MISCEGENATION

Although the concept of miscegenation was known in Europe and England, the word was a New World neologism, first suggested by the authors of an 1863 pamphlet "Miscegenation," who coined it seemingly to advocate abolition and "the blending of the races," as stated in the work's subtitle. In fact, the tract was actually written by the anti-abolitionists David G. Croly and George Wakeman, who hoped to suggest the Republican Party and President Abraham Lincoln, who had just issued the Emancipation Proclamation, favored racial amalgamation. From its very coinage, then, the term "miscegenation" was intended to fuel racist fury. Racist attitudes toward intermarriage predated the term, of course, and the possibility that white men or women would have children with members of other races engendered hatred and fear among many people. The Puritans, for example, were outraged by the North American colonial leader Thomas Morton's suggestion that his young men, far from home and English women, should take Native American women as wives. Likewise, cultural and legal prohibitions against "amalgamation" with African slaves and free blacks were created and, to some degree, enforced. If, as W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) stated in The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (1903), "the problem of the twentieth-century is the problem of the color-line" (p. xi), mixed-race characters and miscegenation in fiction pose and interrogate that problem. Literary discussions of miscegenation are, to a great degree, the history of how society tried to insist on an ineradicable line between the races, while mixed-race characters, by definition, propose a redrawing of the lines or their complete abandonment.

THE CIVIL WAR AND THE RECONSTRUCTION OF RACIAL IDENTITY

With the end of slavery, one of the legal lines between black and white was removed, but legal definitions of race were not, nor were laws against miscegenation; in fact, the term was given new legal life, with dozens of states passing antimiscegenation laws from 1867 to the 1880s. As a result, the novel of "the tragic mulatto" who is an alien in two worlds remained fashionable even after the Civil War. Such stories feature a character who may appear white but who is in fact racially mixed. Albion Tourgée (1838–1905), a northerner who served as a federal judge in the South during Reconstruction, wrote several such novels. While the best known is his autobiographical novel A Fool's Errand (1879), recounting his experiences as a "carpetbagger" during Reconstruction, Tourgée wrote many other novels about the race problem in the South, including some that dealt with intermarriage between blacks and whites. Toinette (1874), later republished as A Royal Gentleman (1881), features a slave owner who falls in love with his mixed-race servant only to reject her even after emancipation because she is not white. Pactolus Prime (1890) likewise tells the story of a mixed-blood character who hopes for equality as well as freedom after emancipation but ultimately comes to dour conclusions about the future.

George Washington Cable (1844–1925) perfected the novel of the tragic mulatto who is alienated from two societies in The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life (1880). Against the backdrop of a history that blended Native American, African American, French, Spanish, and British cultures and bloodlines, Cable's novel of postbellum Louisiana features seemingly infinite gradations of race and ethnicity. Cable's novel relates the practical difficulties facing people of mixed heritage who rise economically but who fear they will never be accepted socially. Cable's narrator observes that even legal protections are insufficient guarantors of real freedom in a society where the law of racial purity is written in culture. The novel Ramona (1884) by Helen Hunt Jackson (1830–1885) is one of the most successful works of the 1880s treating the theme of miscegenation; in it Jackson challenges many mixed-race stereotypes and social strictures against intermarriage. Ramona, the daughter of a Scotsman and a Native American woman, attempts to find a social identity uniting and honoring both parents.

During the 1890s, literary depictions of mixed-race characters became, if anything, more provocative. This change was precipitated in large part by the increasing legal oppression of people of color, including those of mixed race. Legally, the "separate but equal" theory was codified in law by the Supreme Court case of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. Consequently, a person with "one drop" of so-called black blood could be legally defined as black and segregated from whites. The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894) by Mark Twain (1835–1910) responds directly to the issues raised by the Plessy v. Ferguson case. This work features several mixed-race characters, among them Roxy, who appears white but has 1/16 part of "black blood" and is, therefore, a slave. She is the product of several generations of miscegenation. As the nursemaid to two children, hers and her master's, she switches the two. Her action goes undetected for decades but, ironically, her own son, trained as a white slave owner, mistreats and even sells Roxy. The master's biological son, named Chambers, might look white but is in every cultural sense black. Twain satirizes American racial attitudes, particularly the notion that such racial distinctions as the "one drop" theory have a real validity. When Roxy's switch is uncovered, her son, who has been trained as the master of the house, is sold downriver, and the illiterate Chambers inherits property, including slaves. Twain thus satirizes the very idea of such arbitrary racial distinctions, revealing race to be a cultural construct rather than a biological fact. Twain also uses race to discuss gender and vice versa by having the character Tom dress like a woman as part of the novel's mystery plot. In having a "black" pass for white and a man pass for a woman, Twain uses the novel to undermine racial and gender categories. Further, Roxy's "sermon" on free grace has her speaking on the text, "Ain't nobody kin save his own self " (p. 931). In this way, Twain describes the inevitability of the white and black bond in American society, suggesting a shared identity, fate, and community along with the shared kinship at the heart of the miscegenation plot.

