Barriers between Us: Interracial Sex in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

4. Doubles in Eden in George Washington Cable's The Grandissimes

4 Doubles in Eden in George Washington Cable’s The Grandissimes After the Reconstruction era ended and political control returned to the South in 1877, writers of mulatto fiction confronted a nation seeking new ways to redefine the social order. Law and custom continued to inform and be informed by the myth of race. Laws were enacted to ensure racial segregation and prohibit the civil rights of blacks. In addition, lynching terrorized African Americans, demonstrating the growing rage that fueled attempts to maintain the color line. It is no surprise that this period produced a wealth of mulatto fiction by writers that included William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, Charles Chesnutt, Kate Chopin, and Pauline Hopkins. Southern writer George Washington Cable was no exception. In The Grandissimes (1879), Cable frames a concern with the relationship between race and the national condition by evoking the image of mulattos in Eden. Pairing these mulatto figures with their white half-siblings, Cable explores the color line in the increasingly segregated society of his time. In each relationship , the white sibling, who is sympathetic to the nonwhite one, is haunted by the existence of the other and yet dependent on the subjugation of that other for his/her own self-actualization. The interdependence of these pairs mirrors the codependency of blackness and whiteness in U.S. culture. Cable’s novel depends on mixed-race characters not only to outline the complexity of racial prescription but also to protest the perpetuation of racial inequalities. Indeed, the final pairing of a mixed-race woman and a rebellious African slave addresses the possibilities of black liberation. Functioning in answer to the other pairings, the supernatural connection between the African slave, who was tortured and killed eight years before the time of the novel’s main plot, and the mixed-race woman who shares his spirit, though not his strength, proclaims the urgency of black liberation. But ultimately Cable’s interpretation of black freedom is gendered, substituting the restoration of black male patriarchy for black civic and social advancement . George E. Marcus’s delineation of the critique of autonomous individualism in late-nineteenth-century American novels offers an illuminating framework within which to consider the paired figures in Cable’s novel. Reading these works as responses to the pervasive ideology of the unified self in Euro-American cultural thought, Marcus describes three devices that express disjointed selves in late-nineteenth-century works: divided, doubled , and crossed selves. The divided self is marked by complex internal thought processes, as in psychological novels. Doubled selves demonstrate distinct, dual personalities in a single person. The crossed self exchanges identities with another character, whether through deception or mistake.1 Marcus concludes that this later critique of the autonomous self is the most effective: [C]rossed selves as a tactic of plotting and character development in the nineteenth-century American novel were a powerful chiasmus-like mode for engaging the reader, even if through an unrelenting effect of slight cognitive imbalance, with the subversive truth of the arbitrariness of cultural categories and especially as they apply to a near sacred ideology in American life about autonomous individualism and the coherent self.2 Cable’s simultaneous expression of difference and the blurring of those boundaries, Marcus contends, defeats the reader’s attempt to separate the two figures. In The Grandissimes, Cable’s mulatto figures function as both doubled and crossed selves to express the duality of American identity as shaped by race. Indeed, one could argue that mulatto figures are the ultimate embodiment of the doubled self, straddling the margins that divide the nation. Cable highlights this duality by representing his mulatto figures as both slaveholders and victims of slavery and racial exclusion. Their interests in two communities whose wishes are opposed demonstrate their bifurcation. Cable’s implementation of the crossed self emerges in his development of the mulatto-white sibling pairs. One pair of the siblings even shares the same name, a situation which ultimately produces much confusion, both mistakenly and purposefully. These racialized crossed selves in The Grandissimes are not so much about the problem of the unified self in general as they are about the myth of a unified American identity marked by whiteness . The narrative of crossed selves in Cable’s novel is an allegory of the 72 Barriers between Us ways in which racial interdiction articulates U.S. identity. The racialized crossed selves demonstrate how whiteness and its...