by two collections of short stories about the inner workings of the mind, Questionable Shapes (1903) and Between the Dark and the Daylight (1907). Howells’s turn to psychological themes is also seen in his portraits of Rhoda, Mrs. Meredith, and Dr. Olney. In fact, Duty, which was originally published in an edition alongside Shadow, delves into the depths of the mind in relation to what Howells’s narrator calls “the race which vexes our social question” (6). Race, then, becomes a way for Howells to explore the stresses and strains of consciousness, particularly the strain of an American undergoing the conversion from white to black. For instance, when Rhoda’s secret is revealed to her, the narrative lingers on her “hysterical laugh” and her “babble of words,” signs of her “mental chaos” (52, 53). Likewise, the narrator pays close attention to detail in describing the mental strain Mrs. Meredith experiences in the burden of both concealing and revealing the secret. “Crazy?” she asks herself, “the word gave her an instant of strange respite. Was she mad, and had she long dreamed this thing in the cloudy deliriums of a sick mind?” (51). And Dr. Olney, in contemplating his love for a woman of color, is described by the narrator as having something “lurking in a dark corner of his mind, intangible if not wholly invisible,” something that haunts his thoughts with “a turmoil of thinking and feeling,” and which carries his psyche in many directions (66, 68). These haunting psychological burdens imposed by the secret of racial difference are also presented in Howells’s autobiographical text, A Boy’s Town, in which he recalls a secret he has kept, one of the “ghosts of his youth” (129). Here, he reveals an early memory wherein he became part of a night mob set against an African American rumored to have struck a white boy (129). Howells, who was raised in an abolitionist and radical Whig family, was haunted by his participation in this mob, and his psychological portrait

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of Rhoda’s and Olney’s “race instinct” illustrates the author’s interest in how Americans often respond with their impulses and instincts when confronted with the matter of racial difference. Howells’s depiction in A Boy’s Town of his youthful abolitionist fervor and his participation in the white mob paints a complex psychological portrait of his ambivalent responses to blackness. The complexity of this ambivalence is present in Duty, and, given the current academic interest in depictions of racial ambiguity in American literature, it is surprising that the novel has not received more critical attention.4 Perhaps one reason for its neglect is that Duty— ever since its first printing—has provoked controversy among critics as to whether it rejects or reinscribes racial stereotypes. Robert E. Fleming, for instance, asserts that Howells’s Duty and Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894) were the only novels “to explore the possibilities beyond the tragic mulatto stereotype” prior to the publication of James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man in 1912 (84). Conversely, African American critic Anna Julia Cooper has criticized Howells’s presentation of African Americans as a “failure,” for “he [Howells] had no business to attempt a subject of which he knew so little” (203).5 But I argue that Howells does not caricature his black figures, but neither does he create fully realized black characters to replace the types. As a result, his text moves in both directions, fluctuating between a liberal position in the field of “racial science” (as expressed by Dr. Olney) and a conservative stance (which relies on stereotyping and reactionary racial fantasies) on the level of racial hierarchies. These competing and contradictory strains in Howells’s narrative move between a celebration of black culture and a patronizing, essentialist representation of African Americans. While his positive depictions of blackness can be traced back to his abolitionist roots, the narrative’s more reactionary representations of race in the narrative are more difficult to explain. It is possible that Howells was influenced by the 1880s conservative reaction to the persistence of blacks in Northern cities such as Boston, where the increase in African American migration to that city had significantly changed its demography. This population shift generated a conservatism that influenced white liberals to adopt a reactionary position on the so-called Negro problem (Williamson, Crucible 85). Although there is little evidence to suggest that Howells adopted an antiblack ideology at this time, his depictions of the “Irish infiltration” of the city show his anxiety about Boston’s changing population (12). Moreover, a reactionary attitude toward the “Negro

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problem” would account for Howells’s depiction of Dr. Olney’s movement from admiration of African American culture to repulsion when he is told of Rhoda’s lineage. “The negroes . . . have a refinement and delicacy,” Olney says at the beginning of the text; but, when the secret is revealed, he “recoiled from the words, in a turmoil of emotion for which there is no term but disgust. His disgust was profound and pervasive . . . [and] he found himself personally disliking the notion of her having negro blood in her veins; before he felt pity, now he felt repulsion” (12, 31). Eventually, though, Olney is able to overcome his initial repulsion, and the conclusion of the novel sees them happily married in Italy. In Europe they are able to pass as a white couple, and Rhoda’s race is “never mentioned” (100). Once again, race is presented as a symptom of language; if Rhoda’s race is never mentioned, she can live as a white woman. With this in mind, I suggest that Olney’s early aversion to Rhoda’s race is based not only on the realization that he loves a woman of African American descent, but is also generated by his observance that race is intimately tied to language, a newfound awareness that inspires his “race instinct” to rebel in “disgust.” That is, Olney’s first instinct is to feel a revulsion when faced with her ability to pass, a feeling that is furthered because Olney cannot read the blackness on her body. For instance, when he first meets Rhoda in Boston, he registers her “black hair with its lustrous crinkle” and her “tragic family mask,” but, although he is a physician, Olney cannot tell from looking at her body that she is black (23). Olney’s profound disgust when faced with Rhoda’s racial heritage, then, derives partly from the illegibility of her blackness, an illegibility that inspires his “race instinct” to “mercilessly reject her beauty, her innocence, her helplessness because of her race” (31). At a time when questions about what it means to be white (and American) are in the forefront of American political and scientific debates, Rhoda’s passing arouses in Olney “sensibilities which ought not to have survived his scientific training,” for “he perceived that there was an inherent outrage” in the “social position” Rhoda had been allowed to maintain (31). Howells and Racial Science Recent Howells criticism has highlighted his integrationist views on American race relations. William L. Andrews has shown the influence of Booker T. Washington’s “reconciliationist” theories on Howells’s position on racial difference (333): Howells believed that reconciliation of the black race with the white race could develop if African Americans could “learn

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at least provisional submission” (Howells, “Exemplary” 282). And Sarah B. Daugherty argues that Duty is “a comedy of reconciliation” between the blacks and whites (58). Moreover, I would add that the racial doctrines of John Fiske, which attempted to show that human development was generated through “peaceful intermarriage and natural selection,” provided Howells with a positive model for his novel of racial mixture (77). At times Howells even goes as far as putting Fiske’s words into Dr. Olney’s mouth. For example, early in the narrative, Olney reassures Mrs. Meredith that racial mixture is a form of genetic progression that will lead to “the permanent effacement of the inferior type” (27). Fiske’s theory that intermarriage provided a path toward reconciliation rather than racial and genetic degeneration inspired Howells to write against 1880s scientific theories— expressed by scientists like Joseph LeConte—that “the mixing of the two primary races produced an inferior breed which must eventually perish in the natural course of race struggle” (LeConte 100). By taking the position that genetic progression could be furthered through racial mixture, Howells was able to promote liberal racial science, while simultaneously avoiding the sentimental tradition of the “tragic mulatto” in which miscegenation produces calamity rather than unity (Berzon 109).6 Howells’s enthusiasm for Fiske’s early theories of evolution are expressed in his review of Fiske’s Destiny of Man Viewed in Light of His Origin (1884) and The Idea of God as Affected by Modern Knowledge (1885). In fact, Fiske’s evolutionary ideas appealed to Howells because they challenged polygenesis, leaving the door open for racial integration (Howells, “John” 732). Likewise, in Duty, Dr. Olney’s views on “the race problem” contradict the theories espoused by the polygenesists, choosing instead to adopt a theory of monogenesis. For instance, in response to Miss Aldgate’s comment that “there seems something unnatural in the very idea” of intermarriage, Olney (echoing Fiske) states that “sooner or later our race must absorb with the colored race; and I believe it will obliterate not only its color, but its qualities. The tame man, the civilized man, is stronger than the wild man” (27). For Olney, then, racial mixture is a positive step in “racial progression” and an inevitable part of evolution. Howells’s narrative continues down this path by contrasting Dr. Olney with the overtly racist Mrs. Bloomingdale, who exclaims that “negroes are an inferior race, and they [African Americans] could never associate with whites because they could never be intellectually equal to them” (43). Ol-

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ney challenges Bloomingdale by advancing an integrationist view of the “race question”: We [whites] might recognize them [African Americans] as fellow human beings in public, if we don’t in private; but we ignore, if we don’t repulse them at every point—from our business as well as our bosoms. Yes, it strikes one as very odd on getting home—very funny, very painful. You would think we might meet them on common ground before our common God—but we don’t. (20)

Here, Olney favors social integration; he thus subscribes to the Fiskean argument in favor of “man’s integration” based on the premise that “negroes can progress under the guidance of higher races . . . [for] they are somewhat more teachable than any brute animals” (53). It is clear that Fiske’s racial theories included a paternalist tone that resonated with the colonial ideology of the “white man’s burden.” Although in favor of integration, he saw blacks as “animal-like” and “infantile,” claiming that within the formula of “cosmic law” it was the Caucasian’s responsibility to “look after the African” (48). Indeed, throughout the 1880s paternalism was a dominant racial ideology that was linked to integration: white liberals of the period believed that African Americans needed to be taught how to integrate into civilization (Williamson 84). Dr. Olney also takes this position. Speaking of blacks, Olney states: “I don’t see why one shouldn’t associate with them. There are terms a good deal short of the affection we lavish on dogs and horses that I fancy they might be very glad of” (20). This patronizing conflation of African Americans with animals is followed by Olney’s theory that racial mixture will elevate the “inferior citizens” to the level of whites by erasing their animalistic “proclivities . . . toward evil” and teaching them “virtue” and “good tendencies” (27). For Olney, following Fiske, African Americans are a primitive, animalistic, and childlike race; they must be raised and taught to live in “civilization.” Fiske’s racial doctrines were clearly influenced by the discourses of imperialism put forth by Thomas Carlyle and others, suggesting that white skin provided access to the qualities of enterprise, organization, and civilization. Such ideologies are present in Fiske’s texts on Darwinism. An early advocate of Origin of Species (1859), Fiske attempted to link evolution to racial hierarchies by examining the brain sizes of various races. In his

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study of brain capacity, Fiske argued that “the difference in volume of the brain between the highest and lowest man is at least six times as great as the difference between the lowest man and the highest ape” (qtd. in Haller 133). These measurements provided a pseudoscientific basis for his imposition of racial hierarchies: the “Teutonic and Aryan races,” Fiske claimed, were at the “top of the evolutionary scale” due to their “larger brain masses,” whereas the “non-Aryan Hindu” and the “black African” were placed near the bottom of his scale (48 – 49). In Duty, Dr. Olney participates in a similar kind of comparative racial analysis in order to develop a hierarchical system based on racial difference. “The Irish are quicker-witted than we are,” he says, “they’re sympathetic and poetic far beyond us. But they set the high constructive faculties of the imagination to work, when they ought to use a little attention and common-sense” (19). Olney thus uses racial classification to undermine his initial praise of the Irish: their quick wit and creativity is undercut by their lack of common sense. Like Fiske’s brain measurements, Olney makes racial generalizations based on what he sees as mental capacities and intellectual abilities. Another example of this arises when he describes Boston’s African American community: “They all [had] barbaric taste in color. . . . Some of the young fellows were very effective dandies of the type we were beginning to call dude. . . . They had that air of being clothed through and through, as to the immortal spirit as well as the perishable body” (7). Here, Olney’s descriptions highlight the bodies of the men and women who surround him, and his diction—“barbaric,” “dandy,” “dude”—trivializes them as predominantly physical rather than intellectual beings. Their intellectual presence is not mentioned, as if their identities are defined only through their bodies and clothing. Although Olney argues in favor of racial integration, it is clear that he sees a large gulf separating the various racial and ethnic citizens of Boston. Such a gulf echoes the Fiskean doctrine of racial taxonomy, which became popular during the 1880s and 1890s due to questions about who could immigrate to the United States. In fact, Fiske’s theories got him elected president of the Immigration Restriction League in the 1890s, after he adopted the reactionary platform that “an enduring Anglo-Saxon birthright” must continue in America (Haller 133). InDuty, Olney believes that this birthright has been forsaken; on his return to Boston, he explains that “he ought, as an American, to live in America” but because of immigration he feels “hopelessly alien” in the city of his youth (8, 9). These conservative remarks exist alongside his liberal position on intermarriage, thus highlighting Olney’s

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conflicted and ambiguous views on racial difference. But perhaps his conservative and liberal attitudes are not as contradictory as they seem on the surface. That is, Olney’s position on racial integration is based on the assumption that the population would benefit by gradually becoming whiter and that the traits that he sees as native to blackness would eventually be bred out. While this might be a progressive position on miscegenation, it implies that it is better to be white and that sexual reproduction is the key to achieving whiteness. Atavism and the Revenant Theories about the possibility of achieving whiteness through racial mixture are central to an exchange that takes place between Mrs. Meredith and Dr. Olney (26). Mrs. Meredith is concerned about the potential “persistence of ancestral traits” in Rhoda’s children and asks Olney if he “believes in heredity” (26). When pressed to define what she means by this, Mrs. Meredith confesses that she is interested in what she calls “atavism,” the “transmission of character and tendency; the reappearance of [racial] types after several generations” (26). Olney’s response is significant; he says, Take the reversion to the inferior race type in the child of parents of mixed blood—say a white with a mulatto or quadroon. . . . You hear of instances in which the parent of mixed race could not be known from a white person, and yet the child reverts to the negro type in color and feature. I should doubt it very much. . . . Because the chances are so enormously against it. The natural tendency is all the other way, to the permanent effacement of the inferior type. . . . The chances of atavism, or the reversion to the black great-great-great grandfather are so remote that they may be said hardly to exist at all. (26–27)

