Transgressing Racial and Sexual Boundaries in Nella Larsen’s Passing and Danzy Senna’s Caucasia
By
Stamatia Koutsimani
A dissertation submitted to the Department of American Literature and Culture, School of English, Faculty of Philosophy of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, in
partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts.
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
September 2008
Transgressing Racial and Sexual Boundaries in Nella Larsen’s Passing and Danzy Senna’s Caucasia
By
Stamatia Koutsimani Has been approved
September 2008
APPROVED:
Supervisory Committee
ACCEPTED:
Department Chairperson
To My Family
Acknowledgements………iv
Abstract………v
Introduction………..1
Chapter One: From Tragic Mulatta Narratives to Passing Texts………19
Chapter Two: The Case of Passing……….39
Chapter Three: The Case of Caucasia………..88
Epilogue………...131
Works Cited………..137
Biographical Note………..143
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Words are not enough to describe how grateful I am to Dr. Zoe Detsi- Diamanti. Her teaching has been a source of inspiration during both my undergraduate and graduate studies program and I would like to thank her for being the supervisor of my MA thesis. Her comments and suggestions have always given me food for thought and this has helped me to improve my writing skills in order to achieve my goal. Her constant support has boosted my self-confidence, which I needed to go on with studying. By always being kind and patient with me, she has encouraged me to do my best in every stage of the process.
I also wish to express my gratitude to Dr. Domna Pastourmatzi for being the second reader of my MA thesis. Working with her for the first time has proven to be a very positive experience. Thanks to her patience and support, I was motivated to work harder and fulfill her expectations. Without her useful advice and practical help I would not have completed this project.
In addition, I would like to thank my parents and my sister for always standing by me. Their love and patience have been sources of relief during my studies.
Finally, I am grateful to all the professors of the Department of American Literature and Culture. Their knowledge and guidance have contributed to my progress and I really appreciate their help.
ABSTRACT
The complex presence of the mulatta figure in American cultural history is mostly reflected in twentieth-century narratives of passing where the light-skinned enough to pass Negress becomes a vehicle for challenging both the color line and the very notions of blackness and whiteness. Contrary to nineteenth-century whites’
stereotypical representations of the “tragic mulatta” as a victim of her divided racial heritage, the use of the passing mulatta by twentieth-century biracial female authors has served to criticize racial as well as gender essentialisms. In this respect, this thesis will focus on Nella Larsen’s Passing, published in 1929 and Danzy Senna’s Caucasia, published in 1998, trying to show how the changing representation of the passing mulatta characters reflects the gradual reversal of the tragic mulatta myth and reveals the interconnections among race, gender, class and sexuality in different sociopolitical contexts. By examining the authors’ use of the passing mulatta as a trope through which to question the dominant political and racial ideology of their time, the thesis will attempt to explain how the biracial female characters’
transgression of racial and gender boundaries contributes to the understanding of identity as constructed and performed. More specifically, the reading of Passing and Caucasia will be based on Judith Butler’s concept of gender performativity and Catherine Rottenberg’s theoretical discussion of race performativity. In addition, Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality, which is central to Valerie Smith’s notion of black feminism, will play a major role in the analysis of the two works.
Based on a comparative analysis of the novels, the thesis will draw attention to the central mulatta characters’ search for racial and gender identities, with a view to tracing potential changes in the authors’ employment of the passing theme in the
increasingly multicultural US racial context. Moreover, by highlighting the passing novels’ difference from stereotypical depictions of mulatta figures, the thesis aims at responding to questions regarding racial dualism and ongoing debates over mixed race identity. On the whole, it will reveal that the biracial female authors’
representations of the permeable borders between identity categories serve to challenge dominant cultural understandings of racial and gender differences which have long contributed to the mulatta figure’s liminal status in American society.
Introduction
Although since the nineteenth century American race relations have primarily been written in terms of black and white, a close examination of the development of black/white biracial identity raises questions about the system of racial categorization and the controversial notions of blackness and whiteness in the early twenty-first- century US racial context. Interestingly, for black/white biracial persons, light- skinned enough to be taken for white, the process of self-definition is particularly complex, since multiple border crossings contribute to the constant transformation of their subjectivity. In this sense, a critical focus on literary representations of mulatto figures passing for white serves not only to reveal the fluidity and fragmentation of racial identities, but also to highlight the parallel roles gender, class and sexuality play in the understanding of the concept of race. In fact, in American society, racial passing – being basically a phenomenon of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – emerged as a dominant literary theme in the first half of the twentieth century but became again popular in the late 1990s. Importantly enough, the literary trope of passing has been adopted and adapted by black/white biracial women writers whose works shed light on the construction of racial and gender identities in different sociopolitical contexts.
Despite the general preoccupation with the mulatto in American society, one is surprised to find that over the past years there has not been any systematic attempt to examine how black/white biracial female authors have dealt with the stereotype of the tragic mulatta in their stories of racial passing. The primary aim of this thesis is to show that in novels by twentieth-century black/white biracial women, the passing mulatta, more than any other literary figure, works to question notions of race based
on a strict black/white binary as well as racialized constructs of gender, class and sexuality.1 Therefore, it can be argued that these writers’ texts, by drawing attention to the problematic construction of identity categories in a white supremacist context, allow American readers to reflect on the discrepancy between the myths of “pure”
whiteness and “authentic” blackness and the reality of the multiple aspects of mixed race identity. Far from imitating nineteenth-century fictional representations of the tragic mulatta, twentieth-century biracial female authors focus on the mulatta figure
“as the representative of American anxieties of miscegenation, patriarchy, citizenship and legal racial classification” in their narratives of passing (Sherrard-Johnson 862).
Indeed, it is this challenge to narrate the experiences associated with a biracial woman’s split identity that is posed in biracial female authors’ passing texts in which representations of mulattas problematize identity categories and their construction at different historical moments.
In fact, black/white biracial women writers who offer their readers particularly full thematic representations of passing are hard to find, with the exception of the Harlem Renaissance writer Nella Larsen and the contemporary author Danzy Senna.
