Deciphering Race: White Anxiety, Racial Conflict, and the Turn to Fiction in Mid-Victorian English Prose (review)

In Deciphering Race Laura Callanan proposes a narratological approach to mid-Victorian racial discourse. She begins by acknowledging that race is an impossibly difficult term to define between 1840–70, as it could refer to color, class, ethnicity, and ability. Given this problem, Callanan aims to extract a working definition of race from its more stable narrotological function, rather than from its always-multivalent potential signification. She does this primarily through analysis of a pattern of allusions to the Haitian, Jamaican, and Indian revolts in mid-Victorian prose. Callanan claims that "mid-Victorian racial discourse was often tropological," conveying "complex social negotiations" in "shorthand allusions" (6) that recall "racial conflicts" while reflecting contemporary anxieties. By providing a "reading strategy" that excavates "the complex systems of meanings" evident in the aestheticized figuring of race, Callanan seeks "to gain a window into . . . Victorian racial attitudes, social ideologies, and strategies of representation" (9) as well as to "heal the legacy" of racial difference and authorize an "ethic of care" for future "model[s] of intellectual exploration" (156).

Callanan provides an efficient example of what she is anatomizing in her introduction. In Book IV of Daniel Deronda (1876), people at a dinner express their views on Governor Eyre's suppression of the Jamaican Rebellion. By having each character speak about the conflict, George Eliot is able to "delineate the ethical and moral differences between [them]" (13). The analogy between the partygoers and their Jamaican counterparts also provides a context for assessing them, but while Grandcourt is like Eyre, there is no sense that the analogy works in reverse—that the situation in Jamaica is under discussion or that Eliot's narrator has an opinion about Eyre she will reveal via the comparison. The Rebellion serves merely as a figurative convenience that allows Eliot to contrast Grandcourt's reprehensibility and Daniel's humanity. Callanan examines this strategy of figuration in the six texts under formal consideration in Deciphering Race, arguing that a white English author or character "turns to the aesthetic . . . to assuage a sense of anxiety produced by a confrontation with racial otherness" (4). "Aesthetic," however, refers too broadly to "standards of form and genre, systems of social evaluation that contribute to producing the beautiful, and issues of desire and compatibility" (5) and despite pages of excursus on the aesthetic, the definition does not narrow. By "anxiety," Callanan refers vaguely to an "indeterminacy—where white characters confront the limitations of preconceived ideologies . . . and subsequently falter" (4). She resists reading "anxiety" psychoanalytically; her attention is on the narrative manifestation of "the complexity, indeterminacy, and irrationality of both racial difference and the systems put in place to understand that difference" (5). For Callanan, race simply cannot function as an ethical marker of difference. Ignoring third-wave feminist arguments that celebrate difference, she asserts that tropes of racial difference always reveal an ethical failing.

What is most compelling in Deciphering Race is its reading of race in non-canonical texts in relation to the pattern of allusion to the Haitian, Jamaican, and Indian conflicts. Chapters 1, 4, and 5 are most successful. In chapter 1, "Toussaint and the Staging of Political Aesthetics in Harriet Martineau's The Hour and the Man," Callanan details how Martineau excised seven years from her fictional biography of Toussaint L'Ouverture to ensure the British were not represented as belligerents in Haiti. To guarantee that her readers would feel empathy for the Haitians, she minimized the violence in the novel and depicted L'Ouverture in a way that conformed to European notions of heroism. Martineau's choices reflect her desire to influence British opinion about slavery, property rights, and imperial barbarism without first offending her readers by pointing to their complicity. Her choices reveal her anxieties, and Callanan deftly draws out the telling concessions she makes. In chapter 4, "'So Help me God, . . .' Hyper-Realism and...