Here, Olney furthers his ambivalent racial doctrines. On the one hand, he does not dismiss miscegenation as immoral, but instead encourages race mixture as being important in the process of racial integration. On the other hand, though, the language of taxonomy and racial hierarchies—“reversion,” “permanent effacement,” and “inferior type”—highlights his belief in white superiority. In fact, according to his argument, it is the very superiority of whiteness that makes the return of black ancestral features virtually impossible. For him, genetic atavism is a fiction, something that is an “effective bit of drama” for writers such as George Washington Cable;

86 e x p l o r i n g i d e n t i t y but, he continues, this “reversion to the inferior race” holds no “scientific currency” (27). Mrs. Meredith, however, remains unconvinced by Olney’s argument. She wishes that Rhoda would marry an Italian; this would keep secret her niece’s genealogy. That is, Mrs. Meredith categorizes Italians as “dark” and thus any future “nonwhite” children from such a union would be explained by the child’s Italian blood (35). The thought of Rhoda marrying a white American and conceiving a child, though, forces Mrs. Meredith to reveal the “stain upon that poor child’s birth” (30). Using gothic discourses, she admits to Olney that there is a “sinister tendency” in Rhoda’s birth and an “ancestral infamy” that could manifest itself on the faces of Rhoda’s children (30). Here, Mrs. Meredith’s ideas about genetic atavism are very different from Dr. Olney’s: in speaking of the return of blackness, she invokes the gothic trope of the revenant, a “sinister” (almost ghostly) presence that will return to life through the uncanny persistence of Rhoda’s “ancestral infamy.” “It is the race instinct!” she tells Olney, “It must assert itself sooner or later” (39). This return of the repressed, or the emergence of that which has been previously rejected by consciousness, fits the basic framework of many gothic texts. In fact, Valdine Clemens defines the term as “a fundamental dynamism of Gothic narratives” (3– 4). In Duty, then, Rhoda’s racial heritage takes on the gothic quality of that which has been submerged or held at bay because it threatens the established order of things. As in other gothic texts, this repression develops a cumulative energy in the narrative that demands its release and forces itself to the realm of visibility through the threat of atavism. Furthermore, this gothic trope is present in Mrs. Meredith’s descriptions of Rhoda: she sees her niece as repressing her “ancestral infamy” but says to Olney, “It might come out in a hundred ways. I can hear it in her voice at times—it’s a black voice! I can see it in her looks! I can feel it in her character—so easy, so irresponsible, so fond of what is soft and pleasant! . . . It’s her race calling her!” (37, Howells’s italics). Such essentialism posits Rhoda’s “blackness” as something that is under the surface of her skin, something that is sometimes pushed to the surface, threatening to release itself. Mrs. Meredith’s description of Rhoda thus captures the approach and appearance of the return of the repressed; she speaks of Rhoda’s “blackness” as creating an aura of menace and uncanniness in the Freudian sense of the unheimlich, something that becomes apparent even though Mrs. Meredith feels it ought to remain hidden.

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During the 1890s, gothic discourse was present in other discussions of genetic atavism and the return of ancestral traits. In 1890, for instance, the zoologist and paleontologist Edward Cope reacted against the supporters of miscegenation and theories of integration by warning against the socalled dangers of atavism. “Its evils,” he claimed, “[could] have innumerable ramifications throughout the body politic” (2400). The national body, he went on to say, was threatened by “the danger which flows from the presence of the negro . . . [and] the certainty of the contamination of the race” (2402). For Cope, the return of hidden racial traits was dangerous because such a return would make the biracial person unpredictable and thus “unfit for American citizenship” (2401). Although Cope’s position serves as a counterpoint to Howells’s (and Olney’s) theory of racial integration, we can see similar gothic discourses in both positions. Both are concerned with the possible reappearance of that which is below the surface. Moreover, Cope, anticipating Howells, raises the question of racial categories alongside questions of “Americanness.” People of mixed race, he claims, should not be allowed the privilege of American citizenship, because the threat of racial mixture could cause a deterioration in the moral, intellectual, and political fiber of the nation. While Howells’s text does not go this far, he does set in motion questions about “whiteness” and its relationship to American citizenship. As a result, a national brand of gothic discourse infects his narrative at a time when issues of racial difference through African American migration and immigration were at the forefront of the national consciousness. This perceived time of crisis due to the “negro problem” and Irish citizenship forces a reevaluation of national identity with an urgency that is expressed in gothic texts.

chapter six

The Haunted House behind the Cedars Charles W. Chesnutt and the “ White Negro”

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t a crucial moment in Charles W. Chesnutt’s House behind the Cedars (1900), George Tyron, who has revealed the secret of his lover Rena’s African American ancestry, counters his earlier repudiation of her by saying that he will simply “make her white” (208). Like Howells’s Mrs. Meredith, who transforms Rhoda from white to black, Tyron believes that his whiteness, which makes him part of the “race born to command,” gives him the power to alter Rena’s race (208). Tyron is, of course, claiming that they will move to a new town so that the light-skinned Rena can pass for white. But his assertion is more than this, for it contradicts his earlier commitment to white supremacy and racial essentialism through a recognition that race is based on, among other things, the social constructions of language, epistemology, secrecy, tradition, and custom. The rigidity of the color line, Tyron implies, is a product of the collective imagination; it is a fictive narrative of Southern life illustrated by the fact that Rena can cross the line without detection. Tyron’s progressive vision of race is, however, short-lived. Upon arriving in Patesville and secretly witnessing Rena dancing with the biracial character, Jefferson Wain, Tyron believes that he has “seen her with her mask thrown off, a true daughter of her race” (223). He is convinced that her veneer of whiteness has been removed and that the “underlying negro” has revealed itself to him for the first time. Rena, from Tyron’s perspective, lacks authenticity; she has been imitating whiteness by copying the manners and gestures of white people. Although it had been his intention to contribute to her identity performance by “making her white,” Tyron discards this idea when he is stricken with a fear of the return of the repressed. “The dark ancestral strain,” he says, “would have been sure to come out in some form, sooner or later, if not in the wife, then in her children” (224). With this he returns to his position of white supremacy, claiming that race is a fixed category that can be covered by a mask, but which cannot obliterate the so-called inferiority of African blood. We leave

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Tyron certain that Rena’s African lineage will always remain a dark stain of difference, a haunting specter of an ancestry that will eventually come to light, thus casting the gothic image of the revenant over his love for her. Chesnutt presents this scene with dramatic irony. The reader is aware that Tyron’s evidence for Rena’s inferiority is questionable: he misreads her dance with Wain, just as he had misread her racial ancestry earlier in the text. Chesnutt’s audience, then, comes to recognize the process of misreading as a trope for conveying the dilemma of Rena’s racial ambiguity and, more generally, the problems faced by the “white Negro.” That is, Tyron’s misreading of Rena’s skin and actions is presented as a metonymy for misunderstood American citizens of mixed blood. Chesnutt explains this in an 1890 letter to George Washington Cable in which he states that “white Negroes” must accept their unique positions in U.S. culture, even though that position has been misunderstood by both blacks and whites. This letter then refers to Tourgée’s “cultivated white Negroes [who] are always bewailing their fate and cursing the drop [of ] black blood which ‘taints’—I hate the word, it implies corruption—their otherwise pure race” (qtd. in Hackenberry xxiii). By calling attention to the problems faced by Tourgée’s “white Negroes,” Chesnutt articulates the doubleness of the vexing liminal position held by the biracial character, a doubleness that, for Chesnutt, is not fully explored in Tourgée’s work. As a result, we can read Rena as a response to Tourgées’s characters, for she eventually accepts her black family and questions what it means to be a black woman while appearing to be white. This chapter, then, examines the doubleness of Chesnutt’s biracial characters, many of whom challenge the U.S. racial binary by posing questions about what it means to be identified as white or black at a time when segregation and “one drop” laws were being supported by legal, sociological, and scientific discourses. Chesnutt’s Gothic Imagination Like many of Chesnutt’s other characters, Rena possesses a doubleness that embodies the gothic discourse of the mysterious family bloodline to convey and undermine the social prohibitions, fears, and anxieties of miscegenation that underpin American life. The sociological import of Chesnutt’s gothic work has been explored by Robert Hemenway, who argues that Charles Chesnutt’s Conjure Woman (1899) is at once “sociological,” through its reflections on racial difference and society, and gothic, through the images of magic, ghosts, and the occult.1 “In content,” Hemen-

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way says, “Chesnutt’s collection of stories is gothic in the extreme. . . . yet the book is not a part of the Gothic tradition, primarily because Chesnutt found the Gothic sociology inadequate to his purpose” (101). Indeed, gothic elements combine with sociological observations in all of Chesnutt’s conjure tales, but such a merger does not, as Hemenway suggests, displace Chesnutt’s work from the gothic canon. For, as I have argued, if we read the gothic outside a restricted supernatural and fantastic textual mode, it is possible to situate gothic production within sociological, political, and materialist discourses. Ultimately, Hemenway’s argument binarizes sociological “purpose” and “fantastic gothic import,” labeling them distinct categories. In support of his claim, he reinforces the binary logic of his argument by separating blackness from whiteness: “Chesnutt uses many of the elements of the Gothic psychology,” Hemenway suggests, “without ever suggesting a demonology of blackness. The Gothic effect depends upon the revelation of irrationality as an explanation for human behavior and supernatural occurrence as a commonplace” (117). But I maintain that Chesnutt’s resistance to the demonization of blackness (or darkness) does not effect an erasure of his gothic position; it simply inverts the gothic trope of blackness to identify the positive effects of darkness set against the demonic effects of the whiteness associated with the perpetuation of slavery. Such an inversion simply calls attention to the fragility of the gothic’s true colors by situating whiteness—as we have seen with Poe’s Tsalalians—as the inspiration of fear and a more appropriate shade of the gothic.2 The instability of gothic coloring is part of Chesnutt’s more general interest in identificatory fluidity and transformation, themes he explores throughout his conjure tales. Take, for example, “Mars Jeems Nightmare,” a story about the power of metamorphosis in which the white master is turned into a black slave. In the nightmare, Jeems becomes the slave “Sambo,” who speaks in African American dialect and embodies dominant white images of racial difference. Here, racial hierarchy is subverted through conjure, and the disenfranchised bodies of the repressed return to haunt the master, who is whipped and beaten in recompense for his own brutality. “Mars Jeems Nightmare” thus mirrors Chesnutt’s articulation of the “white negro” by using the gothic discourse of fluidly transformative identities to question the racial essentialism that marks blackness and whiteness as strictly autonomous. The gothic import, directed toward white supremacy, speaks of the horrors of slavery through the rejection of whiteness as an exemption from bondage. Although Jeems’s nightmare ends in a moderate reso-

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lution, the psychological and cultural violence revealed in the dream makes conscious the haunting presence of antebellum history. Similar images of metamorphosis and retribution are present in “The Conjurer’s Revenge,” in which Primus is transformed into a mule as revenge for stealing a conjurer’s shoat. Here, Chesnutt is able to link the images of the mule and the slave as the workhorses of antebellum America, a linkage that has also played an important role in nineteenth-century racial science: Chesnutt, who was light-skinned enough to pass, would have been aware of the parallels that racist commentary often drew between mules and mulattos (the words have the same etymology) as being sterile and degenerate species. Indeed, when Josiah Nott called the mulatto a hybrid in 1843, he was drawing on Webster’s 1823 definition of hybrid as “a mongrel or mule; an animal or plant, produced from the mixture of two species” (qtd. in Young, Colonial 6). Although Webster’s definition of hybridity did not denote the mixing of different races, Nott appropriated the term and applied it to humans, thereby adapting it to suit his theory of polygenesis. And to justify slavery by relegating blacks and biracial people to an inferior species because they were not human, he claimed they should not be given the rights of citizenship. Old racial theories die hard, because when Chesnutt was composing The House behind the Cedars, Thomas Dixon was using Nott’s argument to label mulattos dangerous victims of biology. Dixon thus advocated the disenfranchising of biracial citizens, maintaining that their mixed blood made them animals that must be segregated from white society in order to guard against further amalgamation. In The Leopard’s Spots (1902), for instance, Dixon insists that without segregation, miscegenation would inevitably grow from the “animal status of black” blood, which is responsible for uncontrollable sexual impulses (147). Whites, he implies, are threatened and helpless in the face of the biological forces of nonwhite sexuality. All are victims of the genetic inferiority of black blood due to potential contamination by racial amalgamation in which so-called inferior genetic material would corrupt white purity. Ideologies of this kind are articulated in The Leopard’s Spots by Rev. Durham, who asks: “Shall the future American be Anglo-Saxon or Mulatto?” (159; Dixon’s emphasis). Rev. Durham then answers his own question by stating that racial equality would mean “suicide” to whites through the “destruction of the Anglo-Saxon race” (160). The gothic discourses of hybridized monsters, death, decay, and the destruction of pure bloodlines— discourses that were first applied to racial mixture by Samuel Morton and Josiah Nott fifty years before the publication of Dixon’s