More specifically, Larsen is the only biracial woman of her era who so openly expresses her interest in the passing theme, as shown by the very title of her novel Passing, published in 1929. Passing, being the first novel written by a black/white biracial woman in the twentieth century, requires special attention, since it prepares the ground for a body of literary works by biracial women writers willing to react to essentialist notions of the mulatta figure. Although Larsen’s initiative indeed constitutes a challenge to the nineteenth-century white male literary tradition and the
1 Stephen Small argues that all social formations in contemporary American society are racialized, which means that “they are systematically organized around beliefs about race” (262). Drawing a distinction between the terms “racialized” and “racist,” he attempts to define “racist” ideologies “in terms of the intentions of those promoting them, the content of the ideologies themselves, and the outcomes that they have or are likely to have for different racialized groups” (271).
stereotype of the tragic mulatta, there have been no other biracial women’s novels dedicated to passing until the last years of the twentieth century.2 In particular, the late twentieth-century biracial author Danzy Senna has offered one of the most recent representations of racial passing in her novel Caucasia, published in 1998.3 At this point, it should be noted that Caucasia is automatically in dialogue with Passing because Senna is the first black/white biracial woman writer who responds to Larsen’s work with a full-scale treatment of the passing theme. On Senna’s part, this resurgence of interest in the passing trope raises the possibility of a kind of literary continuousness that is worth paying attention to. Thus, the focus of this thesis will be on Passing and Caucasia, which, despite being written in different sociopolitical contexts, give readers new insights into the complex issue of biracial female subjectivity.
Actually, the popularity of the passing theme during the period of the Harlem Renaissance and then again in the last decade of the twentieth century raises questions about potential changes in Larsen’s and Senna’s treatment of the theme and what kind of solutions they offered to the problem of their unstable racial and gender identity.
Because of the time gap that separates the two biracial women authors’ works, Senna’s representations of mulatta characters are likely to reveal her reaction to her predecessor’s portrayals of mulattas almost seventy years before her own. The fact
2 Since the publication of Larsen’s Passing in 1929, the theme of passing has been employed in very few texts until the 1990s. The only women writers who used the theme were the Jewish author Fannie Hurst and her African-American counterpart Toni Morrison. Despite the popularity of Hurst’s 1933 passing novel Imitation of Life, Morrison just invoked the concept in Song of Solomon and Jazz, published in 1977 and 1992 respectively. As Juda Bennett notes, “these novels [Song of Solomon and Jazz] present the passing figure indirectly through memories that are partially lost, distorted, or made ambiguous in the telling” (2). For more details about these works, see Harrison-Kahan, “Passing” (19) and Bennett (2-3).
3 Examples of late twentieth-century passing texts include Charles Johnson’s The Oxherding Tale, published in 1982, John Gregory Brown’s 1994 novel Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery, Donald McCaig’s 1998 historical novel Jacob’s Ladder, Ralph Ellison’s posthumously published 1999 novel Juneteenth and Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, published in 2000. For details, see Bennett (9) and Suzanne W. Jones (220).
that Senna dares to begin her career with Caucasia, a novel whose theme might sound anachronistic at the turn of the century, implies that she has felt the need to make her own innovative contribution to the passing narrative. In any case, the concerns voiced by a black/white biracial woman writer are to a large extent shaped by the dominant political and racial ideology of her time. While in Passing Larsen contributes to the gradual reversal of the tragic mulatta myth, in Caucasia Senna complicates notions of mixed race identity by reinventing the passing theme. What this thesis will reveal is that both writers promote a new understanding of the female mulatto’s status in American society by presenting gender and race as mutually dependent constructions which further emphasize the already unstable notion of identity.
On the whole, this thesis will focus on Nella Larsen’s Passing and Danzy Senna’s Caucasia trying to show how the changing representation of passing mulatta characters in these twentieth-century novels attests to the dynamic process of biracial women’s identity formation and calls into question the authenticity of racial and gender identities. Through a comparative analysis of Passing and Caucasia it will also attempt to trace potential differences or similarities in the passing mulattas’
representation and consciousness with a view to examining any changes in the prevailing racial ideology of early twenty-first-century American multicultural society. In order to show how Passing and Caucasia differ from stereotypical depictions of mixed race identity, the thesis will provide a reading of the works which will be based on African-American feminist theory, the concept of intersectionality and the notions of race and gender performativity.4 By drawing attention to the mulatta characters’ struggle for a satisfying self-definition, it will reveal the
4 The notion of black feminism that will be used in this thesis grows out of Valerie Smith’s argument that “there can be no black feminism without intersectionality” (Not Just Race xvi). More specifically, the reading of Passing and Caucasia will be based on Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality.
Furthermore, Judith Butler’s concept of gender performativity and Catherine Rottenberg’s theoretical discussion of race performativity will play a central role in the analysis of the two works.
interdependency of various identity categories and the authors’ attempt to challenge fixed notions of identity and of each specific category. More importantly, this thesis will highlight the authors’ ways of dealing with racial ambiguity, showing that both Larsen and Senna interrogate racial dualism and promote the validation of multiple identities.
The arguments regarding biracial women’s racial and gender identity construction will not be clear without some necessary clarifications. What needs to be explained is the theory and methodology used in the analysis of Passing and Caucasia as well as some terms that will often appear in the thesis.
Theory and Methodology
Above all, any attempt to study passing texts in which the color line is crossed by mulatta characters requires a further theoretical discussion of the concepts of race and gender. To begin with, the very theme of passing brings to the surface questions about the idea of race and how it operates in American society. Following Louis Miron and Jonathan Inda’s critical approach to the subject, Catherine Rottenberg aptly argues that race must be conceived of as performative repetition.5 In her own words,
“race performativity is the power of discourse to bring about what it names through the citing or repetition of racial norms” (437). In fact, racial norms, typically produced by those in positions of power, are likely to change depending on the particular historical moment and the relevant context. In a white supremacist society, for example, racial norms are reflected in a hierarchically arranged system of racial dualism in which white is always privileged over black. To a large extent, these norms bring together a series of arbitrarily chosen elements combined in equally arbitrary
5 The understanding of race as performative repetition implies that racial identity is constantly constructed through a set of repeated social practices produced and circulated by the relations of power existing within a given society.
