Family Money: Property, Race, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century

Posted in Books, History, Law, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Monographs, Slavery, United States on 2013-06-10 00:00Z by Steven

Family Money: Property, Race, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century

Oxford University Press
November 2012
224 Pages
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780199897704

Jeffory A. Clymer, Professor of English
University of Kentucky

  • Sophisticated interdisciplinary treatment of literature’s interaction with the law
  • Dramatically revises scholarship on racial identity by emphasizing race’s connection to family and property rights
  • Demonstrates that race was entwined with economics well beyond direct issue of slavery in the nineteenth century
  • Nuanced, flexible, non-doctrinaire interpretations of both well-known and less familiar literary works

Family Money explores the histories of formerly enslaved women who tried to claim inheritances left to them by deceased owners, the household traumas of mixed-race slaves, post-Emancipation calls for reparations, and the economic fallout from anti-miscegenation marriage laws. Authors ranging from Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frank Webb, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Chesnutt, to Lydia Maria Child recognized that intimate interracial relationships took myriad forms, often simultaneously-sexual, marital, coercive, familial, pleasurable, and painful. Their fiction confirms that the consequences of these relationships for nineteenth-century Americans meant thinking about more than the legal structure of racial identity. Who could count as family (and when), who could own property (and when), and how racial difference was imagined (and why) were emphatically bound together. Demonstrating that notions of race were entwined with economics well beyond the direct issue of slavery, Family Money reveals interracial sexuality to be a volatile mixture of emotion, economics, and law that had dramatic, long-term financial consequences.

Table of Contents

  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction
  • 1. “This Most Illegal Family”: Sex, Slavery, and the Politics of Inheritance
  • 2. Blood, Truth, and Consequences: Partus Sequitur Ventrem and the Problem of Legal Title
  • 3. Plantation Heiress Fiction, Slavery, and the Properties of White Marriage
  • 4. Reparations for Slavery and Lydia Maria Child’s Reconstruction of the Family
  • 5. The Properties of Marriage in Chesnutt and Hopkins
  • Coda “Race Feeling”
  • Notes
  • Index
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Blood relations: The cultural work of miscegenation in nineteenth-century American literature

Posted in Dissertations, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, United States on 2011-08-21 02:07Z by Steven

Blood relations: The cultural work of miscegenation in nineteenth-century American literature

University of Pennsylvania
1999, 282 pages
Publication Number: AAT 9937719
ISBN: 9780599389762

Leigh Holladay Edwards, Associate Professor of English
Florida State University

A DISSERTATION in English Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

“Blood Relations” analyzes the way nineteenth-century literary texts use racial mixture to explore cultural anxieties about subjectivity and national identity. As many scholars have detailed, nineteenth century Anglo-America overwhelmingly rejected actual, literal interracial sex and reproduction between white and non-white races. Yet I show that on a symbolic level, the dominant white culture actively invoked metaphors of mixing in order to define itself. While it would be more conventional to argue that nineteenth-century culture ignored or suppressed miscegenation because it wanted to believe in racial purity, I illustrate that the culture shaped notions of race not by repressing mixture but rather by obsessively focusing on it. Intermixture emerges as a popular literary trope in the nineteenth century at the same time that amalgamation was becoming more socially and legally taboo. The literary focus on mixing is a way of micro-managing it, encouraging people to think about the interracial in certain ways, not in others. This process of cultural management through endless discussion is similar to nineteenth-century discourses about sexuality; as Foucault has shown us, the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie did not ignore sex, they endlessly talked about it, and their routinized ways of talking about sex worked to narrow and restrict sexual identities. Similarly, American race consciousness requires a discussion of the interracial in order to sustain itself. If Americans had not had interracial sex, their writers would have had to invent it.

I analyze works by writers such as Hawthorne, Melville, Chopin, Twain, and Helen Hunt Jackson, as well as popular Pocahontas narratives and the 1863 miscegenation pamphlet in which the term was coined. These representations titillated readers with America’s “open secret” of mixture, speaking to its paradoxical status as both social taboo and defining factor of self and nation. While distancing themselves from literal mixing, these writers simultaneously deploy symbolic intermixing, using mixture metaphorically to stage notions of the identity and the relationship between ideas of nation, gender, and race. I argue that we should place representations of mixture not at the periphery, but at the center of accounts of nineteenth-century culture.

Table of Contents

  • Introduction
  • Chapter One: Amalgamation and the National Imaginary in Hawthorne and Melville
  • Chapter Two: Tricky Business: Racial Mixture as Hoax in Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson
  • Section Introduction: Gendering Interracial Mixture
  • Chapter Three: Women as the Source of Mixture in “Desiree’s Baby
  • Chapter Four: Women and Assimilation in Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona
  • Chapter Five: The United Colors of Pocahontas: America’s Obsession with Race Mixing
  • Bibliography

Purchase the dissertation here.

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