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text—are repeated here in response to the imagined dangers of Reconstruction, black voting rights, and racial equality.3 Such views were supported by a number of racial scientists during the 1890s and 1900s. In 1902, for example, Joseph Alexander Tillinghast published an essay that argued for the “ West African’s debasement long before any slavery ever touched our shore” (148). Racial heredity, he claimed, established a “fundamental law of nature,” confirming an unchangeable legislation that marked the African as inferior (149). He further argued that African Americans could never fully assimilate into the United States, for they were too distinct from the so-called dominant race (136). And, for a writer such as Chesnutt, these scientific developments were particularly painful because they omitted him from national visions of post-Reconstruction unity, despite the official rhetoric of the nation, which asserted that African Americans should have full participation in American life (Gunning 48). Chesnutt challenged racist scientific theories in a series of newspaper articles that attempted to outline the future racial identity of the American citizen. In the first of these articles, “The Future American: What the Race is Likely to Become,” Chesnutt counters Tillinghast’s and Dixon’s theories by claiming that “the conception of a pure Aryan, Indo-European race has been abandoned in scientific circles, and the secret of the progress of Europe has been found in racial heterogeneity, rather than racial purity” (122). Working on the teleological premise that racial amalgamation is a step forward in the development of “civilization,” Chesnutt states that “people of mixed blood are very prolific and very long-lived. . . . [they are not] less virile, prolific, or able than those of purer strains” (123). He further claims that a “stream of dark blood” (126) already exists in the veins of many Southern whites, and that such a trend should be encouraged until “a complete race amalgamation occurs” (131). Here, Chesnutt plays upon the amalgamation hysteria at the heart of Dixon’s and Tillinghast’s writings. For them, intermixture inspired fear because it not only threatened to corrupt Southern racial purity, but it had the potential to destabilize the Southern caste system and shed doubt on the legacy of a great Southern “civilization.” Civil progress and racial integrity can only be maintained, they claimed, through the implementation of segregation laws and the “separate but equal” doctrines handed down in the Supreme Court’s 1896 landmark ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson. But Chesnutt, who had held up whiteness instead of blackness as the proper shade of the gothic, plays on Dixon’s and Tillinghast’s anxiety in his nonfiction by outlining a racial theory in which amalgamation is

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the solution to America’s race problems and the path to progress and “civilization.” Chesnutt furthers his argument, and counters Tillinghast’s racial “science,” by characterizing segregation as a form of degeneration, regression, and injustice that inspires his own fear.4 “An obstacle to race fusion,” Chesnutt states, “lies in the drastic and increasing proscriptive legislation by which the South attempts to keep the white and colored races apart . . . [and] the persistent effort to degrade the Negro to a distinctly and permanently inferior caste. . . . This distinctively American institution [leads to] the custom of lynching, with its attendant horrors” (133). Chesnutt’s challenge to racist ideologies through the appropriation of gothic discourse is best illustrated in “The Disfranchisement of the Negro,” which was first published in The Negro Problem, a collection of essays that he edited (1903). This article refers to “the specter” of “Negro-hating whites,” the haunting decisions of the Supreme Court, and the subsequent contamination of public opinion, all of which have “neglected the suffrage and rights” of black Americans (185). Such language calls attention to the prosopopoeia of racism and the racial injustice that lingers in the wake of slavery. The living specter of race hatred is, according to Chesnutt, unearthed by those whites who view the Negro as “one body . . . stumbling forward and upward” without the use of “a brain” or any intellectual capacity (184). Here, Chesnutt’s rhetoric of the black body is connected to the body of the republic, which was “conceived out of a bloody revolution,” but which is now “impotent to protect civil rights” (182). By calling attention to the “impotence” of the nation, Chesnutt appropriates the language of racial “scientific” theories that denigrated mulatto reproduction. According to the logic of Chesnutt’s argument, the health of the national body is not threatened by potential racial amalgamation, as Dixon and Tillinghast would have the public believe, but by racism and segregation, both of which have bred a “contempt for the law” that “has developed alarming symptoms” like that of a “disease” (184). Chesnutt can thus effectively turn the gothic discourses of racial “science” upside down, claiming that racism was the real suicidal tendency, a tendency that will eventually lead to the “death of the republic” (184). Ideas about social progress, contemporary racial hierarchies, and the discourses of genetic evolution are also explored in Chesnutt’s conjure tales. Eric Sundquist notes that white ethnologists of the 1890s stigmatized conjure and hoodoo as superstition and delusion, associating them with the potential for “reversion” and “degeneration” (To Wake 295). Chesnutt, how-

94 e x p l o r i n g i d e n t i t y ever, presents conjure as an alternative frame of thought and experience that circumvents the racist assumptions of social scientific theories about racial difference. For instance, the tale, “A Victim of Heredity; or Why the Darky Loves Chicken,” dismisses scientific rationality and logic, and blurs the lines separating the science of genetics and the magic of conjure. Here, Julius responds to the white narrator’s inquiry about “why . . . your people can’t let chickens alone” by recounting the story of “aun’ Peggy’s” conjuring (173). Julius begins by confirming the narrator’s essentialist assertion that stealing chickens must be “in their blood,” implying that the African American appetite for poultry is hereditary (174). But Julius then proceeds to speak with a forked tongue: on the one hand, he confirms contemporary theories of racial “science”; on the other hand, though, he says that Peggy’s conjuring “goophered” the blood of all the “cullu’d folks in No’f Ca’lina” in order to give them a taste for chicken (181). He thus challenges the narrator’s racial “scientific” opinion: the desire for chicken is not a sign that African Americans are victims of heredity, but are instead the victims of Peggy’s “conjuration” (182). While it cannot be denied that the appetite is passed on from one generation to another, its genesis is not a result of natural selection, evolution, or degeneration; it derives from a magical “mixtry” (177). The science of genetics and the anti-science of conjure (with its resistance to rationality and Enlightenment principles) are thus merged to undermine the cultural currency of the hereditary theories that informed racial “science” and sanctioned Jim Crow laws. Through Julius’s tale, then, Chesnutt plays on powerful cultural stereotypes and questions hierarchical notions of racial difference based on pseudoscientific theories. Furthermore, the story’s structure, in which Julius simultaneously confirms and contradicts the narrator’s genetic theory, is mirrored in the tale’s title. That is, the title’s first clause introduces the text through the rhetoric of racial “science,” whereby the inferiority of black blood makes African Americans victims of an ancestry from which they cannot escape. And it is here that scientific language combines with the gothic discourse of victimization to echo the contemporary fears of racial mixture that produced the “true” victims of heredity. Certainly the disenfranchising of “Mars Tom’s” inheritance and the hints about his familial ties—as well as the fact that his name and class position intertextually resonate with the “Mars Toms” of Chesnutt’s Marrow of Tradition (1901) and Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson—suggest that Tom is the text’s “victim” of heredity through his mixed racial heritage and lost inheritance. But the clause that follows the coordinating

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conjunction moves in another direction: the word “darkey” and the oblique stereotype that follows it shies away from the scientific language of the first clause in that it relies on the subjective elements of racial prejudice rather than the “objective” logic of science. By linking the two clauses, Chesnutt suggests that the discourses of nineteenth-century racial “science” and the ideological import of stereotyping do not necessarily lie in opposition. Rather, from Chesnutt’s perspective, they inform one another, and, as such, are both seen as politically loaded. The Horror of Tradition The claims of late nineteenth-century racial “science”— claims that Chesnutt tried to counter throughout his writing career—were used to rationalize segregation and the disenfranchisement of African Americans. The African’s hereditary alienation from “civilization,” it was argued, made him unfit to vote, and he was thus rendered powerless as a social, political, or economic force in the United States. Chesnutt’s Marrow of Tradition (1901) captures this disenfranchisement, as well as the white supremacist fears that motivate it. Through a fictional account of the Wilmington, North Carolina, race riots of 1898, Chesnutt locates the impetus for the violence in the November elections, in which the white community fears that African American voters will elect black politicians. Depriving black voters of their citizenship by taking away their right to vote, the white rioters are presented as gothic tyrants—“white devils” who are controlled by the “forces of evil” (300, 304). But even in this overtly political text, Chesnutt occasionally turns to the effects of conjure and the gothicism of magic as a way of depicting the asymmetrical divisions of power across racial lines. For instance, in the opening chapter Mammy Jane, the voice and practitioner of conjure, plants a small vial of wash water mixed with several other “mysterious ingredients” in Major Carteret’s backyard (10, 11). These steps are taken after she finds a small mole under the left ear of young Dodie, the child and heir to the Carteret name. Jane, who has been a slave and servant to the Carterets for generations, interprets Dodie’s mole as an indication of bad luck, a sign that he “will die by judicial strangulation” (10). Jane’s response to the text on the child’s body casts the spell of an African American tradition over Dodie’s life. In fact, Dodie’s mark of “bad luck” symbolically conveys the recent tradition of African American empowerment that has left his once-wealthy slaveholding family hopelessly impoverished. Through descriptions recall-

96 e x p l o r i n g i d e n t i t y ing the decaying colonial Southern mansions of George Washington Cable (and anticipating those of William Faulkner), Chesnutt tells us that Dodie’s ancestral home has been “swallowed up in the common ruin” of Southern aristocracy; Dodie is the last in his ancestral line and the only child of Major and Olivia Carteret, who are forced to live off the money inherited by Olivia (2). Dodie’s mark, then, can be read as a branding of past injustice and the resulting familial decline, because, as the future patriarch, he is heir to the horrors of Southern history in which the sins of the father return to haunt the son. “He [Dr. Miller] realized,” says the narrator, “the continuity of life, how inseparably the present is woven with the past, how certainly the future will be the outcome of the present” (112). Dodie thus symbolizes a perilous racial situation in which he is not only born into “bad luck,” but into a family that will pass on the burden of infamy. Chesnutt furthers the symbolic logic of Dodie’s birth through Jane’s prediction of his death by judicial strangulation. Dodie, who almost suffocates from a piece of ivory—a trope of whiteness—from his rattle, will not only acquire the Carteret legacy, but he will also inherit the Reconstruction and segregationist practices of lynching. Indeed, Jane’s interpretation of Dodie’s mole as a “hangman’s knot” that “foreshadowed dire misfortune” anticipates the attempted lynching of Sandy, who is condemned and sentenced by the court of public opinion to a violent death for a crime he did not commit (46). Lynching, then, lies at the heart of Chesnutt’s novel as a form of white revenge for the economic decay of the South in the wake of abolition and an imagined threat of black sexuality. Seen from this perspective, the accusations of rape that engender the threat of Sandy’s lynching should be read as a synecdoche for the more general Southern fears of black empowerment expressed by white supremacists such as Major Carteret; the consuming white fear of black rape, that is, stands in for the 1890s anxiety concerning integration, intermixture, and the loss of white political power. The tropological power of lynching is expressed by the “frank and somewhat bold discussion of lynching and its causes” in the African American Banner’s denial “that most lynchings were for the offense most generally charged as their justification” (85). Indeed, the text illustrates the displacement arising from the language of lynching and rape whereby the guilt of the subject is never determined—nor does it matter—for the violent act becomes a white backlash against the emasculating effects of the Confederate defeat, financial decline, and the imagined usurping of white patriarchal power. Major Carteret, for instance, contemplates his emasculation when he re-

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members his financial losses during the Civil War, losses which have forced him to live off the estate and family fortune of his wife, Olivia Merkell, while the African American Dr. Miller and his family live in “his ancestral home” (2). And the fragility of Major Carteret’s masculinity is passed on to Dodie, his only male heir, who is depicted as weak and sickly, a child who may not survive to maturity. It is in this context that Carteret organizes what he calls the “ Wellington revolution” by falsely accusing Sandy of raping and murdering Mrs. Ochiltree. As a result, the charge of interracial rape is deployed to stigmatize Sandy and, by extension, a race that was perceived to threaten dominant Southern conceptions not only of violence and sexuality, but of class, power, and white supremacy. Interracial rape, as Chesnutt points out, is not a politically neutral term: it signifies social disorder of a frightening magnitude and thus occupies one end of the spectrum of practices associated with racial violence. Sandy’s alleged crime is therefore intimately tied to social relations and political discourses; it is a politically freighted accusation in its threatened upheaval of the social order. The charge is then used by the “big three” to justify white racial violence through the claim that Sandy (like all African Americans, they imply) is a monstrous and animal-like threat to white womanhood. Here, Chesnutt illustrates how rape is linked to the ideological and, at times contradictory and ambiguous, forces of social and political power because the legal contradictions and limitations surrounding the discourses of rape are articulated by Captain McBane, who claims that the white mob must “Burn the nigger. . . . We seem to have the right nigger, but whether we have or not, burn a nigger. It is an assault upon the white race, in the person of old Mrs. Ochiltree, committed by the black race, in the person of some nigger. It would justify the white people in burning any nigger” (182; my emphasis). Sandy’s guilt is irrelevant. McBane does not care if Sandy is responsible for Ochiltree’s murder; he simply wants black blood to flow. Such comments show how the accusation of rape fails to signify comprehensively when compared with alternative meanings for racial and sexual violence. That is, Southern configurations of black rape are sufficiently fluid to define the unacceptable; hence, in this context, the language of rape functions as a demarcation between blackness and whiteness, center and margin, rather than the specificity of forceable intercourse. But for Chesnutt and the African American community, the language of Southern rape translates directly into gothic discourse. “The American