ways so as to maintain dominant social hierarchies. Thus, from a white supremacist perspective, whiteness is linked to positive attributes of intellect and behavior, such as intelligence and morality, while blackness to apparently negative ones, such as instinct and licentiousness. In this respect, Rottenberg goes on to argue that “race performativity compels subjects to perform according to […] ‘fictitious’ unities, thus shaping their identity and their preferences” (437). Given that the binary opposition between black and white has been the dominant one with regard to race in American society, it should be noted that passing – being itself a performative act – has certain implications for the unquestioned invisibility of whiteness. If whiteness can be performed, it seems that it must no longer be viewed as a meaningless, unmarked category but rather be acknowledged as a racial categorization.6 Ironically, it was the inadequacy of the old-fashioned scientific definition of race as a visual phenomenon that led to its understanding as performative repetition which does not have to depend on skin color. Based on the naturalistic science of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the use of visual markers, such as skin color, to conceive of race primarily failed to highlight the cultural construction of white racial identity. The theory of performativity has actually been introduced by Judith Butler in detail, in her book Bodies That Matter, in which she focuses on the notion of gender performativity. For Butler, gender itself lacks essence and identity formation results from the reiteration
6 As Kobena Marcer states, “one of the signs of the times is that we really don’t know what ‘white’ is.
[…]. The real challenge in the new cultural politics of difference is to make ‘whiteness’ visible for the first time, as a culturally constructed ethnic identity historically contingent upon the disavowal and violent denial of difference” (qtd. in Keating 904). On the recent demand for the analysis of white as a racialized category, see also Keating (901-09). For more information on current views of whiteness as simultaneously racial and cultural, see Ruth Frankenberg (19-21).
of performances that have to do with arbitrarily established gender norms.7 Although Butler’s analysis indeed aimed at emphasizing the involuntary nature of performativity, this did not seem to suggest the impossibility of applying the theory to other notions apart from gender.8 On the whole, both gender and race performativity tend to imply that identity is something that one acquires and “performs”
mechanically through repetition, an idea which underlies all narratives of passing.
It should be remembered that postmodernist discourse, by drawing attention to heterogeneity and the decentered subject, encourages the critique of essentialist notions of identity in a white supremacist social context. Focusing on the need for a revised identity politics, bell hooks notes that “postmodern critiques of essentialism which challenge notions of universality and static over-determined identity within mass culture and mass consciousness can open up new possibilities for the construction of self and the assertion of agency” (Yearning 28). In particular, the belief in essential racial differences underlying the ideology of racial dualism has long been associated with the mixed race subject’s problematic racial categorization. In this sense, employing the critique of racial essentialism in favor of postmodern conceptions of identity would allow racially mixed persons to acquire a voice of their own and confront the issue of racism. Similarly, for supporters of postmodernism, fixed notions of gendered, class and sexual identities are also among the products of essentialism and should be put into question.9 Thus, it seems that postmodern
7 For short references to the performative construction of gender identity, see Butler, Gender Trouble (24-25), (33) and Bodies (x). Perhaps not accidentally, this theory of identity was much criticized because of “the split between agency and social construction that theorists have described as characteristic of performativity” (Goldsmith 97). In this respect, the debate over whether gender, as a construction, presupposes a subject that performs it or operates deterministically at the expense of human agency has been the source of much controversy.
8 For a thorough analysis of the concept of gender performativity, see Butler, Bodies (27-56) and Gender Trouble (1-34). On Butler’s response to criticism of the notion of performativity, see also Butler, Bodies (121-42).
9 For a close examination of the postmodern critique of “identity” and its impact on the understanding of African-American experience, see hooks, Yearning (26-31).
sensibility is a rather necessary prerequisite for the better understanding of the complex process of identity formation, dominant in narratives of racial passing.
In the United States, where racial and ethnic categorization is central to the construction of social and political identities, racialized minorities whose multiple identities are fragmented by category politics threaten supposedly fixed boundaries drawn for the purposes of white domination. Interestingly, the focus on mixed race subjectivity in biracial female authors’ stories of mulattas who transgress the color line offers readers a unique opportunity to understand the diverse ways in which race and gender principally – but also class and sexuality – determine the changing dynamics of identity. In fact, from a black feminist perspective, these social and cultural categories interact and awareness of their interdependency allows individuals to challenge ideas of a uniform model of black womanhood and, by extension, a homogeneous women’s or black experience. More specifically, the term
“intersectionality” has been coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in her attempt to describe the particular interactions of race and gender as they shape everyday experience.10 Reflecting on Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality, Smith explains that “Kimberlé Crenshaw uses the concept of ‘intersectionality’ to theorize the black feminist critique of single-axis feminist or antiracist frameworks. The notion of intersectionality points to the recognition that race and gender are not mutually exclusive, but rather are interlocking categories of experience” (“Reading” 43). The inseparability of race and gender as shown in narratives of passing in which female passers are more often punished than male ones points to the possibility of reading these texts intersectionally. Not surprisingly, the practice of reading intersectionally on the basis
10 The theory of intersectionality serves to broaden feminist and antiracist analyses by highlighting the multidimensionality of black women’s experience, which reflects the complex interactions of gender and race. In this sense, both sexist expectations of chastity and racist assumptions of sexual promiscuity that black females have to confront reveal the intersection of race and sex. For more information on the concept of intersectionality and in particular the intersection of race and sex, see Crenshaw (208-38).
of African-American feminist theory reveals how the rhetoric of white supremacy and its forms of cultural imposition have determined power relations at the expense of all blacks and all women across time.11 In this sense, myths of progress, civilization and liberalism underlying Western colonial ideologies have functioned to maintain white cultural hegemony and reinforce the multiple levels of discrimination that subordinate groups face due to their intersectional identities. Moreover, intersectionality as a mode of textual analysis for passing narratives allows for the examination of the multiple aspects of identity that come closer to representing the mixed race self. Such interpretations tend to challenge fixed binarisms and emphasize the negotiations of race, gender, class and sexuality on which the survival of the mixed race female character depends.