The novel Iola Leroy; or, Shadows Uplifted (1892) by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825–1911) seems in some ways to begin where The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson leaves off but from the perspective of a woman. At the beginning of the novel, the title character is a Scarlett O'Hara–type southern belle, at one with regional politics and mores. The daughter of a wealthy planter, Iola discovers only after her father's death that her mother was part black, a "mulatta." Sold into slavery, this flower of white, southern race training eventually escapes and becomes an advocate for black Americans. Iola ultimately embraces the identity society confers upon her, refusing to pass as white, though she certainly is capable of doing so.

An ironic twist on the theme of miscegenation is presented by Kate Chopin (1851–1904) in "Désirée's Baby," which was first published in her collection of stories Bayou Folk in 1894. The short story depicts the horror with which "accidental" miscegenation was held in the South, when people were uncertain of the racial heritages of those closest to them or even their own backgrounds. In this story, the formal conflict is provoked by racist prohibitions against intermarriage and by the existence of characters who can "pass" as white or who do pass as white without even being aware of their background. Having given birth to a child with a complexion suggesting he is a "quadroon" and one-quarter black, the title character is suspected of having "black blood" in her lineage. Her punctilious husband rejects her and the child and sends them away from the house, discovering later, to his horror, that he is the one with such an ancestry. In the language of their society, he is the one "guilty" of miscegenation, and his wife, from the perspective of racist laws, is the injured party.

ECONOMIES OF PASSING

Related to the novel of miscegenation is the novel of "passing," a novel featuring a character who appears white but who is, in fact, of mixed race. Such a person often "passes" as white for social or economic reasons. The incentive to do so grew as so-called Jim Crow laws proliferated in the South, as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) became an active force of oppression and intimidation, and as large numbers of blacks were lynched. Drawing from his own observations of society, and from his own mixed-race heritage, Charles Waddell Chesnutt (1858–1932) announced in his essay "What Is a White Man?" (1889) that "the line which separates the races must in many instances have been practically obliterated" (p. 5). In his fiction, Chesnutt illustrates this idea frequently, portraying many mixed-race individuals and instances of intermarriage, most famously in The House behind the Cedars (1900) and The Marrow of Tradition (1901). In the former, Chesnutt tells the story of brother and sister, children of a woman of mixed blood. John Warwick passes as white and marries the daughter of a plantation family, while his sister is on the verge of contracting a similar marriage when her past is revealed. Chesnutt returned to the theme in The Marrow of Tradition.

Pauline Hopkins (1859–1930) explores similar situations in her novels Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (1900), Hagar's Daughter: A Story of Caste Prejudice (1901–1902), Winona: A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest (1902), and Of One Blood; or, The Hidden Self (1902–1903). In Hagar's Daughter, Hopkins introduces the theme of miscegenation through two young women, Jewell and Aurelia. Both are accepted in white society until the secret of Jewell's ancestry is revealed. While Aurelia is more "successful" by all contemporary social definitions, Jewell is the moral center of the novel. Hopkins's character Reuel Briggs in Of One Blood is one of her most interesting. The opening chapters of the book find Briggs, who believes himself white, reading a treatise called "The Unclassified Residuum," referring to a passage in William James's (1842–1910) study "The Hidden Self," which Hopkins uses as a subtitle for her novel. James had used the term "unclassified residuum" while discussing psychical phenomena, and Hopkins exploits it both for psychic and social purposes, to discuss the "residuum" of blood prejudice in American culture (p. 361). The novel charts Briggs's journey to self-discovery as he travels to Africa, finding that he is "of one blood" with Africans and, in a larger sense, that all humankind is "of one blood."

Interestingly, while "passing" undermines imposed racial definitions, it is often depicted in literature as a negative action but from different perspectives. Thomas Dixon (1864–1946) wrote the historical antimiscegenation and antiblack novels The Leopard's Spots (1902) and The Clansman (1905), which were adapted by D. W. Griffith into the controversial film The Birth of a Nation (1915). Both books feature mixed-race characters who pass as white as part of a covert plot to exploit the South and transform the United States into a "mulatto" society rather than one dominated by Anglo-Saxons.