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habit of lynching,” says the narrator of Marrow, “had so whetted the thirst for black blood that a negro suspected of crime had to face at least the possibility of a short shrift and a long rope, not to mention more gruesome horrors, without the intervention of judge or jury” (179). Here, the narrator, who often articulates Chesnutt’s thoughts, presents the gothic fears of unspeakable punishments: the “gruesome horrors” of whipping, burning, castration, and other acts of torture are hinted at but left unsaid. This gap in the narrative not only adds to the gothic horror of the text by forcing the reader to imagine that which remains silent; it also exposes the rhetorical effects of an accusation and the subsequent punishment in the context of the Southern rape complex. The accusation, then, must be read as a linguistic force, a potentially fictive construct, that is strategically positioned alongside white supremacy. But this gothic vision of lynching is also tied to the horrific history of interracial rape under slavery in that the violence inflicted on African Americans during Reconstruction in response to white anxieties concerning black sexuality reverses the anxious position held by those slaves who feared sexual abuse by their antebellum masters. Such a history is inscribed on Dr. Miller’s body by way of his light skin. As a result, he can be read as a living specter of past injustices; his body testifies to the historical realities of master-servant rape, while the narrative also exposes the fictive and politically charged aspects of synecdochic Southern rape and the threats of the return of the repressed. Seeing Double The narrative doubling of Dodie’s predicted hanging and Sandy’s lynching is one in a series of doublings that arise throughout Chesnutt’s novel. In the opening chapter, for instance, Olivia is sent into a “nervous shock” after seeing her African American half sister, Janet, who looks as if she were Olivia’s twin. In fact, the two sisters, one white and the other black, look so much alike that Olivia is struck by the uncanny resemblance and she is sent into “hysterics” as if she had seen a ghost (9). Mammy Jane is hard-pressed to explain the cause of Olivia’s hysterical condition; she ends up telling Dr. Price that it is the result of the familial resemblance of her sister and the realization that “folks sometimes takes ’em fer one ernudder” (8). As a result, Olivia’s breakdown is brought on not only by the witnessing of her double; it is also a product of her sudden awareness that the color line is not a rigidly policed border. That is, her hysteria derives from the breakdown of the boundaries between self and other

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when she is forced to face the fragile distinctions between blackness and whiteness: if the townspeople take Janet for white and mistake her for Olivia, then it follows that Olivia may be mistaken for Janet and taken to be an African American woman. Olivia’s revelation destabilizes her sense of self and the tenets of white supremacy, just as it casts a shadow of doubt over the imagined purity of the Merkell family bloodline. This doubling foreshadows Polly Ochiltree’s unmasking of Olivia’s gothic family secret when she reveals that Mr. Merkell had indeed married Janet’s African American mother, Julia, thus legally legitimizing Janet’s identity as Olivia’s sister. But it also mirrors Tom’s doubling of Sandy. Here, once again, the boundaries separating self and other, black and white, slave and aristocrat begin to erode. Sandy is said to have formed noble manners “upon those of old Mr. Delamere,” for which he performs “not a bad imitation” of the aristocrat (130). And Tom, “a most brilliant performer,” passes for Sandy and acts out a “genuine negro cakewalk” (117). Sandy’s imitation and Tom’s genuine performance raise questions about authenticity and counterfeiting, casting doubt over what it means to be a “real” white aristocrat or a “genuine” African American servant. Chesnutt, then, builds on the tension between an imagined authentic racial identity and the burlesque-like conventions associated with Sandy’s and Tom’s masquerades. That is, Sandy’s authenticity as a trusted black servant relies on his mimicking of genteel white standards, which he does through exaggerated dress and overdetermined politeness. It follows that acting white and the artifice of his gestures make Sandy a “true” black man. The irony that Chesnutt employs here is doubled in the presentation of Tom’s “unexcelled . . . cakewalk or ‘coon’ impersonation,” for which he successfully adopts Sandy’s “face, his clothes, his walk”—in short, his identity—so that the community believes Sandy to be the “true” performer of the blackface routine. Chesnutt’s exploration of the complexities of identity are furthered when we consider that the “somewhat overdone grotesque contortions” and the “suggestion of unreality” within Tom’s performance contribute to the authenticity of his act. In other words, the exaggeration, caricature, and stereotyping— central to the tradition and success of the minstrel performance—mean that the “real” must denote “imitation” just as “artifice” denotes “authenticity”; both performances test the unstable ground between race and identity. If, as we have seen, the caricatured image can exaggerate racial and ethnic difference in order to shore up the fire walls of American identity, then

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Chesnutt uses the same images to destabilize the very categories they are meant to reinforce. That is, he presents the fluid conception of self as a byproduct of minstrelsy, racial mimicry, and the exaggerated conventions of racial performance to expose the absurdities of a stable racial identity. In the performances’ oscillation between currency and counterfeit, the narrative sets in motion an uncertain relationship between the “genuine” subject and its “extravagant” embodiment. Authenticity and imitation thus become two sides of the same coin, generating a profound confusion about who is imitating whom: Sandy’s mimicry of whiteness and Tom’s black performance engenders the confusing charade of a white man imitating a black man imitating a white man. The threat posed by passing (the most extreme interaction between authenticity and imitation) is poked fun at when Sandy, from a distance, sees Tom’s impersonation of him (167). Anxious at the sight of his own double, Sandy invokes gothic discourse: “Ef dat’s me gwine ’long in front . . . den who is dis behin’ here? Dere ain’ but one er me, an’ my ha’nt would n’ leave my body ’tel I wuz dead. Ef dat’s me in front, den I mus’ be my own ha’nt; an whichever one of us is de ha’nt, de yuther must be dead an’ don’ know it” (167). Like James’s “Jolly Corner,” in which Spencer pursues his ghostly alter ego, Sandy is haunted by himself, a haunting presence that strikes at the heart of his notion of self, because the experience forces him to recognize the effacing effects of the potential breakdowns in unified subjectivity: if he can see himself, then he must be dead. The contemplation of an unstable self and its articulation through gothicized language are furthered when Sandy says that “a witch come here eve’y night” to cause “some kin’er dev’lishness . . . dat don’ show on de su’face” (161). Conjure and “dev’lish” spells, then, are related to questions of surface and depth, imitation and authenticity: Sandy can read only the signs on the surface of Tom’s body; he is unable to penetrate into the depths of the performance to reveal the cause of this doubling. As a result, from Sandy’s perspective, his double must derive from some “incomprehensible” magic and the “supernatural” realm (167). Such restricted vision limits the degree to which Tom can be recognized as “merely the shadow without the substance, the empty husk of the grain” (96). And it is here that the narrator suggests that Tom’s ability to play with the surface effects of identity makes his impersonation of Sandy so successful that Tom’s “servant had now become his master, and held him in an iron grip” (165).

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Ha’nted Houses It is in the figure of the double that Chesnutt sets in motion questions about blackness and whiteness, the legal fictions of identity, and racial purity. But it is through Rena, the passing figure of The House behind the Cedars, that Chesnutt fully explores the doubleness of American racial life. As a “white Negro,” Rena embodies the racial crises of a gothic American history; not only is her family torn apart by slavery and racism, but her body symbolizes the transgressed prohibitions and taboos of the social order. For a white supremacist like George Tyron, Rena’s body is both attractive and monstrous: it is imagined to offer the exoticism and eroticism disseminated in racist discourses of black sexuality, but it is also gothicized as a threat to the hegemonic forces that seek to stabilize racial difference. Within the white postbellum imagination, then, racial inconsistencies reflect the general Southern decay and “perceptible decline” that Chesnutt captures on the opening pages of his novel. In fact, the text’s introduction reminds us of George Washington Cable’s gothic depictions of a crumbling Southern society: “Here and there,” the narrator says of Warwick’s return to Patesville, “blackened and dismantled walls marked the place where handsome buildings once stood, for Sherman’s last march to the sea had left its mark upon the town” (Chesnutt, House 2). It is hard to ignore the symbolism of this passage, in which the “blackened,” charred remains of war have physically altered the landscape at a time when the recent freedom of blacks make them a visible presence in the town. The symbolic currency of this sentence is furthered by the following sentence, in which Warwick, who returns to the town passing as a white man, registers a change in the town’s demographics: “Some of the names on the signs were familiar; others, including a number of Jewish names, were quite unknown to him” (3). Clearly the ethnicity of the town’s population has changed. And the narrator’s merger of Warwick’s feelings of estrangement with the signs of Southern decay gesture toward the shifting ethnic and racial landscape of Wellington (in The Marrow of Tradition), in which the white structures of power are eroding and crumbling like the town’s buildings. In contrast, the house behind the cedars in which Warwick was born and raised is familiar to him (12). But this is not surprising, for its deformed “dwarf cedars,” its “gray, unpainted” walls, its “dark, . . . somber and depressing” features will never change; they will always remain monuments to past injustices and continue to testify to a “guilty or disgraceful secret”

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(11). In fact, the secretive and unspeakable history of slavery is hidden away in this house, a house that remains elusive because “no one can see [it] through the trees” (14). The gothic import of these passages is striking: the dark and melancholic peculiarities of the house are combined with a secret, perhaps shameful, history. By casting the shadow of the gothic secret over this haunted house, the narrative calls attention to the history of miscegenation, sexual exploitation, illegitimate children, adultery, and racism that lie beneath the surface of its exterior. Juxtaposed on the darkness that engulfs this structure is Warwick’s current residence, which is described as a “stately colonnade . . . painted white . . . in a charming setting of palmettos, magnolias, and flowering shrubs” (63). By crossing the color line, Warwick has entered a world of whiteness that is reflected in the very color of his house. But as we have seen in Iola Leroy, this movement does not always breed contentment: Warwick suffers the strain of loneliness and alienation brought on by passing. “His secret,” says the narrator, “[generated] a certain sense of loneliness. . . . for [since crossing the color line] he had always been, in a figurative sense, a naturalized foreigner in the world of wide opportunity” (66). In fact, he will always be a foreigner in this community, for his familial identity has been stripped away— even his mother says that seeing him again is “like [seeing] the dead comin’ to life” (17). As a result, the whiteness that he embraces does not always satisfy his desires; there is always a sense of loss and melancholy, a mourning for his old life and the nostalgia for belonging. Rena’s passing also reflects this sense of loss; but hers is accompanied by a feeling of terror that her secret will be revealed. “I am afraid,” she says of her relationship with Tyron, “I should be forever thinking of what he would do if he should find it out; or, if I should die without his having learned it, I should not rest easy in my grave” (78). The image of death that gothicizes passing in her thoughts do in fact recur throughout the novel: she often refers to her passing as her “skeleton in the closet,” her “prison-house,” and her “nightmare” (75, 90). Not surprisingly, Tyron also conceives of passing in gothic terms. The most striking instance occurs after he has revealed Rena’s secret, and he is haunted by nightmares of her ability to pass for white: He fell into an unquiet slumber, and dreamed again of Rena. He must learn to control his waking thoughts; his dreams could not be curbed. In that realm Rena’s image was for many a day to remain supreme. He

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dreamed of her sweet smile, her soft touch, her gentle voice. In all her fair young beauty she stood before him, and then by some hellish magic she was slowly transformed into a hideous black hag. With agonized eyes he watched her beautiful tresses become mere wisps of coarse wool, wrapped round with dingy cotton strings; he saw her clear eyes grow bloodshot, her ivory teeth turn to unwholesome fangs. With a shudder he awoke. (147)

Tyron’s attraction soon turns to repulsion as Rena’s “white” beauty—her soft and gentle features—falls away and he sees her as “hideous” and “black.” Just as Rena was able to transform her appearance to conform to white notions of beauty, Tyron’s dream effects a reversal of that transformation: the image of her black appearance, the “wooly” hair (which racial “scientists” often cited as proof of an African’s animalistic degeneracy), the blood that corrupts the whites of her eyes, and the loss of her ivory teeth (an overt trope of whiteness) all “blacken” Rena and contribute to what Tyron believes to be her “authentic” self. More interesting, though, are the “unwholesome” and vampiric fangs that heighten Rena’s “monstrous” and threatening otherness. Tyron’s subconscious placement of her in the vampiric tradition casts her sharp teeth as symbols of her savage and uncontrollable hunger for whiteness. Such images of consumption are infused with cannibalistic currency, for Tyron imagines that she wants to appropriate his vitality—his lifeblood—and absorb the strength of his white privilege. As a result, Tyron sees himself as the victimized tool of her passing, in which she appropriates his race, wealth, and class privilege, transmuting them into her own identity. The dream, then, reexpresses the general anxiety about identity, self-control, and the preservation of individuality. As the vamp, Rena threatens his sense of self and provokes an awareness of the “unnaturalness” of their relationship— that is, of an imagined sexual transgression and potential racial miscegenation, which imply the subversion or even reversal of the assumed-to-be natural power-relations of gender, sexuality, and race. The dream’s vampiric imagery thus brings treacherous sexuality, “bad blood,” and other subversions to bare on his relationship to Rena. Therefore, from Tyron’s perspective, vampires are not unlike passing figures: they both signify erotic deviations and sexual sadism; their lives are products of “corrupt” blood; and they both highlight the problem of confused, vulnerable, or secret identities, fear of exposure, evil masquerading as respectability, or respectability