Some Useful Terms
In the first place, the study of black/white biracial women characters’
representations in passing novels presupposes a basic understanding of the problem of racial ambiguity of which the famous DuBoisian term “double consciousness” is mostly indicative. In fact, double consciousness was used to refer to the fundamental cultural contradiction underlying all African-American experience, as described by the black scholar W. E. B. Du Bois in his work The Souls of Black Folk: “One ever feels his two-ness,–an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (364-65). The duality of black identity seems to be a more explicit problem in the case of the light-skinned passing Negro, who has the potential to move between black and white worlds. In this respect, mulattoes are seen as the
11 Alternative approaches to black feminist politics have been promoted by various female critics, including Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing (10), Ann duCille (6-7), Patricia Hill Collins (184-207) and Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby” (57-87).
ultimate marginal figures whose very existence represents the testing of the boundaries between two racial worlds considered distinct and separable.12 Ironically, it is the proper boundaries of whiteness that have to be defined given that “pure”
whiteness has been an inaccurate concept throughout the American nation’s history.
If, for example, mulattoes cannot be classified as white despite their white complexion, then whiteness should be viewed as a product of culture that is socially constructed. Taking into consideration the “melting-pot” ideal, dominant in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American society, one is not surprised that by the mid-twentieth century whiteness had been consolidated through the establishment of the category “Caucasian.”13 Reflecting on the relationship between “white” and
“Caucasian,” Jacobson notes that “to become ‘Caucasian’ in the 1920s and after, […]
was not simply to be ‘white’ […]; it was to be conclusively, certifiably, scientifically white. ‘Caucasian’ identity represents a whiteness discovered and apprehended by that regime of knowledge whose cultural authority is greatest” (95). In other words, the idea of a Caucasian race came to represent a unified whiteness that was understood as a category created and policed by scientific authority. The process of becoming Caucasian was part of a long tendency toward homogenizing whiteness which was necessary for American identity in various political contexts.14 The development of racial consciousness seems then a convenient way to perpetuate dichotomies that usually favor specific groups of people and lead to the oppression of others.
12 Hazel V. Carby aptly argues that “the mulatto figure is a narrative device of mediation; it allows for a fictional exploration of the relationship between the races while being at the same time an imaginary expression of the relationship between the races” (Reconstructing 171).
13 For information on the melting pot concept, its origin and use in American society, see Samuel P.
Huntington (128-29) and Harryette Mullen (83).
14 For a detailed account of the social, political and cultural factors that contributed to the manufacture and maintenance of “Caucasian” whiteness, see Jacobson (202-22).
From the nineteenth century onward, in real life as well as in literary forms including fiction and drama, black/white biracial men and women were classified as black according to the dominant mode of hypo-descent. As Valerie Smith explains,
“the ‘hypo-descent’ rule, acknowledged historically by the federal courts, the U.S.
census bureau, and other agencies of the state, assigned people of mixed racial origin to the status of the subordinated racial group” (Not Just Race 38). Therefore, mixed race came to be associated with a supposedly inferior social status, as also shown by the term “mulatto,” used to refer to black/white biracial persons in order to emphasize their racial “impurity.” Until it was taken off the U.S. census in 1920, the term, derived from the word “mule,” carried negative connotations not only of sterility and weakness but also of marginality in a deeply racialized world.15 Reflecting on mulatto being, Hortense J. Spillers observes that:
The mulatto/a embodied an alibi, an excuse for ‘other/otherness’ that the dominant culture could not (cannot now either) appropriate, or wish away. An accretion of signs that embody the ‘unspeakable,’ of the Everything that the dominant culture would forget, the mulatto/a, as term, designates a disguise, covers up in the century of Emancipation and beyond, the social and political reality of the dreaded African presence. (“Notes” 165-66)
Even in the most challenging cases of light-skinned mulattoes, whose racial categorization could not be based on the observation of black bodies, racial identity construction was determined by the possession of a few invisible drops of black blood. The so-called “one-drop” rule was used “to classify those with any perceivable
15 For a brief definition of the law of hypo-descent, see Jonathan Brennan (2) and Naomi Pabst (178).
On the origin of the word mulatto and its use in American society, see also Barbara Christian, Black Women (16). On the other hand, for an explanation of the difference between the one-drop and the related hypo-descent rules, see Valerie Smith, Not Just Race (38).
or arguable African American heritage as ‘black’” (Brennan 15). The irrationality of the “one-drop” rule, applied exclusively to the group of African Americans in the United States, attests to the unpredictability of the mulatto’s fate in a white supremacist context. Thus, what is clear is that white obsession with fixed racial categories has long been prevalent in American society.
Significantly, any attempt to examine texts that deal with racial identity formation in the United States requires exploring the issue of race and black/white race relations at different moments in American cultural history. Following this historical overview, the readers will be better prepared for Larsen’s and Senna’s treatment of mulatta characters in Passing and Caucasia.
American Society and Miscegenation
It should be acknowledged that the cultivation of different forms of racial consciousness in the United States was the inevitable product of America’s imperialistic schemes and economic expansion which had peaked in the late nineteenth century.16 As Timothy B. Powell observes with regard to nineteenth- century American expansionism, “[the] collision between the forces of imperial expansion and the nativist contraction of ‘American’ citizenship created a proliferation of competing nationalisms” (13). In this respect, the discourse of empire, by emphasizing white supremacy, had served to establish arbitrary racial divisions and justify the exploitation of the racial Other. On the other hand, another ideological dimension of American imperialist discourse had to do with the ways in which it
16 As Michael Banton notes, racial consciousness “is greatest when it evokes an identification of ‘us’
and ‘them,’ and this is most potent when the groups differ in their power and their access to valued resources, like well-paying occupations” (44). For an examination of white people’s measures that led to the growth of racial consciousness in the United States, see also Banton (63-68).
created and maintained gender relations.17 The interests of the nation as it is defined in terms of a dominant white masculinity were promoted by imperial practices mostly at the expense of colonized women’s needs.18 Racism and sexism are typically among the primary effects of imperialism no matter what forms it may take across time, which also raises the issue of the inextricability of race and gender as social categories. It is in response to these processes that in the mid-twentieth century Frantz Fanon, well known for his ideas about the colonized and oppressed subjects, explored the forms of consciousness developed by colonized peoples of color forced to live under white supremacist rule in his book Black Skin White Masks. For Fanon, the resistance to the rhetoric of white supremacy presupposes “the open door of every consciousness” that will result in a new understanding of the self, as explained by Chéla Sandoval: “Fanon’s ‘open door of consciousness’ refers not only to a location of access and departure but to a site of crossing, transition, translocation, and metamorphosis where identity alters and is mutated” (104). What is expected then is the subject’s willingness to deconstruct rigid social categories and accept the changing nature of his or her identity. In this sense, the concern with identity politics constitutes an important stage in the process of resisting stereotypical representations of the racial Other in every context where white people are trying to maintain their cultural hegemony.
