Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity, and Victorian Culture (review)

The current reincarnation of African American literary and cultural studies has been ongoing for approximately two decades, and in Impossible Purities Jennifer Brody pursues what is, no doubt, one of the least explored trajectories of these renewed critical attentions. Brody examines the dynamics of African American cultural presence with a revisionary eye toward historical periodization, an ongoing trend in studies in the Renaissance, the eighteenth century and Enlightenment, and romanticism. Brody’s project reimagines the purview of African American studies and the subject and thematics of Victorian studies. By treating racial blackness as one symptom of Victorian ideology and doxa, Brody examines these fields together and pursues often unmined imbrications. The intent is to bring “to the recent study of ‘black Atlantic’ cultural traffic a sustained discussion of gender and sexuality focused on the utility of ‘black’ women (mulattas, octoroons, prostitutes) for the reproduction of certain forms of English subjectivity” (7). Brody recoins the mulatta as the “mulattaroon” in order “to suggest this figure’s status as an unreal, impossible ideal whose corrupted and corrupting constitution inevitably causes conflicts in narratives that attempt to attain purity” (16). Brody sets up the figure of the mulattaroon as indispensable to her analysis of Victorian culture and Englishness because “to define the mulattaroon is to assume, after the fact, that her antecedents were racially pure, thereby justifying the contrast between white and black” (43). To this end, Brody’s prologue, four chapters, and epilogue examine an array of impressively diverse texts and cultural artifacts, from Thackerey’s Vanity Fair to H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau, from the cultural force of minstrelsy in England to racial iconography and the influences of Darwinian thought.

The central conceptual figure and Brody’s diverse examinations highlight, however, an intriguing limit of the analysis, since the conceptual figure loses some consistency across Brody’s broad critical range. The unreal figure of the black woman is deployed sometimes as a recognizable social categorization, as it is in the incisive reading of the character of Becky Schwartz as the racialized foil already disqualified from comparison to and competition with the white women in Vanity Fair. At other times the conceptual figure appears more strictly metaphorical or speculative, as in a reading of floral imagery understood to “symbolize blackened femininity . . . the problematic of ‘black femininity’” (92). This inconsistency reflects the inconsistencies between social categorization and its always metaphorical, always receding speculative premises. In other words, Brody’s central analytical figure is fated to redact very closely the vicissitudes of those discourses Brody traces, an aspect of the study that might be more carefully articulated or highlighted. The slippage or limit Brody uncovers in whiteness as Victorian sensibility is finally one the historical incarnation sought to assume and protect. Brody might more explicitly frame this difference.