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built upon hidden corruption. This latter point is particularly significant; like the vampire, Rena represents a threat, a cultural anxiety, that goes unnoticed: “There was no mark upon her brow,” says the narrator, “to brand her as less pure, less innocent, less desirable, less worthy to be loved” (76). It is here that the narrative challenges racial “scientific” theories—put forth by Tillinghast and others—that racial heredity marks the person of African descent as an inferior (149). Indeed, Chesnutt’s text exposes the projected fantasy of racial “scientific” doctrines that argue that an African American identity is visibly, metaphorically, or semiotically written on the flesh. Such an exposure highlights the process by which racial identity is put into writing through a rhetorical or tropological articulation that raises the question of writing as difference by constituting that African American body as text. As race becomes a subject of discourse, the African American as subject is conceived of as inhabiting a body on which her race is written. It is the fear and anxiety at the heart of racism that produces this need to construe an emblem of racial difference that will securely situate that difference within the register of the visible. This reference to a visual analogue of difference draws on racial “scientific” theories and cultural associations that join African American descent with primitivism, degeneracy, inferiority, and impurity. Chesnutt presents such associations when Tyron reads of the “special tendency of the negro blood, however diluted, to revert to the African type” (105– 06). Here, the language of contemporary racial “science” is invoked to argue that “any future amalgamation of the black and white races . . . [is] an ethnological impossibility” (106). The article, which Tyron reads as he waits in Dr. Green’s office, undertakes to expose the “hybrid” body as a social problem by uncovering the problem of seeing or recognizing a black body even within the “whitening” processes of amalgamation. A black heritage, the article suggests, can never be fully hidden from view; it will always be detected and visually revealed to the discerning observer. The discourse of the revered is clearly invoked, and the process draws attention to the physicality of the black body, in terms of which the notion of racial difference continues to be construed regardless of how “diluted” the African ancestry might be. The Body of the Law Such discourses and ideologies were used by nineteenth-century racial “scientists” who argued in favor of legislation outlawing racial mix-

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ture or intensifying the policing of existing miscegenation laws (Sundquist, To Wake 429). In 1895, for instance, the state convention of South Carolina witnessed a proposal that would once again outlaw interracial marriage, a proposal that reflected the general rise of segregation in the wake of federal rulings such as the Supreme Court judgment inPlessy v. Ferguson, which made the illegality of interracial marriage a national issue (F. James Davis 45). These laws, which were by-products of an anxiety about potential misreadings of “black” bodies, sought to warn “innocent” Southerners about the so-called cultural “degeneration” and the possible failure of “civilization” from racial mixture. Chesnutt, who was trained as a lawyer, passing the Ohio bar in 1887, would have been abreast of these legal developments; it is not surprising, then, that he uses legal discourse to explore the readability of identity in the context of racial passing. Such an exploration must have seemed appropriate to Chesnutt, because he realized that the duality of passing was reflected in the voice of the law, which expresses absolute authority, although it is simultaneously a voice of mystery and indeterminacy that begs for interpretation. Legal language, then, constitutes both an authoritative and an elusive discourse that calls attention to questions of duplicity and identificatory fluidity. With this in mind, it is possible to read Chesnutt’s oeuvre as a confirmation of David Punter’s argument that “the ‘site’ of the Gothic is obsessed with the law, with its operations, justifications, limits” (Gothic Pathologies 19). For instance, part of Warwick’s job is to decipher legal documents in order to determine if Tyron’s family holds lawful claim to estates that they held before the Civil War. In passages that anticipate the questions of lineage and rightful legacies in The Marrow of Tradition, Warwick’s job inquires into the processes of reading familial bonds and legitimacy in the context of legal inheritance. His examinations into the legal “notes” that Tyron holds “against the estate of Duncan McSwayne,” for example, resonate with the questions posed by racial passing: Are familial lines self-evident categories for determining identity? Who has the right to claim a family’s name and its property? How does one legally, epistemologically, or visually decipher another person’s ancestry? (101). Furthermore, as we have seen, “notes” played an important role in the antebellum etymology of the term “passing” in that the word arose out of the legal documents given to slaves as “passports” to enable them to move unchaperoned from state to state. Such notes were thought to determine the legal identity and ownership of the traveling slave, but because of the

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forging and counterfeiting of these documents, reading them and determining their authenticity was often a difficult task. As a result, legal ambiguities and the fictions of identity came to exist in a symbiotic relationship to each other: just as the legal notes needed to be read in order to determine identity, the racial body needed to be interpreted through a set of signs that could determine the legal status of the subject. It was assumed that the interpretation of one could determine the other. Tyron’s legal notes giving him claim to property held prior to abolition thus recalls a history in which Rena and Warwick could have been held as Tyron’s legitimate property. And it is in this context that Chesnutt ties racial passing to legal discourse: Warwick is said to be forging his identity, and when Tyron reveals Rena’s African lineage he “sees nothing but the fraud of which he had been made the victim” (117, 143; my emphasis). In addition, while he is working as a clerk in Judge Straight’s office, Warwick seeks out the legal perimeters of racial passing and African American identity, finding that under certain circumstances passing is not prohibited by law: The Judge took down a volume bound in legal calf and glanced through it. . . . “The term mulatto,” he read, “is not invariably applicable to every admixture of African blood with European, nor is one having all the features of a white to be ranked with the degraded class designated by the laws of this State as persons of color. . . . Juries would probably be justified in holding a person to be white in whom the admixture of African blood did not exceed one eighth. And even where color or feature are doubtful, it is a question for the jury to decide by reputation.” (172)

Warwick’s response to this legal paragraph speaks to the indeterminacy of lawful definitions of blackness: “Then I need not be black,” he says (172). Indeed, the legal categories of race are as blurred as Warwick’s racial identity, for, according to this legal volume, physical features and percentages of African blood may or may not determine racial classification. Instead of establishing fixity or stability, the body of the law reads race (like it reads everything else) with an ambiguity that is open to a variety of conflicting readings and interpretations. The final sentence of the statute is particularly obscure, suggesting that when a person’s body cannot be read to determine racial identity, then a jury must interpret bloodlines on the basis of reputation. Such an assumption suggests that a person’s actions and social ties— rather than his or her body— can constitute evidence for ascertaining

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racial classification. This further assumes that there are innate actions and lifestyles that accompany racial lineage; according to this logic, someone with African blood will have an inferior reputation, perhaps leaning toward degeneracy or even criminality. In the field of racial “science” the connections between the law, degeneracy, and racial ancestry were introduced by Cesare Lombroso, whose argument in support of l’uomo delinquente—the criminal man—was “probably the most influential doctrine ever to emerge from the anthropometric tradition” (Gould 152). Lombroso published his theory of innate criminality during the late 1880s and early 1890s, claiming that, by studying the skulls of various criminals, he had uncovered a series of atavistic features connecting delinquency to an apish past. By measuring the head, jaws, and cheekbones of felonious characters, Lombroso asserted that the nature of the criminal was determined by “ferocious instincts” and primitive biological traits that linked criminals to inferior animals (Lombroso 40). Criminals were thus savage and apelike creatures who were insensitive to pain and had the “desire not only to extinguish life in the victim, but to mutilate the corpse, tear its flesh and drink its blood” (qtd. in Gould 153). Here, the gothic discourses associated with savage monsters, cannibals, and vampires infect Lombroso’s social “scientific” claim that crime is hereditary and evolutionary; criminals are evolutionary throwbacks who threaten the safety of our “civilized” cities by haunting our streets.5 For Lombroso, these remnants of an ancestral past, these born criminals, could be physically identified; their bodies were texts that could be read in order to interpret the anatomical signs of their savage compulsions, appetites, and desires. He thus saw their atavism as both mental and physical, but the physical signs— what he called the “stigmata”—were clearly inscribed on their bodies (667). Chesnutt playfully incorporates Lombroso’s theories into his portrait of the text’s gothic villain, Jeff Wain. Wain’s attempted kidnapping and rape of Rena are anticipated by Rena’s secret admirer, Frank, who watches Wain and concludes that Wain’s “style and skill” are mere “affectation, his good nature mere hypocrisy” (217). Frank thus believes that “in this man’s shifty eye he could read the liar—his wealth and standing were probably as false as his seeming good-humour” (217). Like Tom’s criminal behavior in The Marrow of Tradition, Wain’s performative identity complicates the relationship between fact and fiction; he is even said to be a “hypocrite masquerading” as an “authentic” man (218). Wain is passing for a respectable man. But from Frank’s perspective, Wain’s body and gestures reveal his underlying

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criminality: his “shifty eyes,” his “false smile,” and his “hawk-like glance” are all signs by which Frank can decipher his “true” nature (217–18). Chesnutt, however, taints the readability of Wain’s criminality by revealing Frank’s analytic abilities to be motivated by his “jealous clairvoyance” (217). Indeed, Frank’s insights are generated more by his emotive subjectivity than by his rational objectivity or by “scientific” observation. Here, Chesnutt responds to the popular “scientific” and legal theories put forth by Lombroso and Nordau, suggesting that their ideas are based on personal beliefs that hold no scientific validity. Chesnutt’s investment in showing the absurdity of innate criminality derives from the racial theories central to Lombroso’s work. It followed from his identification of apish atavism in criminals that the natural inclinations of savages and lower animals were delinquent. As well as arguing that animals were innately criminal, an argument that Jay Gould correctly calls “the most ludicrous excursion into anthropomorphism ever published,” Lombroso ventured into ethnography to claim that criminality was normal behavior in “inferior people” (154). The Dinka of the Upper Nile and the American Indians, he wrote, displayed apish stigmata that reflected their high threshold for pain and a criminal desire to inflict pain on others (qtd. in Gould 154). He used this spurious evidence to argue that hereditary compulsions toward criminal activity were higher in those races that had not reached the heights of what he labeled “our brilliant European civilization” (476). The cultural implications of Lombroso’s racist theories posited an intimate connection between society’s legal system and what he saw as the law of nature. That is, he argued that the physical traits of various citizens should be tested in order to read the laws of nature and establish those who were biologically determined to commit legal transgressions. Lombroso’s “science” was thus framed within the gothic discourse of the transgression of “natural laws,” a discourse that had long been a source of gothic production: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) crosses the lines between life and death, between biological production and scientific rationality; H. G. Wells’s Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) complicates the boundaries between man and animal, crossing a border that engenders confusion, chaos, and disorder. Lombroso’s ideas spoke to American racial “scientists” and those who wished to outlaw miscegenation. As a result, racial mixture was placed among these monstrous transgressions, producing perverse and unnaturally constructed bodies. Legislation was therefore thought to function as

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a boundary to guard against imagined racial transgressions. What these legal advocates overlooked was the fact that the clarity of the law is always subject to obfuscation through reading and interpretation. However, Chesnutt was familiar with the instability of legal processes. His experience with both the fluctuations of the law and the fluidity of identity helped him see that dealings with legal discourse were always dealings with texts, interactions with discursive bodies that were always subject to change. He also realized that what the text of the law cannot permit, where legal language becomes mute, is the exceptional body: the body that confounds hermeneutic notions of selfhood and rational conceptions of identity based on binary logic. In an era of segregation and racial “science,” Chesnutt thus presents the “white Negro” as a way of challenging American racist ideologies and dismantling the authoritative discourses of the law. His gothicism, then, enacts those complicated and confused moments of rhetoric and notions of self in which the uncanny seeps in and those boundaries that had once seemed to be fixed and concealed now appear to be unstable and permeable. His “white Negro” therefore exposes the racially coded “I” as unfixed, as we have now seen so often in the gothic, hovering phantasmatically between blackness and whiteness, between American binary conceptions of racial difference.

epilogue

Twentieth-Century Gothicism and Racial Ambiguity

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hile depictions of racial ambiguity existed in gothic discourse prior to Poe and have continued after Chesnutt, Poe’s ideas about hybridity and racial amalgamation during the late 1830s mark a paradigm shift in the articulations of racial categories that flourished during the rest of the century. Indeed, Poe’s use of the term “hybrid” in Pym to describe race mixture and identificatory ambiguity became an influential model for representations of racial mixture. These, in turn, were challenged and supplanted by the rise of popular forms of Darwinism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Stephen Crane’s The Monster (1899), for instance, resists the conflation of gothicism with racial ambiguity and moves toward a representation of blackness, whiteness, and the gothic which, a few decades later, would be picked up by African American writers such as Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison. In Crane’s novella, Henry Johnson, a black man whose face is disfigured in a laboratory fire and who is then ostracized by his community, adopts a Darwinistic model of race and identity in a hybrid text that draws on both naturalist forms and gothic images. The effacing of Henry marks him as both an outcast and a weak man who cannot survive within a community where whiteness is equated with health and strength. The survival of the fittest, a repressive ideology that displaces Henry because of his black skin and disfigured face, is presented alongside the macabre setting of the doctor’s giant, dark house and the monstrous community that banishes the victim, calling for his blood. More terrifying, however, is the image of Henry’s “monstrousness,” which is not a great remove from the formidable racist constructions of the black man as an “uncivilized animal” or an “ignoble savage,” racist constructions which are, as Toni Morrison notes, dominant in American literature (59). Crane connects racial difference, gothicism, and scientific ideologies when Henry’s deformity arises out of an accident in Dr. Trescott’s scientific laboratory, transforming Henry from man to monster. This metamor-