Throughout the history of the United States, the concept of race, used as one of the defining components of American national identity, has been the source of much controversy. In contemporary American society, for instance, conflicting demands for either an adequate definition of race or the rejection of the term reflect
17 Laura Chrisman draws attention to “the gendering of colonialist discourse” and “the racialization of categories of gender within colonial and dominant metropolitan discourses” (193-94).
18 For a detailed discussion of the place of women and gender in colonial discourse, see Ania Loomba (69-79) and Anne McClintock (1-17).
the problematic role race has played in the process of individual and collective identity formation.19 Preoccupation with American identity involved racial categorization ever since the Founding Fathers promoted American republican ideology on which the nation’s dream of unity and homogeneity depended. In the nineteenth century, the concentration of various racial and ethnic groups within the geographic boundaries of the United States resulted in the increasing cultural diversity of the nation’s population, thus making race the most prominent signifier of difference. Among the peoples who played the role of the racial Other, African Americans apparently posed such a threat to the racial “purity” of the Anglo- American society that black and white became the binary poles in a hierarchically arranged system of racial dualism. In real life, even well into the twentieth century, defining a black person as Other practically meant marginalization and exclusion or even violent extermination. Thus, it was mainly racially mixed persons, whose traces of hybridity were not always sufficient evidence of violating racial boundaries, that mostly undermined the authority of the dominant white group.20
Although racial mixing is not new in the United States, it seems that black/white miscegenation has had a unique impact on American imagination across time. From a white supremacist perspective, according to Matthew Frye Jacobson, things get complicated when “contradictory racial identities come to coexist at the same moment in the same body in unstable combinations, as the specific histories that generated them linger in various cultural forms or in the social and political
19 For more information on the complicated production of the discourse of race in nineteenth and twentieth-century American society, see Robyn Wiegman (21-42). What one means by concepts such as race and racism has often preoccupied many twentieth-century critics. For an insightful analysis of both concepts, see Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Race” (1-20), (402-09) and John Solomos (198-211). On contemporary racial politics and recent debates on the idea of race and the crisis of raciology in the United States, see Paul Gilroy, Against Race (11-53), “Urban Social Movements” (404-20) and Jon Michael Spencer (131-64).
20 Reflecting on the “logic” of race in American culture, Robyn Wiegman draws attention to the
“recurrent and discursively, if not always materially, violent equation between the idea of ‘race’ and the ‘black’ body” (21).
relationships that are their legacies” (142). The nineteenth-century antimiscegenation laws prohibited marriage between blacks and whites in most states until 1967, when the Supreme Court held them unconstitutional.21 The act of miscegenation dates back to the period of slavery during which black/white intermixing was not recognized as a crime, despite being mostly forced rather than freely chosen. In pre-Civil War America, illegitimate mixed race children of black female slaves and their white masters were largely deprived of the privileges of the white group. However, after the end of slavery, legislation proved no sufficient deterrent to interracial unions and white men’s fear of miscegenation deepened so much that new complex ways of marginalizing racially mixed persons had to be found and maintained.22
Importantly enough, throughout the twentieth century, American obsession with white racial purity was reflected in social practices of racial categorization that made interracial people invisible. More specifically, the U.S. census relied on monoracial classifications from 1920 to 2000, when racially mixed persons were for the first time allowed to check all ethnic categories that applied to their identity. In addition, it is interesting that until 1989 American hospitals assigned babies the racial status of the nonwhite parent.23 Such facts indicate that interracial relationships remain deeply problematic in contemporary American society. Ironically, although since the late 1960s Americans have become more tolerant of black/white marriages, racially mixed young people are often unsure of their choice of ethnicity and hesitate to acknowledge their mixed ancestry.24 Thus, in the early twenty-first-century US
21 On the Supreme Court decision that struck down these laws, see Linda Williams (180) and Jones (210).
22 For more historical information on interracial relationships in the United States, see Anita Kathy Foeman and Teresa Nance (541-42). On the changing definitions of miscegenation in nineteenth- century American society, see also Williams (180-82).
23 For relevant information about twentieth-century practices that contributed to the repression of mixed race subjectivity, see Jones (229-30).
24 For details about late twentieth-century Americans’ attitude to interracial couples and their children, see Jones (210).
racial context, the negotiation of biracial and even more complex multiracial identities tends to become a thorny issue, which cannot be easily ignored.
The perpetuation of certain myths, well-known in the twentieth century, was the most efficient way of discouraging legalized relationships between black women and white men, arguably considered the ultimate threat to white patriarchy.25 Anita Kathy Foeman and Teresa Nance identify the “areas of mythology surrounding Black- White interracial couples,” focusing on “psychological issues of the Black-White couple,” “negative genetic outcomes of interracial coupling” and “psychological shortcomings of interracial children” (542-43). For example, the most popular myth surrounding black/white sexual unions relates to the idea that black men and women have an unusually strong sex drive.26 Although support for the myth regarding black sexuality is limited in early twenty-first-century America, the persistence of some genetic myths suggests that mixed race individuals are still subject to exclusion and racism. Such myths are commonly based on beliefs that blacks are intellectually inferior to whites and, therefore, black/white offspring will “lower” the white race.
Other myths regarding biracial children overemphasize their psychological problems, thus perpetuating their image as social outcasts.27 As might be expected, since the nineteenth century, the use of these myths had served the interests of white supremacists in positions of power, who wanted to brainwash all members of the white race and uphold their political imperialism. In fact, the myths remained dominant in twentieth-century American society because they were largely promoted
25 For bell hooks “explanations as to why marriages between black men and white women are more readily accepted than marriages between white men and black women can be found in patriarchal sexual politics” (Ain’t I 64). For further information on the continued devaluation of black womanhood since the end of slavery, see hooks, Ain’t I (51-86).