However, neither is "passing" portrayed positively in James Weldon Johnson's (1871–1938) The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912). Born to a mulatto mother and white father in the South, the narrator tells a story reminiscent of many other narratives featuring miscegenation as a theme. In this highly complex and delightfully ironic novel, Johnson's narrator details how passing is for him a joke. At whose expense the joke is has been a subject of much critical debate. On the one hand, the narrator plays a joke on himself, losing an integral sense of his own identity by passing as white. On the other hand, the joke is at the expense of the society that creates the context for passing through its racism and racist laws. The novel ends with the narrator passing as an anonymous white man, a racial trickster set loose within racist society. By showing that the narrator is able to pass, Johnson asserts that race definitions are artificial constructions.

Edith Maude Eaton (1865–1914), who wrote under the pen name Sui Sin Far, was born to a Chinese mother and an English father. Thus, like Charles W. Chesnutt, her own mixed-race background probably influenced her frequent choice of themes of miscegenation, passing, and crossing boundaries and borders. One is tempted to suggest that her pen name, Sui Sin Far, is itself an inversion of the usual pattern of passing, for it allows her to "pass" as Chinese. Eaton wrote in her autobiographical work "Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian" (1909) that she was a stranger in the world by virtue of her racial heritage, distanced even from her parents. Many of the characters in her story collection Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912) are similarly estranged from two worlds, rather than belonging to both.

Indeed, the miscegenation plot itself might be defined as a literary form that foregrounds estrangement even as it imagines community. At the heart of the form is the question of the "color line" that Du Bois saw as America's preeminent challenge.

see alsoThe Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man; The Birth of a Nation; Blacks; Civil Rights; Iola Leroy; Ku Klux Klan; The Marrow of Tradition; Mrs. Spring Fragrance; Race Novels; Ramona

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Chesnutt, Charles. "What Is A White Man?" Independent 41 (30 May 1889): 5–6.

Croly, David G. Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro. New York: H. Dexter, Hamilton & Company, 1864.

Dixon, Thomas. The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan. New York: Doubleday & Page, 1905.

Dixon, Thomas. The Leopard's Spots: A Romance of the White Man's Burden—1865–1900. New York: Doubleday & Page, 1902.

Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches. New York: Signet, 1969.

Eaton, Edith Maude [Sui Sin Far]. "Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian." Independent 66 (1909): 125–132.

Eaton, Edith Maude [Sui Sin Far]. Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995.

Hopkins, Pauline Elizabeth. Hagar's Daughter: A Story of Southern Caste Prejudice. In The Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins, pp. 1–284. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988.

Hopkins, Pauline Elizabeth. Of One Blood; or, The Hidden Self. In The Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins, pp. 439–672. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988.

Hopkins, Pauline Elizabeth. Winona: A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest. In The Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins, pp. 285–438. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988.

James, William. "The Hidden Self." Scribners 7 (1890): 361–373.

Johnson, James Weldon. The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man. New York: Hill and Wang, 1960.

Twain, Mark. The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson. In Mississippi Writings, pp. 915–1056. New York: Library of America, 1982.

Secondary Works

Berzon, Judith R. Neither White nor Black: The Mulatto Character in American Fiction. New York: New York University Press, 1978.

Bost, Suzanne. Mulattas and Mestizas: Representing Mixed Identities in the Americas, 1850–2000. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003.

Cutter, Martha J. "Struggling across the Borders of Race, Gender, and Sexuality: Sui Sin Far's Mrs. Spring Fragrance." In Mixed Race Literature, edited by Jonathan Brennan, pp. 137–164. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002.

Fabi, M. Giulia. Passing and the Rise of the African American Novel. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001.

Fredrickson, George M. The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914. New York: Harper and Row, 1971.

Fulton, Joe B. "Mark Twain and the Multicultural Imagination." In Multiculturalism: Roots and Realities, edited by C. James Trotman, pp. 238–251. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002.

Ings, Katharine Nicholson. "Blackness and the Literary Imagination: Uncovering The Hidden Hand." In Passing and the Fictions of Identity, edited by Elaine K. Ginsberg, pp. 131–150. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996.

Kaplan, Sidney. American Studies in Black and White: Selected Essays, 1949–1989. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991.

Kinney, James. AMALGAMATION! Race, Sex, and Rhetoric in the Nineteenth-Century American Novel. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985.

Sollors, Werner. Neither Black nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Sollors, Werner, ed. Interracialism: Black-White Intermarriage in American History, Literature, and Law. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Sundquist, Eric J. To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1993.

Wald, Gayle. Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000.

Joe B. Fulton