Race, Romance, and Rebellion: Literatures of the Americas in the Nineteenth Century

Preface

Preface This book is about romance and rebellion, amalgamation and expansion, a set of interrelated terms that reshape the way we might think about race, gender, sex, and the revolutionary concept of rights that emerged in the New World in the long eighteenth century. The idea of equality, which evolved in the Americas as colonies became states, was always troubled by exclusions that came to be defined as racial and gender differences. In the revolutionary era and throughout the era of reform, however, the act of righteous rebellion substantiated claims to equality. Thus representations or incidents of rebellion correlated with historically changing and contested definitions of race, gender, and human rights. Simultaneously, what might be called romantic ideals of political equality infiltrated the literary genre of romance. What Hayden White identifies as the romantic emplotment of the novel both responds to the political changes going on and is reflected in the rhetoric of the public sphere. Politically, romanticism’s ideals of universal emancipation led to acts of rebellion; in historical romance, the quest for freedom often materialized as a rebellion against racial and gender subordination . Therefore, both romanticism and romance are inextricable from the act and idea of rebellion. The texts at hand epitomize the inseparability of the tropes of romance and rebellion from attempts to imagine universal freedom. The endurance and resilience of these stories during the era of reform (1835– 1870) is my primary focus. Many imagined this era as the revolutionary moment revisited, the moment when the unfulfilled promises of 1776 would expand throughout the populace, or even the hemisphere. As I will illustrate, concomitant images of that other revolution—1791—permeate the imaginative and political discourses of the era as well. x Preface While rebels like John Brown saw insurrection as an expression of filial love for black men, very rarely do proslavery or antireform writers envision political collaboration between white women and black men in particular as a platonic relation. Novels like Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda ’s Sab (1841), Harriet Martineau’s The Hour and the Man (1840), E.D.E.N. Southworth’s Retribution (1849), Elizabeth Livermore’s Zoë; or, The Quadroon’s Triumph (1855), Lydia Maria Child’s Romance of the Republic (1867), and, of course, Uncle Tom’s Cabin all flash back, in differing measures, to the spectacle of the Haitian Revolution, and they all explore cross-racial love of some kind. The juxtaposition of crossracial relationships (romance) and violent uprisings (rebellion) takes root in the iconography of the Haitian Revolution and continues to appear in novels and nonfiction documents that address issues of radical equality and freedom for white women and African or Native Americans right up until the Civil War.1 In many of the New World’s historical romances, racial and gender differences dissolved in the transcendent power of love affairs that were often cross-racial. Relationships between races, of course, could bring about the “amalgamation” of those races.2 These forbidden romances imagined a world where a dialogue between lovers could level racial and gender boundaries and usher in new forms of equality. Amalgamation also broke down other kinds of boundaries and borders, both intellectual and geographic . Therefore, the dialogue between lovers could also be an allegory for the dialogue between U.S. and Haitian ideas of revolution. While the expansion of enlightened political ideals allegedly led to new definitions of rights, the expansion of rights themselves was also a function of geographic expansion. Not only the opportunities that the New World afforded Europeans, but also the challenges to their sovereignty waged by the indigenes and unfree African laborers they enslaved, figure into the narrative of territorial expansion. These contending forces— romance and rebellion, expansion and amalgamation—had the potential to strike a radical break from Old World hierarchies and traditions. Supposedly natural boundaries between the races broke down through the process of biological amalgamation, different cultures and intellectual movements were amalgamated by geographic expansion, and all of these factors rebelled against the restrictions of the past. This changes the way we view the literatures of the Americas because it reflects the mobility and fluidity of all the borders and limits that were thought to restrict the definitions of race, gender, and nation. Eventually, as many scholars of American studies have illustrated, the United States xi Preface would become an exceptionalist, imperial nation. But before this solidified , a handful of reformers would imagine more cosmopolitan...