26 On the issue of black male and female sexuality, see Foeman and Nance (543).
27 For a detailed discussion of myths and twentieth-century theories regarding interracial unions recently questioned in the United States, see Foeman and Nance (542-48). For example, perhaps the most enduring social theory surrounding black/white unions is that blacks marry whites for status whereas whites marry blacks in an attempt to act out, to punish parents or make a social statement.
and internalized through popular culture. This has facilitated the ongoing repression of biracial subjectivity, a phenomenon that attests to contemporary Americans’
inability to deal with the problem of racial ambiguity.
Interestingly, although in the early twenty-first century racial identity for biracial individuals involves choosing between available options, mixed race people with African-American ancestry that have traditionally been assigned an African- American identity are still – and sometimes willingly – identified as black. Arguing that an appreciation of blackness will not happen unless the black community opens up new space for those who choose to be biracially black, Jon Michael Spencer radically suggests that “the black community must accept as black those of mixed race who want to be black-identified, even though they may not look black and may not know what it feels like to be discriminated against on a daily basis like darker- skinned people” (161). It seems then that what might fill black/white biracial people with anxiety about the possibility of a simultaneous incorporation into and separation from blackness is the particular way gender influences the racial identity development process. More specifically, Kerry Ann Rockquemore, in her insightful analysis of how gender affects the process of racial identity construction among black/white biracial women, argues that “gender is experienced at the most intimate levels of social interaction, differentiating the ways in which men and women find their Blackness validated, or invalidated, by others” (499). Indeed, in today’s gendered and racialized interactional context, the tension between light-skinned biracial and black women undermines the former’s sense of group acceptance, thus urging them to finally proclaim a biracial identity.28
28 In her attempt to explain the contested relations between black and biracial women, Rockquemore, focusing on marriage market factors, notes that “social experiences of race are fundamentally gendered because they occur within the cultural valuation of white-defined beauty and a patriarchal structure of mate selection” (498).
On the other hand, the representation of mulatto figures in literature was initially based on rather predictable literary conventions which resulted in the creation of the so-called Tragic Mulatto stereotype.29 At this point, it is clear that more historical information about literary representations of mulatta characters and passing will raise readers’ awareness of the ideological issues underlying the analysis of Passing and Caucasia. The use of tragic mulatta narratives and passing texts will be discussed in Chapter One, while Chapter Two and Chapter Three will focus on Passing and Caucasia respectively.
29 Werner Sollors notes that “Sterling A. Brown appears to have been the first to call attention to the literary ‘stereotype’ of the Tragic Mulatto in a systematic fashion, and to have named it” (223). For a detailed presentation of the central elements Brown used to define the concept of the “Tragic Mulatto,”
see Sollors (223-25).
Chapter One:
From Tragic Mulatta Narratives to Passing Texts
The Nineteenth-Century Tragic Mulatta Stereotype
Mulatto characters, introduced in fiction and drama by white male and female authors during the antebellum period, were all light-skinned enough to be taken for whites, although their adventures differed on the basis of their sex.30 As M. Giulia Fabi notices, “what spelled the tragic fate of these in-between figures, in fact, was the supposedly clear differentiation and in-compatibility of the races, which fed the reassuring conviction that racial difference was ultimately always legible and easy to regulate, since ‘blood will tell’” (39). Under the circumstances, the experiences of mulatto heroines, sometimes referred to as quadroons or octoroons, have had such an impact on American imagination that the literary stereotype of the tragic mulatto tends to be mostly associated with mulatto women. These tragic mulatta images reflected the dominant political and racial ideology of the time, given that mulattas emerged as central characters in abolitionists’ literature. In typical plots, limitations imposed on mulatta characters after the discovery of their unstable racial identity finally led to their own death, often a suicide. The inability of the mulatta figure to survive also brings to the surface a gender issue which is dominant in texts written by abolitionists, including the earliest black male writer.31 Thus, the use of the tragic
30 For a brief summary of the differences in the representations of male and female mulatto characters in the literature of the period, see Sollors (239-40). For example, as opposed to the male mulatto who denounces accident of birth and is of a restless and rebellious disposition, the female one is melancholy, resigned and self-sacrificing.
31 In 1853, Clotel, or the President’s Daughter, by William Wells Brown, was the first novel to be published by a black man in America. Among the most famous antislavery works of the period is also the 1859 melodrama The Octoroon, by the white dramatist Dion Boucicault. In both texts, the central mulatta characters commit suicide in contrast to Eliza, the protagonist in the widely read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published in 1852 by the white female writer Harriet Beecher Stowe.
mulatta stereotype is inextricably connected with the ideological conflicts that determined the readers’ expectations in pre-Civil War America.
To begin with, the descriptions of the tragic mulattas in the antislavery texts of the mid-nineteenth century were primarily meant to trigger the emotional reaction of the white readers to whom they were addressed. Reflecting on the popularity of mulatto characters, Sterling A. Brown clearly states that “the tragic mulatto stereotype stemmed from the antislavery crusade, whose authors used it partly to show miscegenation as an evil of slavery, partly as an attempt to win readers’ sympathies by presenting central characters who were physically very like the readers” (339).
Brown’s argument can be seen as an indirect attack on nineteenth-century whites’
racial prejudice which determined their willingness to identify or sympathize with mulatto characters on the basis of skin color. That being the case, light-skinned mulattoes, whose complexion made them less “black” than their dark-skinned counterparts, were less exposed to this kind of color-based racism. In particular, light- skinned mulattas were likely to appeal to whites because their portrayals largely conformed to the requirements of the ideal of womanhood imposed on white women by the American patriarchal society of the time. For white male readers, the existing patriarchal social order was not threatened by representations of mulattas as beautiful, fragile and prone to self-sacrifice beings that were conveniently doomed to death when the secret of their black ancestry was revealed.32 In this respect, Spillers notices that the stereotype of the tragic mulatto is associated with a primarily male literary tradition:
32 Nineteenth-century novels drawing on melodramatic conventions, such as the revelation of hidden identities, were examples of sentimental fiction. Shirley Samuels defines sentimentality as “a set of cultural practices designed to evoke a certain form of emotional response, usually empathy, in the reader or viewer” (4). For more historical information about the culture of sentiment, see Samuels (1- 8). On the nineteenth-century American race melodrama, see Susan Gillman (222-43).
A semantic marker, already fully occupied by a content and an expectation, America’s ‘tragic mulatto’ exists for others – and a particular male other – in an attribution of the illicit that designates the violent mingling and commingling of bloodlines that a simplified cultural patrimony wishes to deny. But in that very denial, the most dramatic and visible of admissions is evident.