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phosis, which echoes the scientific creation of the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, furthers the text’s merger of gothicism and race when the doctor creates a grotesque life form, a figure whose descendants also include Dr. Jekyll and Dr. Moreau. Central to Shelley’s and Crane’s texts is the gothic depiction of the laboratory, which, in Frankenstein, is a gloomdrenched laboratory full of ominous equipment, and which, in Dr. Trescott’s lab, inspires Henry’s “fear” and “terror” (405). This lab is clearly a place where nature is manipulated and altered: Henry is given a monstrous new life here, for an acid compound shatters its glass container and “sizzles” upon Henry’s “molten head” like a “red snake [that] flowed directly down into Johnson’s upturned face” (406). The burning chemical, moreover, transforms into a snake—the original “monster” of Eden—that symbolically bites Henry, infecting him with a poison from which he will never recover. And just as the biblical snake robs innocence, the “liquid snake” is the final stage in the infliction of pain and oppression that disfigures Henry into the monster. Crane’s text is significant because it uses gothic conventions fraught with political symbolism—the fire also destroys an engraving of The Signing of the Declaration—by highlighting the contradictory American assertion, in the face of Henry’s blackness, that all men are created equal (403). Crane’s framing of Henry’s burning with this engraving (which eventually drops to the floor, bursting with “the sound of a bomb”) calls attention to Henry’s disenfranchised position within the nation: the blaze is called Henry’s “submission” and he is said to be “a creature to the flames” (405). The flames thus symbolize his weak position within American culture; he must submit to the fire just as he must submit to wealthy white men such as Dr. Trescott. The uncanny house, then, is haunted by national injustices of the past; its burning structure reflects the heated racial tensions that threaten to destroy the nation and consume the principles upon which the Declaration of Independence was signed. Just as Henry finds the fire-ravaged house inescapable, he is unable to escape the history of his fathers—not only the founding forefathers represented in the engraving—but those African American fathers whose lives were ravaged by slavery. It is significant that Crane’s text turns away from the gothicism of racial ambiguity found in earlier nineteenth-century texts. Henry’s skin is unmistakably black, and the scenes of abuse are clearly inscribed on his body, which, like Sethe’s chokecherry tree in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, displays the tortures of a racial injustice written on the flesh as well as in the text. Henry’s

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disfigured face fits this gothic pattern, but this physical abuse is compounded by the psychological abuses of segregation; that is, Henry is removed from the streets of Whilomville: first, he is confined to a house on the outskirts of town; and, second, after escaping from Williams’s home, he is incarcerated in the local prison. The abuse that can be read on Henry’s body engenders the desire to section him off from society, just as the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision attempted to restrict the actions of a portion of the population. Crane’s gothicism, then, attacks the segregation laws that deny the very existence of racial ambiguity; in fact, the theme of segregation merges with gothic conventions in the conclusion of the text where we find Henry (who now inhabits the room over Dr. Trescott’s carriage house) wearing “a heavy crêpe veil” over his face (435). In this penultimate scene, Henry has taken on the physical characteristics of a phantom, while his face continues to be segregated from the town’s field of vision. The creation of this phantom presence is thus presented as a crime for which an outraged Mother Nature seeks revenge. Appearing at a time when lynchings and urban race riots were on the rise and in which theories of racial difference proliferated, The Monster responded to the pseudoDarwinist theories that were motivated by a desire to restrict immigration on racial grounds. Such overtly racist works such as Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1922) and Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race; or, the Racial Basis of European History (1916) attempted to define race in strictly biological terms. With this in mind, the creation of Henry as the ghastly Other may encompass the creation of an artificial racial binary that pits whiteness against blackness. The genesis of the monster, I suggest, comes to stand in for the genesis of pseudoscientific racial theories that justify the effacing of African Americans. Given that Crane’s narrative questions essentialist racial divisions, the text implies that, just as the scientific laboratory transforms Henry into the beast, American “scientific” theories about racial difference work to create an inferior race through doctrines of white supremacy. When one reads The Monster in this light, it is important to remember that anxiety over the early 1900s shift in American racial geography resulted in a revival of scientific attempts to prove that African American was a degraded race. And the dissemination of Darwinist theories throughout the United States provided a scientific frame of reference from which social critics could revive the debate over the place of black men and women in the human community. As a result, arguments that echoed antebellum proslav-

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ery diatribes of natural “Negro inferiority” were presented to the public by “objective social scientists.” William P. Calhoun and Charles Carroll, for example, espoused “Aryan supremacy,” claiming that “the negro was genetically inferior,” a race that would never overcome “immorality, dishonesty, laziness or ignorance” (Carroll 54). It is also interesting to note that Calhoun and Carroll couched their racist ideas in gothic terms; blacks, they claimed, were “a fungus growth that the white man should totally destroy,” for, they claimed, blacks were “the greatest menace” to the “Anglo-Saxon civilization” because of the potential for “pollution with the blood of the depraved Ethiopian” (Calhoun 139, 141). These racist ideologues asserted that African Americans of the early 1900s were “unreliable” and even “inhuman” (Carroll 56). Such discourses stemmed from northern migration and the subsequent restructuring of the Northern and Southern economies. The assumed instability generated by this “unreliable” race resulted in an anxiety about race relations. That is, by espousing the “unreliable” nature of African Americans, racist social scientists could circulate discourses of fear and anxiety based on social instability; if blacks were not loyal or reliable, these people claimed, white control in the United States would be vulnerable to attacks arising out of racial oppression. While Calhoun and his contemporaries discouraged racial mixture and feared racial ambiguity, the early twentieth century also witnessed an increase in the number of African American authors who turned to biracial figures and narratives of passing. As M. Giulia Fabi has argued, racial ambiguity and passing became an important theme that laid the groundwork for the rise of the African American novel, but this theme was to be fully explored only by black writers of the twentieth century (12). Indeed, the trope of passing by, among others, James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, Jessie Fauset, Walter White, and George Schuyler transformed representations of blackness and often celebrated racial ambiguity as a reaction to the restrictive myths of racial purity and the color line. Passing, for these writers, was not a source of fear and anxiety; it was an important subject in the dramatization of race as a cultural construct; it was a part of the quest for, and expression of, racial identity; and it was a challenge to the irrationalities of the American attempt to classify races biologically. To a large extent these novels, particularly those published during the Harlem Renaissance, explored the coding that interacts with America’s basic attitudes toward racial intermixture. One exception to this is William Faulkner’s Light in August (1932), in which

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Joe Christmas’s passing is depicted as a haunting presence that not only merges the binaries of blackness and whiteness but also joins together the past with the present and the South with the North. As a kind of tableau, a ghostlike figure, Joe generates anxiety in the town of Jefferson; his body is a testament to the ontological breakdown of American racial categories, and he symbolizes the return of a repressed history of slavery, rape, and miscegenation. As such, he is always potentially violent, and his relationship with Miss Burden, a white woman, culminates in his violent murdering of her and the burning of her plantation, an act that recalls the white antebellum anxieties over slave insurrections. Indeed, as a figure who is simultaneously “real” and “not real,” he embodies an “in-betweenness” associated with a state of abjection that complicates the distinctions between self and other, subject and object. It is here that meanings begin to collapse; we are forced to see Joe Christmas as existing “beside himself,” inside and outside of himself, as well as confounding the hermeneutics of language and racial difference. The epistomological certainties of Light in August are always illusory, for there are multiple breakdowns in the transference of knowledge, exposing gaps in language and understanding. No light can be shed on Joe’s heritage, for example, and we are thus left in the dark when it comes to ascribing him a fixed identity. Any “truthful” determination of selfhood is impossible and certainties are concealed by the text, just as lightness or darkness cannot be read on his body. The secrets and mysteries of the text’s gothicism are never unveiled; we are never enlightened. Faulkner’s gothic novel thus points back to nineteenth-century depictions of racial ambiguity that highlight an anxiety about the collapse of meaning and the erasure of racial binaries. Joe’s lack of a stable or singular race identity and his failure to embody fully either race successfully, suggest the ontological impossibility that uneasily inhabits the structure of racial identity. Presenting himself at times as white and at other times as black locates him in relation to others, but the “being” that relates Joe to each of these terms of identity is actually a “not-being.” That is, his failure to be either black or white is a failure to “be himself,” a failure to realize himself authentically and a failure to identify himself with blackness or whiteness. This failure is not, as we have seen throughout this study, a personal, subjective failure; rather, it is the failure of any form of rigid classification at the heart of the limited language of racial identity. Joe’s identity, like so many of the passing figures in this book, exposes the fact that identity is not what one is but what one passes for— a vision of identity that has often been articulated in gothic terms.

Notes

Introduction 1 References to slavery are also found in William Beckford’s Vathek and Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. In fact, it is possible to read a gothic subtext to Austen’s novel, in which the indolent Bertrams loll on their sofas and perform theatricals, while their luxury is provided by the tainted wealth and the gothic horrors of the slave trade in Antigua (Lew 271). Likewise, the gothic imprisonment of the Creole character, Bertha Mason, in Jane Eyre (1847) repeats the horrors of Caribbean slavery. Although slavery lies in the background of the novel, Jane, we must assume, inherits a fortune derived from the slave trade of the West Indies. For a comprehensive reading of slavery in these texts see Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism. 2 The Marquis de Sade observed that the fiction of Lewis and Radcliffe was “the inevitable result of revolutionary shocks which all of Europe suffered” (109), and Edmund Burke’s 1790 Reflections on the Revolution in France develops the rhetoric of gothic monstrosity to depict what he sees as the excessive force of the revolutionaries (333). 3 Similarly, Henry James, who often criticized the external and sensational gothic modes used by Ann Radcliffe, Wilkie Collins, and Mary Braddon, realized that their experiments in “sources of excitement” could be adapted and improved in the United States by connecting ghostly imagery to “the common objects of life” (“Mary” 742). 4 DeLamotte’s argument is challenged in the preface to Marble Faun when Hawthorne expresses the “difficulty of writing a romance about a country [the United States] where there is no shadow, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong” (xx–xi). Fiedler concurs with Hawthorne when he states that the American gothic depicts the “darkness and the grotesque in a land of light and affirmation” (29). 5 Robert K. Martin finds this same familial ambivalence in Hawthorne’sThe House of the Seven Gables, and he argues that “Hawthorne’s gothic enacts the presence of the past, even as his text seeks to deny that past” (“Haunted” 130). 6 The theme of the double is present throughout gothic discourse: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) are the

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two most commonly cited examples. For more on the double in the history of English literature see Karl Miller’s Doubles: Studies in Literary History (1985) and Masao Miyoshi’s The Divided Self (1969). Eve Sedgwick elsewhere refers to this crisis of identity as “paranoid Gothic,” in which “a male hero is in a close, usually murderous relation to another male figure, in some respects his ‘double,’ to whom he seems to be mentally transparent” (Epistemology 186). Sedgwick then links the paranoid gothic to the development of the identity of the bachelor as illustrated in Henry James’s “The Jolly Corner,” Du Maurier’s Trilby, and Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Similar questions of identity also arise in Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland; or the Transformation (1798), for Carwin is able to adjust his voice to mimic other people. He can thus verbally pass for various characters and, as the title suggests, he “transforms” himself into numerous identities. Likewise, Brown’s Ormond; or the Secret Witness (1799) presents the charismatic feminist Marinette de Beauvais donning a soldier’s dress and passing for a man in order to fight in the French and the American revolutions. Stevenson also uses the figure of the split self in his melodrama, Deacon Brodie, or the Double Life, and in his short story, “Olalla” (1885). For a discussion of these texts see Martin A. Danahay’s insightful introduction to the Broadview Press edition of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (14 –15). For more on Poe’s text as a possible source for Pudd’nhead Wilson, see Jack Scherting’s “Poe’s ‘Cask of Amontillado’: A Source for Twain’s ‘The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg,’” which suggests that “ William Wilson” supplied the textual framework for Pudd’nhead Wilson (19n). For a general study of Poe’s influence on Twain, see Minnie M. Brashear’s Mark Twain: Son of Missouri. And for an interesting reading of Poe, Twain, and questions of genre in Pudd’nhead Wilson, see Lawrence Howe’s “Race, Genealogy, and Genre in Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson.” Howe places Twain’s text in the tradition of “detective fiction” (495). Tom’s disguise also emphasizes the fiction of identity: he is a black man passing for white, who then adopts a woman’s clothing and blackens his face in order to pass as a black woman. Robert Brent Toplin gives an admirable history of antebellum attitudes toward the biracial subject in his article, “Between Black and White: Attitudes toward Southern Mulattos, 1830 –1861.” For a book-length study on the various representations of biracial characters, see Judith R. Berzon’s Neither White Nor Black. While supporters of slavery condemned the San Domingo revolt as immoral and unnatural, some American abolitionists saw Haitian slaves as seizing the Rights of Man in the same spirit as 1776 (Sundquist,To Wake 144 – 45). For other readings of Stowe’s depiction of the “San Domingo hour,” see Eric Sundquist’s

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“Benito Cereno and New World Slavery” (93) and Nancy Bentley’s “ White Slaves” (501). Biracial characters were not always presented as threats to antebellum culture. As Robert Toplin correctly points out, representations of mulattos often “expressed a marked bias favoring the mulatto over the Negro” (185). Indeed, the use of mulattos as “house slaves” illustrates this bias, but this privileging, I suggest, also generated an anxiety concerning the position of the biracial slave. That is, his position within the master’s house made it easy for him to take his master’s life. Adrian Piper correctly points out that the subject of racial ambiguity in the United States “ranks up there with family incest, murder and suicide” (250). Questions of authenticity and identity have been present in American gothic discourse at least since Charles Brockden Brown. In Arthur Mervyn (1800), for instance, Welbeck converts worthless paper into a fortune through counterfeiting and adopts a new class position by covering up his past and forging a new identity. Likewise, Craig in Ormond (1799) hides his family history and forges banknotes in order to acquire the identity of a successful businessman and a gentleman. Sundquist places Twain’s image of the so-called “imitation nigger” in the context of the segregation laws that grew out of Reconstruction (To Wake 260 – 61). For more on the diversity of authors and texts within the category of “American gothic literature,” see Charles L. Crow’s strong collection, American Gothic: An Anthology, 1787–1916. And for a reactionary reading of the “radical evolution” of the term “gothic,” including the expression “American gothic,” see Maurice Levy’s “‘Gothic’ and Critical Idiom.”

