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4. Domesticating Liminality: Somatic Defiance in Rhinelander v. Rhinelander
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∂ D Domesticating Liminality somatic defiance in rhinelander v. rhinelander Miscegenation . . . has been abhorred by men for ages . . . if young Rhinelander had gone no farther than to place the battered crown of illicit love upon the brow of Alice Jones . . . recent spectacle would now be an unwritten and unacted drama . . . [I]nstead . . . he and the girl he married are viewed today by the millions as degraded violators of an age-old human law. The reasons that marriage is more abhorred than illicit connection are two in chief: First, marriage is an open defiance, a rebellion against the code which forbids miscegenation: and, second, marriage is more likely to produce children and mix the races forever. —New York Amsterdam News, 25 November 1925, Editorial page In 1924, the former laundress and nursemaid, Alice Jones, married Leonard Rhinelander, the scion of one of New York’s oldest and wealthiest families. In doing so, the New York Times (11 March 1925, 1) claimed, Alice ‘‘passe[d] over hundreds of persons on the fringes of society and [made] her debut therein.’’∞ But ‘‘[w]ithin a few hours of the wedding announcement,’’ the newspaper reported , ‘‘town gossip recalled that Alice Jones’s sister was married to a colored butler, and then it was found that a census taker had written down Mr. Rhinelander ’s bride as a mulatto. Shortly afterward the youthful bridegroom separated from his wife and the annulment suit followed’’ (New York Times, 11 March 1925, 1) on the basis that Alice had supposedly lied about her race and passed as white. This case threatened social mores and categories pertaining to class, sexual and gendered protocols, and, perhaps most forcefully, expectations re- 74 racial imperatives garding racial behavior. In this chapter, I look to Alice Rhinelander in order to demonstrate (a) how the liminal subject complicates performative demands of race; (b) how racial ‘truth’ and corporeality are viewed as—and are made to seem—commensurate; and (c) how law is used as a modality of racial discipline to punish and ‘correct’ the recalcitrant subject who fails to ratify discursive racial classification and accompanying performative demands. Even though interracial marriage had never been prohibited under law within the State of New York, the discursive capital of anti-miscegenation rhetoric and taboos were, nevertheless, ever present and underscored the entire Rhinelander case. The public exposure of Alice’s possible blackness and the attendant exposure of Leonard Rhinelander’s transgression in entering into a miscegenous union was an undeniable social infraction, one that challenged Leonard’s white masculine subject position. Performative demands attendant to this subject position require that the white individual maintain white purity by reproducing within the racial group. In entering into a miscegenous union, Leonard defied this demand; he symbolizes transgressive breach in his performative failure of white masculinity, in that he (potentially) ‘invites’ the strain of ‘black blood’ into the body of whiteness and, in so doing, threatens pollution. It is the potential threat of miscegenous procreativity that signals Leonard’s abrogation of the discursive injunctions of whiteness; he derogates from the performative decrees of normative white masculinity, positioning himself as the agent through which whiteness becomes vulnerable. Leonard poses a threat from within the very ranks of whiteness, rendering him the aberrant ‘internal other.’ The trial, thereby, served as his e√ort to recuperate his status in white masculinity. It is in the trial that Leonard Rhinelander attempted to disavow his own culpability in what this union represented, through claiming that Alice had deceived him. During this era, New York State law only permitted divorce on the grounds of adultery, but annulments could be (and still are) granted if one party’s consent to a marriage is obtained through force or by fraud. It was to fraud that Leonard made recourse when he claimed that he had been ‘duped.’ But how could such a claim be proven? And was race grounds upon which fraud could be established? Explaining the basis for matrimonial fraud, Edgar M. Grey, writing for the New York Amsterdam News (9 December 1925, Editorial and Feature page; my emphasis ), stated: The law specifically makes a di√erence between the marriage contract and all other contracts and declares that, while in the ordinary contract any misrepresentation would be fraud su≈cient to void a contract, in the marriage contract the misrepresentation must be of such a nature as to reach the essence of the agreement before any fraud will be allowed.≤ [35.172.231.232] Project...