(“Notes” 167)
In any case, on the basis of the warring blood imagery of the period, the white blood in the mulatto’s veins was supposed to explain all the character’s positive traits, whereas any negative ones were attributed to the infusion of Negro blood. Thus, idealized models of mulatta figures, often reproduced by white authors, mainly aimed at flattering white audiences by reinforcing the belief in whites’ racial superiority and its association with biological factors. It was the one black drop of blood that always made the mulatto heroine a little less than perfect for white males.
Given that mulattoes were generally seen as victims of their divided racial heritage, the stereotype of the tragic mulatto, when used in literature, took forms that largely deprived mixed race representation of its potential authenticity. In her critique of this literary device, Naomi Pabst notes that “the trope of the tragic mulatto places on the mixed-race subject, rather than on society, the responsibility for any disconnectedness, displacement, alienation, and lack of belonging he or she might experience in a social context that widely subscribes to deleterious dualisms” (196).
Indeed, whites’ need to maintain fixed racial categories favored representations of mulattoes as contradictory figures evoking feelings of admiration and repulsion at the same time. In the case of mulatto heroines, usual plots leading to unhappy endings contributed to the creation of the tragic mulatto myth, mostly aimed at emphasizing
white supremacy. The tragic mulatto trajectory presupposes that the mulatto woman, divided between her white and black blood, is unable to marry the white man she loves and finally dies after the discovery of her racial background in a racist environment. In fact, Judith Berzon in her study of mulatto figures explains that this tradition “often expresses his [the white man’s] deepest (usually unspoken) fantasies about the largest marginal group in our society: specifically, his assumption that the mixed blood yearns to be white and is doomed to unhappiness and despair because of this impossible dream” (qtd. in Dearborn 140). Berzon’s argument draws attention to the basic components of the tragic mulatto myth including the mulatta’s supposed wish to be white, her inevitable melancholy and final doom. For mulatto women, in particular, the myth carries certain ideological and political connotations. Not only does it reflect whites’ complacency, but it also points to the rigidity of racial and gender boundaries beyond which these so-called “liminar figures” have to cope with marginalization and isolation.33 In this way, white authors’ perpetuation of the tragic mulatto myth, with its indirect support for existing racial and social hierarchies, could not result in realistic depictions of mixed race characters.
On the other hand, during the postbellum decades, as well as after the period of Reconstruction, the existence of mulatto characters in African-American fiction demanded revisions of the tragic mulatto stereotype. Actually, it was mainly black female writers who used mulatta figures in order to challenge the model provided by
33 The mulatto figure constitutes a problematic “Other” and thus has a liminal status in American society. For an explanation of the concept of “liminars,” see Anne Norton (52-54), (80-82).
their first black male counterpart in the 1850s.34 The big difference between late nineteenth-century black female writers’ depictions of mulattas and those of their black and white predecessors is that in the former mulattas were not presented as victims of a tragic fate but instead embraced their black identity and returned to the black community. As Fabi argues with regard to the complexity of representations of mulattoes in the postbellum period, “the mulatto hero’s or heroine’s survival against all stereotypes, discriminations, and societal odds parallels and highlights that of the black community as a whole” (39). One is not surprised that the apparent triumph of mulatta characters took place in an era in which separation between blacks and whites as a result of segregation had filled black authors with anxiety about the fate of their people.35 Even in this case, however, African-American women novelists did not allow their mulatto heroines complete freedom of expression as far as their own traumatic experiences were concerned. With the painful memories of slavery still fresh, the burden of history was such that these authors were rather reluctant to make their heroines very outspoken. Thus, since the trope of the tragic mulatta in the hands of black women writers could still impose limitations on mulatta characters, it was clear that, irrespective of the author’s race or sex, more changes needed to be made with regard to mixed race representation.
34 The earliest examples of African-American fiction date back to the antebellum era when the novel was used as a means of exposing the evils of slavery. Works by black abolitionists such as William Wells Brown inspired African-American writers who focused on miscegenation and the issues of intellectual, psychological and physical freedom. For a detailed account of the themes that preoccupied black writers before the Civil War, see William L. Van Deburg, Slavery (62-66). After the Civil War, examples of the most influential literary works by black female writers include Iola Leroy by Frances Harper, published in 1892 and Contending Forces by Pauline Hopkins, published in 1900. For an account of the achievements of these novelists, see Elizabeth Fox-Genovese (179-88).
35 African Americans’ political and social gains during the Reconstruction period, which had followed the Civil War, were gradually eroded because of the late nineteenth-century whites’ attempts to establish a new racial order through state legislation. The so-called “Jim Crow” laws led to the development of a system of racial segregation which determined the “Negro’s place” in American society. For more information on the post-Reconstruction years and the creation of racial segregation, see Grace Elizabeth Hale (13-24).
The Literary Trope of Passing
The internal conflicts with which protagonists in the tragic mulatta tradition had to cope were more central to narratives of passing, rather dominant in African- American fiction in the first half of the twentieth century. Commenting on the association between the theme of passing and the trope of the tragic mulatta, Lori Harrison-Kahan notes that “the passing figure often acts out, and acts upon, the double consciousness that the figure of the tragic mulatta merely represents” (“Her
‘Nig’” 124). It follows then that passing, when defined in racial terms, is both a literary theme and a social practice understood in relation to the problem of mixed race identity.36 In fact, in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American society, racial passing typically referred to the crossing of the color line which separated the dominant white from the supposedly inferior black group. In the US racial context, the decision of light-skinned mulattoes to identify as white reflected their need to escape social subordination imposed by the one-drop and the related hypo-descent rules. Thus, for individuals passing for white, as Harryette Mullen explains, “passing is not so much a willful deception or duplicity as it is an attempt to move from the margin to the center of American identity” (77). Since moving across the color line implies shifts in racial identity, the individuals who resort to passing raise the possibility of redefining and challenging fixed categories and binarisms upon which the maintenance of a stable racial order depends. In this way, the transgression of racial boundaries through passing is viewed as a subversive activity which allows mixed race persons to access white privileges while, at the same time, it questions notions of race based on biological criteria. It appears therefore that the understanding
36 For interesting information on some real cases and some guesses about the extent of passing in American society, see Sollors (280-83).
of race and identity as concepts that are constantly negotiated is facilitated by the phenomenon of racial passing, both in literature and in real life.