1. Hybrid Bodies and Gothic Narratives 1 Here, Goddu draws on Harry Levin’s discussion of the Poe-Lewis conversation in his Power of Blackness (28). 2 Hybrid bodies were much discussed in the scientific community of 1830s America (for a good example, see S. G. Morton’s 1839 book, Crania Americana). The question arose out of the debate about the children born out of miscegenation: Were the products of racial mixture sterile or did they have the same generative faculties as their parents? This question was significant because it contributed to the larger racial scientific debate about whether blacks and whites were two varieties of a single species or represented two distinct species (Haller 72). 3 Poe, in fact, frequently spoke out in favor of of slavery. For more on this, see Bernard Rosenthal’s “Poe, Slavery, and the Southern Literary Messenger: A Reexamination,” Poe Studies 7.2 (1974):29–38; John Carlos Rowe’s “Poe, Ante-

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bellum Slavery, and Modern Criticism,” Poe’s Pym: Critical Explorations, ed. Richard Kopley, Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1992, 117–138; and Joan Dayan’s “Amorous Bondage: Poe, Ladies, and Slaves,” American Literature 66.2 (1994): 239–73. Visitors to the United States during the 1830s sometimes remarked on the growing biracial population of the country. In 1832, for instance, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that in “parts of America the European and the negro races are so crossed by one another that it is rare to meet a man who is entirely black, or entirely white” (vol. 1, 379). And Tocqueville’s traveling companion Gustave de Beaumont wrote in 1835: “Intermarriages are certainly the best, if not the unique, means of fusing the black and white races” (245). In an 1800 issue of Charles Brockden Brown’s Monthly Magazine, it is noted that “the change of colour which Harry Moss has undergone . . . has been published so often that few curious persons are ignorant of it” (qtd. in Gardner 461). For an excellent reading of these “racial transformations” in the context of Brown’s fiction, see Jared Gardner’s “Alien Nation: Edgar Huntly’s Savage Awakening” (447– 61). During the early nineteenth century, doctors and scientists debated the meaning of the term “hybrid” with respect to human beings. Some racial theorists such as Edward Long and Charles White argued that whites and blacks were of different species, thus any union between these groups would produce a hybrid offspring who was infertile. Yet, anthropologists such as Theodore Waitz argued for the unity of the human species, and he claimed that a hybrid child born of parents of different races was fertile. For more of this, see Robert J. C. Young’s Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (6–12). For a discussion of Morton’s measurements of the brain, see John S. Haller’s Outcasts from Evolution (31–33). This gothic dread in the face of whiteness echoes The Life of Olaudah Equiano, which describes whiteness as a disfigurement: “Negro children [who were] quite white,” Equiano says, “were universally regarded as deformed” (17). Likewise, when he sees white men for the first time, Equiano is “persuaded that [he] had got into a world of bad spirits, and that they were going to kill [him]” (33). Dana D. Nelson notes that “Pym underscores the significance of the evidence of a natural principle of segregation” by presenting the island’s botanical and biological species as offering distinct hues which never join together (The Word 96). For an interesting reading of Peters as Pym’s slave, see John Carlos Rowe’s “Poe, Antebellum Slavery, and Modern Criticism.” Robert K. Martin notes that Peters’s African and Indian features serve as hidden or multiple selves that remind us of “the portrait in Dorian Gray or Mr. Hyde in Stevenson’s novel” (“Knights-Errant” 177).

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13 For more on Turner’s rebellion and Poe’s writing, see Lesley Ginsberg’s “Slavery and the Gothic Horror of Poe’s ‘The Black Cat.’” 14 For a thorough discussion of critics who see Poe’s characterization of Peters as marked by technical errors, see Burton R. Pollin’s introduction and notes to the definitive Twayne edition of the novel.

2. Gothic Travels in Melville’s Benito Cereno 1 For more on these sources, see the introduction to the Penguin edition of Pym. 2 This source was identified by Harold Scudder in his “Melville’s Benito Cereno and Captain Delano’s Voyages,” PMLA, 43 (1928): 502–32. 3 For a more thorough reading of this process, see my “Melville’s Peep-Show: Sexual and Textual Cruises in Typee,” Ariel: An International Review of English Literature (spring 1999): 63–71. 4 We also see orientalist imagery used in other gothic novels such as Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764). 5 The English title of Gobineau’s book is The Moral and Intellectual Diversity of Races. 6 Ironically, John Ledyard, the American explorer, never made it to Africa. He was planning to explore the interior of Africa when he died in 1789 (Hitchings xl). In the original version of Benito Cereno, published in Putnam’s Magazine, Melville had used the name Mungo Park, an explorer who published Travels in the Interior of Africa in 1790. 7 For an excellent assessment of the political effects of these songs (and minstrelsy in general), see Paul Gilmore’s “‘De Genewine Artekil’: William Wells Brown, Blackface Minstrelsy, and Abolitionism,” American Literature 69.4 (December 1997): 743– 80. My understanding of Babo follows his reading of William Wells Brown and the tensions between the authenticity of identity and performativity. 8 I turn to Lacan here because, although Freud attributes silence to the uncanny, he is effectively silent on the subject of what makes it uncanny.

3. Passing and Abjection in William and Ellen Craft’s Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom 1 For an interesting comparison of Benito Cereno and Gray’s “Confessions,” see Sundquist’s To Wake the Nations (35). 2 Johnson wrote a play entitled William and Ellen Craft: A Play in One Act, and Stowe used the Crafts’ story in chapter 37 of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (400 –12). 3 William Wells Brown uses “white slavery” to similar ends in Clotel (1853). In the chapter titled “A Free Woman Reduced to Slavery,” Brown narrates the story of a “perfectly white woman” from Germany who is sold into slavery (189). 4 Carlyle, for example, stated that colonial expansion was the burden and the “everlasting duty” of all white men (355).

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5 Having documentation to prove one’s racial status also arises in H. Mattison’s Louisa Picquet, The Octoroon Slave and Concubine: A Tale of Southern Life. Here, Mrs. S. challenges Mrs. P.’s status as a black woman: “You a colored woman?” Mrs. S. says, “You’re no negro. Where did you come from? If you’re a negro, where are your free papers to show it?” (23). 6 For more on cross-dressing as a source of gothic fear and anxiety, see Robert K. Martin’s “Knights-Errant and Gothic Seducers” (176).

4. The Epistemology of the Body; or, Gothic Secrets in Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy 1 The specter of the haunted house and other spaces of gothic mystery are also present in Cable’s “Madame Delphine,” “‘Sieur George,” and “Jean-ah Poquelin.” For more on Cable and the gothic tradition, see Edward Stone’s “Usher, Poquelin, and Miss Emily: The Progress of Southern Gothic” and Bill Christopherson’s “Jean-ah Poquelin: Cable’s Place in Southern Gothic.” Harper draws on these texts in her presentation of Eugene Leroy, the “heir of a Creole planter” who lives in a large house that “was French in its style of architecture, large and rambling, with no hint of modern improvements” (61). 2 For a good overview of the biracial figure in Cable’s work, see William Bedford Clark’s “Cable and the Theme of Miscegenation.” 3 The word “miscegenation” had been coined by David Goodman in his Miscegenation, a social tract that was published four years before What Answer? For a general discussion of the history of the term, see Jordan’s White over Black; and for a discussion of the word in Dickinson’s novel, see James Kinney’s Amalgamation! (113–14). 4 James Kinney notes that, “during the actual period of Reconstruction [1865– 77], the literary battleground over slavery had already ended and with that cessation had come a virtual halt in novels about miscegenation” (105). Indeed, with a few minor exceptions, the biracial figure virtually disappeared between 1865 and 1880, only to reappear again in the 1880s and 1890s. This accounts for the historical gap between my reading of the Crafts’ Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom and Harper’s Iola Leroy . 5 For more on Harper’s responses to Page’s racist narratives, see Vashti Lewis’s “The Near-White Female in Frances Ellen Harper’s Iola Leroy” (315). 6 For other critical discussions of sentimentality in Iola Leroy, see Mary Helen Washington’s Invented Lives (74 –76) and Elizabeth Ammons’s “Stowe’s Dream of the Mother-Saviour” (178 – 82). 7 For an interesting discussion of the theme of motherhood in Iola Leroy, see Elizabeth Ammons’s “Stowe’s Dream of the Mother-Savior” (178 – 82). Ammons places Harper’s text within contemporary debates about religion, motherhood, and womanhood in sentimental novels by American women.

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5. Genetic Atavism and the Return of the Repressed in William Dean Howells’s An Imperative Duty 1 The presence of immigration and citizenship has long been a subject of American gothic discourse. Jared Gardner, for instance, says that Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly frames “the question of identity” in “national rather than (generally) human or (particularly) individual” terms (429). The gothic import of the novel, Gardner argues, centers around what it means to be American in a nation of immigrants, natives, and slaves. Likewise, Brown’s Ormond expresses anxieties about the nation’s being overrun by threatening immigrants from France and St. Domingue who may challenge the early republic’s commitment to democracy. 2 For more on Shaler’s racial “scientific” theories, see his “Nature and Man in America,” Scribner’s Magazine VIII (September 1890): 360 – 65, and “European Peasants as Immigrants,” Atlantic Monthly LXXI (May 1893): 644 –51. 3 Other short stories from this period illustrate Howells’s use of gothic discourses. “The Angel of the Lord,” for instance, is the story of Ormond, who believes that he has supernatural visions. It is possible that Howells had Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond in mind when he composed this text. 4 Recent books on racial passing such as Juda Bennett’s The Passing Figure: Racial Confusion in American Literature and the collection of essays entitled Passing and the Fictions of Identity either relegate Howells’s novella to a footnote or ignore it entirely. 5 Negative readings of Duty have also appeared in Kenneth Ebel’s William Dean Howells (Boston: Twayne 1982) and Jacqueline Y. MacLendon’s The Politics of Color in the Fiction of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1995). More positive analyses of Duty have appeared in George N. Bennett’s The Realism of William Dean Howells, 1889–1920 (Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 1973) and Judith R. Berzon’s Neither White nor Black: The Mulatto in American Fiction (New York: New York UP, 1978). 6 For an interesting reading of how Howells’s novel subverts the tradition of the tragic mulatto, see Judith Berzon’s Neither Black nor White (109–15).

6. The Haunted House behind the Cedars: Charles W. Chesnutt and the “White Negro” 1 For a good description of the gothic elements in Chesnutt’s conjure tales, see Charles L. Crow’s essay, “Under the Upas Tree: Charles Chesnutt’s Gothic.” Unfortunately, Crow’s piece contains little analytical insight. 2 Whiteness as a source of gothic import is used in a number of African American texts. Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), for instance, shows how the African American experience, written as a realist text, resembles a gothic

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narrative. The dread that Bigger experiences when speaking to the white characters, the white, “ghostlike” figure of Mrs. Dalton, and the haunting presence of the “big white cat” are but a few examples of how Wright uses whiteness to revise the gothic mode for the African American subject while not straying completely from the gothic tradition (232). 3 Chesnutt was an outspoken opponent of Dixon. When The Leopard’s Spots was published to great acclaim and popularity in 1902, Chesnutt sent copies of his own book, The Marrow of Tradition (1901), to President Roosevelt and to some members of Congress to offer them an alternate vision of the American race problem (Keller 213). 4 In her reading of Chesnutt’s ideas about “the race problem,” June Socken supports my argument by claiming that “Chesnutt appreciated the fact that his white audiences found the possibility of large scale miscegenation a horror and the realization of their worst fears” (54). 5 Interestingly, Lombroso’s theories found their way into a number of late nineteenth-century gothic novels. In Bram Stoker’sDracula (1897), for instance, Mina Parker describes the evil count as “a criminal of criminal type. Nordau and Lombroso would so classify him, and qua criminal he is of imperfectly formed mind” (383). The reference to Nordau is to Max Nordau, a German physician whose book, Degeneration (1895), was an attempt at extending Lombroso’s argument to cover an individual’s moral decline, perversion, and degeneracy.

