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  • Racial Violence and the Theatrics of Opinion in Beaumont's Marie
  • Jennifer Greiman (bio)
Jennifer Greiman
SUNY, Albany
Jennifer Greiman

Jennifer Greiman is an assistant professor of English at SUNY, Albany beginning this fall. At present she is working on a book project exploring theatricality in the antebellum public sphere.

Notes

. I would like to thank Nancy Ruttenburg, Sam Otter, Gil Hochberg, Promita Chatterji, and Amir Banbaji for their comments on earlier versions of this essay.

1. First published in two volumes in 1835, Beaumont's Marie, went through five printings in France and was awarded the Prix Montoyn by the Académie Française, but it was not published in book form in America until 1958, when an abridged version of the novel was issued by Stanford University Press (that edition was re-issued in 1999 by Johns Hopkins University Press). However, between July 1845 and May 1846, a translation of the novel was serialized in the National Antislavery Standard, which importantly places it in a tradition of American Abolitionist writing. Unless otherwise noted, all of the passages quoted in English will be taken from the Hopkins edition of Barbara Chapman's 1958 translation; where the translations are mine, I give the French in the notes.

2. Although Tocqueville scholars do advocate the importance of Beaumont's novel, they invariably see it as little more than an important companion to the Démocratie. Pierson, who makes a strong case for Beaumont's influence on Tocqueville's thought and work, dedicates only thirteen pages of his 800-page study to Beaumont's novel. Pierson lists the novel's failures as follows: "too romantic, too sentimental and too interrupted, too much concerned with social issues and too little with political . . . . As a novel . . . the intended masterpiece left even more to be desired" (13-33). Even recent critics, like Glazer and Fergerson, who appreciate Beaumont's concern with social issues, tend to see its importance only in its relation to Tocqueville's omissions. Glazer is particularly patronizing, arguing that Beaumont's novel served almost as a good conscience for Tocqueville, allowing him to "put aside" the issues of slavery and Indian Removal because Beaumont, who was "more indignant" about such injustices, intended to dedicate his entire work to them (96). Only Sollors treats Beaumont's novel as a project independent of Tocqueville's work. Indeed, Sollors significantly re-positions Beaumont as one of the earliest authors in a tradition of interracial literature that gains immense popularity in Europe and the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Sollors argues, albeit somewhat tongue-in-cheek, that the entire literary tradition associated with the Tragic Mulatta figure might be better redefined as "[the] representation of male and female mixed-race characters in the manner popularized by Beaumont's Marie" ("Neither" 240-41, 257-60).

3. See Pierson, 522-23. Also see Tocqueville and Beaumont's joint work, On the Penitentiary System in the United States and its Application in France.

4. Much recent scholarship has challenged the relevance of Habermas' rational-critical, print-mediated model of the public sphere to the American context both before and after the Revolution-see Fliegelman's Declaring Independence, Ruttenburg, and Looby-while scholars such as Warner argue for the retention of the Habermassian model. My analysis is clearly indebted to the former: Fliegelman focuses on the centrality of sensibility and affect to the performances of authenticity and authority in the eighteenth-century public sphere (128), and Ruttenburg describes a public, democratic space that emerges in the seventeenth century and persists into the nineteenth century, in which transcendent authority becomes available through a vocal performance that is ultimately uncontainable in print. The form of publicness that Ruttenburg describes is "unconnected to rational debate in a Habermassian public sphere. Emerging well in advance of a bourgeois public sphere, democratic personality exceeded the power of cultural forms, from Puritan cosmology to the 'national' novel, to contain it" (3, 4-11).

5. Sollors shows that the interracial figure in literature often stands as "a most upsetting and subversive character who illuminates the paradoxes of 'race' in America" both by revealing the insufficiency of the categories of black and white and by...

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