Gothic Passages: Racial Ambiguity and the American Gothic (review)

Many recent theorists of the Gothic, from Julia Kristeva to Judith Halberstam, have noted that the terror of the Gothic is produced first and foremost by the permeability of boundaries. Gothic literature can be said to be most interested in sites that simultaneously buttress borders and advertise their permeability. American texts are often characterized as different from their European counterparts by virtue of the fact that their "monstrosity" is produced by the blurring of conventional boundaries—between male and female, public and private, foreign and domestic, familiar and strange, straight and queer, self and other—rather than by supernatural effects.

In Gothic Passages: Racial Ambiguity and the American Gothic, Justin D. Edwards examines the gothic import of another boundary in American culture: the colour line. Gothic Passages examines the "thematic and rhetorical interface between the gothic discourses of racial ambiguity and passing" in nineteenth-century literary texts by writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, William and Ellen Craft, Frances Harper, William Dean Howells, and Charles Chesnutt and in contemporary racial "science" texts asserting polygenesis (the notion that blacks and whites are separate species), white racial superiority, and the innate criminality of the racial "other."

Taking as his starting point the idea that nineteenth-century American gothic recasts European gothic's concerns with primogeniture, bloodlines, and sexual transgression in terms of racial ambiguity and passing, Edwards organizes his study chronologically, concentrating on the period between 1830 and 1901, during which America can be said to have debated most vociferously the fate of its racial others in discussions of Indian removal, slavery, and Reconstruction. Edwards innovatively brings together psychoanalysis—particularly Freud's theory of the uncanny—which informs much work on the gothic, and post-colonial theory—most notably Bhabha's theory of colonial hybridity—which does not figure in discussions of American gothic, to probe the figure of the racial hybrid that is both strange and familiar, both productive of social panic and synecdochic of social transformation. If the uncanny marks the return of what the rational mind has repressed, postcolonial theory flags the degree to which our understanding has already been colonized by structures that produce racial or ethnic difference. Gothic Passages argues that the fluid identity of the hybrid, even in texts that appear to imagine hybridity as a source of terror, "speaks to the transformative powers" of hybridity and serves as a "counterpoint" to racial essentialism (12).

Part One, "Creating a Self in Antebellum Gothic Narrative," reads the deconstructive tendencies of Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Melville's Benito Cereno, and William and Ellen Craft's Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom in relation to nineteenth-century (pseudo)-scientific assertions of the dangers of racial mixing. Edward claims that each of these works at once explores the theme of racial hybridity and functions as a textual hybrid, combining gothic tale with travel narrative. In fact, because the travel narrative provides reportage of the unfamiliar at the same time that it organizes this reportage in terms of the known, it can be understood as always already a gothicized form: descriptions of the colonial other are always uncannily in terms of the imperial self. Pym, according to Edwards, is a "complex negotiation of antebellum racial discourses" that ultimately imagines a possibility of a hybridized space that permits the circulation of hybridized bodies (13). If hybridity can be productive of terror, it can also offer transformative possibility (12). Like Pym, Melville's Benito Cereno is politically complex: Using travel narrative as a means of forcing an encounter with the strangely familiar racial other, Melville's Benito Cereno, according to Edwards, both "repudiate[es] … racist ideologies" and "repeats the language of white supremacy" (19). Although Edwards reads Melville's theatrical tropes as asserting the performative nature of race, he also claims that the legal documents which conclude the novella enforce a racial hierarchy that negates the possibilities implicit in Babo's masquerade. Edwards's take on William Craft's Running a...