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Index

abjection, 45–50 adaptability, xxi American Gothic: Imagination and Reason in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Ringe), xx–xxi American Scene ( James), 72 Ammons, Elizabeth, 120n Andrews, William L., 35, 58, 81 Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (Walker), xx, 4 Arthur Mervyn (Brown), 65 Arvin, Newton, 18 atavism, 85– 87 Austen, Jane, xviii, 115n

blackface, 27–30 Blockson, Charles L., 35 bloodline, xxiv–xxv Botting, Fred, xix, xxiv Boy’s Town (Howells), 79– 80 Brown, Charles Brockden, xvii, xx, xxiii, xxxiii, 5, 65, 78, 116n, 117n, 118n, 121n Brown, William Wells, 34 –35, 44, 119n Bruce, Philip A., 71 Burke, Edmund, xx Burton, Tim, xxiii Butcher, Philip, 54 Butler, Judith, 45

Baker, Houston, 45 Bakhtin, M., xviii, xix Banta, Martha, 78 Barthes, Roland, 66– 67 Beckford, William, xviii, 20, 21, 23 Bellis, Peter, 32 Beloved (Morrison), 111–12 Benito Cereno (Melville), 18 –33 Bennett, Juda, xxix, 43, 121n Bentley, Nancy, xxix, 63 Bernstein, Stephen, xxiii Berzon, Judith, 76, 82 Bhabha, Homi K., 13–14, 19 biraciality, xxviii–xxxiii, 25; in Iola Leroy, 63– 64 Blackett, R. J. M., 36, 39, 40

Cable, George Washington, 53–57, 85, 89, 96, 101, 120n Calhoun, William, 113 Campbell, John, 6– 8, 10, 15 cannibalism, 12–13, 39, 103, 107 Carby, Hazel, 61 Carlyle, Thomas, 38 – 40, 83 Carroll, Charles, 113 Cash, W. J., 58 Castle of Otranto (Walpole), xxiv, 63 Cecil, Moffitt, 14 Chapman, Mary, xx Chesnutt, Charles, xxv, xxviii, xxxiii, 57, 88 –110 Child, Lydia Maria, 38 Christy, Edwin, 28

142

index

Clemens, Valdine, 62, 86 Coherence of Gothic Conventions (Sedgwick), xxvi conjure, 90 –95, 100 Conjure Woman (Chesnutt), 89 Cooper, Anna Julia, 80 Cope, Edward, 87 Craft, William and Ellen, xxxiii, 34 –50, 53 Crane, Stephen, 110 –13 Crania America (Morton), 6 Crawfurd, John, 39– 40, 47, 50 Crenshaw, Kimberle, xxx Dacre, Charlotte, xviii Darwinism, xxiii, 60, 62, 83, 110, 112 Daughtery, Sarah, 82 Davis, James, xxviii, 105 Davis, Rebecca Harding, 56–57 Day, Beth, 7 Day, William, xix DeLamotte, Eugenia, xxi Delano, Amasa, 18 –20 Derrida, J., 67 Destiny of Man (Fiske), 82 Dickinson, Anna E., 56 Dickinson, Emily, xxxiii discourse, xxi–xxiii; gothic, xx; political, xix–xxi, xxiii Dixon, Thomas, 91–93, 122n Doren, Carl Van, 18 Dyer, Richard, 74 –75 Edgar Huntly (Brown), xx Edmundson, Mark, xxi Elbert, Monika, xxiv Elkins, Marilyn, 61 Ellison, Ralph, 44, 110 Emmett, Dan, 28 Equiano, Olaudah, 118n

Ernest, John, 60, 62, 67 expatriation, 4 –5 Fabi, M. Giulia, 113 Faulkner, William, 96, 113–14 Fauset, Jessie, 113 Favor, Martin, xxxi Fiedler, Leslie, xvii, xix, xxvii, 11 Fisher, Marvin, 18 Fiske, John, 82– 84 Fleming, Robert, 80 Foucault, Michel, xxii Frankenstein (Shelley), 108, 111 Fredrickson, George, 60 Freud, Sigmund, xxv, 12, 16, 20, 22, 26 Freudian theories: return of the repressed, 86; uncanny, xxv, xxvi, 16, 19– 22, 26–28, 31–33, 35, 78, 86, 98, 109 Garber, Marjorie, xxix, xxxi, 48 Gardner, Jared, 5 Garrison, William Lloyd, 38 Gaston, Paul, 55 Gates, Henry Louis, 31 genre, xix–xxi, 21, 35–37, 61– 62, 76, 78 Gilmore, Paul, 28, 44 Ginsberg, Elaine, xxxi Glidden, George, 8, 23–25 Gobineau, Joseph, 25 Goddu, Teresa, xviii, 3 Godwin, William, 21 gothic: American v. British, xvii–xix; criticism of, xxiii–xxiv; definition of, xviii–xix, xxi–xxiii; and the law, 104 – 109; “realism,” 78 – 81 Gould, Jay, 107–108 Grady, Henry, 56 Graham, Kenneth, xix Grant, Madison, 112 Gray, Thomas, 34

index Greenberg, Kenneth, xxii Gross, Louis S., xx, xxi Grosz, Elizabeth, 49 Gunning, Sandra, 92 Hackenberry, Charles, 89 Haller, John S., 59, 84 Halttunen, Karen, 26 Harper, Frances, xxxiii, 53–71, 102 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, xvii, xx, xxi, xxiv–xxv, 115n Hemenway, Robert, xviii, 89, 90 homosexuality, 48 House behind the Cedars (Chesnutt), 88 – 109 Howells, Coral Ann, xix Howells, William Dean, 72– 87 Hubbell, Jay B., 58 Hunt, James, 39, 47, 50 hybridity, xix, 91, 110; in Benito Cereno, 23–27; in Narrative of Voyages, 23–27; in Iola Leroy, 61, 65; organic, xviii–xix; in Pym, 4 –17; in Running, 46–50 Idea of God (Fiske), 82 identity, xxiii–xxvii, 114; American, 72– 73, 99–100; doppelgänger, xxv–xxvi; gender, 40 –50; Irish, 74 –75, 84; performance, 41, 99–100 immigration, 72–75, 84 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl ( Jacobs), xxii Iola Leroy (Harper), 53–71; political commentary in, 61– 62 Jacobs, Harriet, xxii James, Henry, xxvi, 72–73, 78, 115n Jefferson, Thomas, 4 Johnson, Georgia Douglas, 36 Johnson, James Weldon, 80, 113

143

“Jolly Corner” ( James), xxvi Jordan, Winthrop, 4, 5 Kaplan, Sidney, 18 Karcher, Carolyn, 18, 38 Keily, Robert, xix Kennedy, J. Gerald, 14 Kilgour, Maggie, xviii Kimball, Samuel, 27 Kinney, James, 57, 120n Knox, Robert, 39 Kristeva, Julia, 49 Ku Klux Klan, 58 –59 Lacan, J., 33, 76, 119n Lane, Henry, 29 Larsen, Nella, 113 LeConte, Joseph, 59– 60, 82 Leopard’s Spots (Dixon), 91 Lewis, Matthew, 3, 21 Light in August (Faulkner), 114 –15 Lombroso, Cesare, 107–108, 122n Lott, Eric, 28, 29 l’uomo delinquente, 107–109 Lutz, Tom, 78 lynching, 96–98 “Man of the Crowd” (Poe), 8 Maria; or, The Wrongs of a Woman (Wollstonecraft), xviii “Markheim” (Stevenson), xxvi–xxvii Marrow of Tradition (Chesnutt), 95–100, 105, 107 Martin, Robert K., xxi, 115n, 118n Matthiessen, F. O., 18 McCaskill, Barbara, 34, 39, 45 Melville, Herman, xxi, xxiii, xxv, xxxiii, 12, 18 –33, 35, 67 Miller, J. H., 67 Mills, Sara, 21

144

index

minstrelsy, 28 –30, 44, 99–100 miscegenation, xxv, 6– 8, 25, 85, 108 – 109; in Iola Leroy, 62– 63 Monster (Crane), 110, 112 Morrell, Benjamin, 18 Morrison, Toni, xxxiii, 110, 111 Morton, Samuel, 6– 8, 10, 91, 117n Moss, Harry, 5, 118n Moss, Sidney, 14 Müller, Salomé, 37–38, 53–54 Narrative of Voyages and Travels (Delano), 19–33 Narrative of William Wells Brown (Brown), 34 Native Americans: negative images of, 10 –13 Neider, Charles, 18 Nelson, Dana, 8, 31, 118n Nordau, Max, 108, 122n Nott, Josiah, 6, 8, 10, 15, 23–25, 91 “Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question” (Carlyle), 38 –39 Olney, James, 41 orientalism, 19, 23–25, 119n Origin of Species (Darwin), 83 Page, Thomas Nelson, 58 –59 passing, xxviii–xxx, 113–14; in Duty, 81; in Iola Leroy, 69; in Marrow, 100; in Narrative of Voyages, 27–31; origin of term, 105–106; in Running, 40 – 45 Picquenard, J. B., xvii, xviii Plessy v. Ferguson, 92, 105, 112 Poe, Edgar Allan, xvii, xxi, xxiii, xxv, xxvii, xxxiii, 3–18, 31, 35, 78, 90, 110, 116n polygenesis, 6–9 Porter, Dennis, 20

Pudd’nhead Wilson (Twain), xxvii–xxix, xxxi, 80 Punter, David, xxi Pym (Poe), 3–17 Races of Men (Knox), 39– 40 racial authenticity, 28 –30, 99 racial conflict, 3, 4 –7 racial difference, xxviii, 25–27, 110 –11; in Duty, 82; in Running, 38 –39 racial hierarchies, 9, 23; in Benito Cereno, 19, 32–33 racial science, xxiii, xxx, xxxi, 3, 6– 8, 23–26, 39, 47, 59– 60, 62, 71, 74, 80, 82– 87, 91–95, 104 –109 Radcliffe, Ann, 69 rape, 58 –59, 97–98 Reconstruction, 54 – 60 Red Rock (Page), 58 –59 Redefining the American Gothic (Gross), xx–xxi Reflections on the Revolution in France (Burke), xx Rice, Anne, xxiii Richmond Enquirer, xxii Ringe, Donald A., xx Roediger, David, 74 Romance of the Republic (Child), 38 Rowe, John Carlos, 10, 12 Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (W. and E. Craft), 34 –50 Said, Edward, 23, 115n “Salome Müller, the White Slave” (Cable), 53–54 Savoy, Eric, xxi Scarlet Letter (Hawthorne), xxiv–xxv Schaler, Nathaniel, 74 Schiffman, Joseph, 18 Schuyler, George, 113

index

145

secrets: in House behind the Cedars, 102; in Iola Leroy, 66–71; as paradoxes, 67– 68 Sedgwick, Eve K., xxvi, 116n segregation, 6–7, 55–56 sentimentality, 61– 66 Shadow of a Dream (Howells), 78 –79; as psychological text, 78 Shelley, Mary, 76, 108, 111, 115n slave narratives, xxii, 34 –37, 41, 63 slavery, xvii–xviii, 34 – 40, 57– 60 Smith, John David, 57 Sollors, Werner, 38 “Some Words with a Mummy” (Poe), 8 Spillers, Hortense, xxxii Stern, Julia, xxx Stevenson, R. L., xxvi–xxvii, 111, 115n, 116n Stoker, Bram, 122n Stoppard, Lothrop, 112 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, xxix, xxx, xxxii, 36, 37, 53–54, 63 Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Stevenson), xxvi Sundquist, Eric, xxvii, 18, 26, 93, 105 Swann, Charles, 18 Symmes, John Cleves, 18 Sypher, Wylie, xix

travel writing, 19–23, 26, 35–37 Tucker, George, 4 Turner, Arlin, 56 Turner, Nat, xxii, 4, 12, 30, 34 Twain, Mark, xxvii–xxix, xxxi–xxxii, 94, 116n Types of Mankind (Nott and Gliddon), 23

Tate, Claudia, 61 Tillinghast, J. A., 92, 93, 104 Toll, Robert, 28 transformation, xxx; in “Another Instance of a Negro Turning White” (anon.), 5– 6; in House behind the Cedars, 88 – 89

yellow fever as metaphor, 65 Young, Elizabeth, 61 Young, Robert, 7, 23, 91

Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), xxix–xxx, xxxii Van Evrie, J. H., xxx, xxxi Waiting for the Verdict (Davis), 56–57 Walker, David, xx, 4 Walpole, Horace, xxiv, 63, 69, 119n Washington, Booker T., 81 Wells, H. G., 108, 111 What Answer? (Dickinson), 56 White, Walter, 113 “ William Wilson” (Poe), xxvii Williams, Stanley, 18 Williamson, Joel, 53, 55, 80, 83 Winter, Kari, 21, 63 Wollstonecraft, Mary, xviii, 21 Wright, Richard, 110, 121n

Zolflora, or, The Generous Negro Girl (Picquenard), xvii–xviii Zolfloya; or, The Moor (Dacre), xviii