On the other hand, the study of the trope of passing involves several parameters, which implies that passing texts are rather complicated and open to various interpretations. For instance, passing can be conscious or unconscious, deliberate or unintentional and permanent or temporary depending on each passer’s particular motives. In any case, John Sheehy draws attention to the often contradictory meanings of stories of racial passing, whether written by white or African-American authors, arguing that “the ‘passing’ character can be read as an attempt to reconcile the two poles of American racial dialogue, an attempt always in danger of being quickly truncated by the reimposition of hallowed moral and/or racial polarities”
(414). Indeed, the reading of passing characters requires taking into consideration the interests and motives of the author who creates such characters, because different plots may result in both fundamental transgression and final reinforcement of fixed dualisms. James Weldon Johnson’s 1912 novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man is different from earlier passing novels by black writers, such as Frank J. Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends, published in 1857 and Charles W. Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars, published in 1900.37 Johnson, by creating a protagonist who starts out to become a distinguished member of the black world and ends up as an ordinary middle-class white citizen, “does not belabor the race issue as practically every other black novelist before him had done. […] There is no moral condemnation here [in Johnson’s novel], no lecturing. This race mingling is described as a fact of Southern life” (Davis, From the Dark Tower 31). Writers of different race and sex are
37 For more detailed information about these literary works and the thematic representations of passing they offered, see Sollors (258-72).
also likely to treat their passing characters differently on the basis of the latter’s sex.38 In this respect, the ideological issues underlying narratives of passing are complex, although apparently most passing texts tend to rely on rather stereotypical representations of passers. Valerie Smith, reflecting on common conventions of the passing-for-white plot, notices:
They [the narrative trajectories] presuppose that characters who pass for white are betrayers of the black race, and they depend, almost inevitably, upon the association of blackness with self- denial and suffering, and of whiteness with selfishness and material comfort. The combination of these points – passing as betrayal, blackness as self-denial, whiteness as comfort – has the effect of advocating black accommodationism, since the texts repeatedly punish at least this particular form of upward mobility.
(“Reading” 42-43)
It seems then that in the novels of passing, depending on their emphasis on the passing figure’s rewards or punishments, racial values and individual emotions were likely to discourage mixed race readers from using the strategy of passing in real life.
The Passing Theme in Nineteenth-Century Texts
From the nineteenth century onward, the exploitation of the theme of passing in novels written by white and black authors reflected their own conflicting racial
38 Examples of mulatto and black writers who allow their passing mulatta characters to survive include Walter White and Jessie Fauset, whereas Charles Chesnutt and Nella Larsen are among those novelists whose works lead to the female passer’s tragic death.
ideologies and attitudes to passing.39 The social mobility and success of the passing character in the white world served as evidence of the irrationality of racist creeds promoting discrimination and separation of the races and also as evidence of the passer’s transgressive potential and the fluidity of racial boundaries. At the same time, however, successful passing often implied the internalization of the racist ideology of white supremacy. Such ideological contradictions are inherent in narratives of passing, even in those cases in which emphasis is placed on the problems the passer has to confront. Not surprisingly, the cost of passing is high not only for the individual passer but also sometimes for his or her loved ones. Passers have to cope with the constant fear of discovery which forces them to deny their past and break ties with their family and friends. Their future is uncertain too, since anything can lead to their recognition as partly black, from a chance meeting to the prospect of marriage and giving birth. Robert Bone, discussing the changes in the passing figure’s life, adds that “the invariable outcome, in fiction if not in fact, is disillusionment with life on the other side of the line, a new appreciation of racial values, and an irresistible longing to return to the Negro community” (98). For those mulattoes whose passing works as a reaffirmation of their racial consciousness, there is no real escape from their racial identity. In the first place, the passer’s desire to return to the black community appears indicative of his or her racial loyalty. Moreover, irrespective of the cost of passing, the passer’s acceptance of his or her racial identity is widely viewed as a moral choice. Ironically enough, however, the light-skinned mulatto’s return to the black
39 The White Slave, by the white author Richard Hildreth, published in 1836 and The Garies and Their Friends, by the African-American writer Frank Webb, published in 1857, are among the earliest examples of the use of the passing theme in American fiction. In Werner Sollors’s terms, “the theme of racial passing seems to come from French texts that American writers only continued” (501). For example, it is in Gustave de Beaumont’s 1835 novel Marie; or, Slavery in the United States that passing is first treated as a serious theme, through the creation of a rebel figure who heroically refuses to reap any benefits from deception. For a detailed account of the development of the theme in American literature, see Sollors (255-80).
community, which is rather predetermined in the majority of passing novels, implies that the writer, consciously or not, tends to reproduce a peculiar kind of racism by reinscribing fixed racial categories. In this respect, it is the extent to which white supremacist and antiracist ideologies converge that mostly determines the complexity of passing texts.
Attacks upon passing as a strategy of survival in the white world largely depend on representations of passers as morally inferior beings and betrayers of the black race to which they legally belong. The paradox is that moral condemnation of passers relies on the assumption that these mixed race individuals are essentially or authentically black and not at least half white. Werner Sollors, commenting on the passing figure’s inadequate racial definition, observes that “‘passing’ can […] justly be described as a social invention, as a ‘fiction of law and custom’ (Mark Twain) that makes one part of a person’s ancestry real, essential and defining, and other parts accidental, mask-like, and insignificant–which is strange in a republican society”
(249). In this sense, passing individuals are not dishonest, but simply exercise their right to self-identification in a society in which the American dream of progress and success and the ideal of the self-made man are supposed to dominate. However, the idea that passing supports and maintains racial essentialism, based on the internalization of the one-drop and the hypo-descent rules, is apparently confirmed by the passer’s typical return to his or her black roots. From a white supremacist perspective, such a resolution can be characterized as the passer’s failure to fulfill the American dream of acceptance by or assimilation into the white community. It should be noted then that, depending on their different endings, passing novels carry different implications in terms of their identity politics. As Harrison-Kahan acknowledges with regard to the passer’s shifting identities, “the identity that is covered up can be just as
