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3 / “Oh Heavens! What Am I?”: The Tragic Mulatta as Sensation Heroine “I—I—oh Heavens! what am I? A slave—a slave—whom men love only to ruin.” —captain mayne reid, the quadroon; or, a lover’s adventures in louisiana (1856) “Julia—Julia is a slave! I am Julia; I am a slave; poor slave!” —van buren denslow, owned and disowned; or, the chattel child (1857) Published the year before Lady Audley’s Secret, Mary Elizabeth Braddon ’s The Octoroon; or, The Lily of Louisiana (1861) opens in a crowded ballroom during the London season of 1860. Cora Leslie, an American girl born on a plantation near New Orleans but educated in England, has attracted the interest of Gilbert Margrave, a British engineer celebrated for inventing machinery to replace slave labor. Pointing out Cora’s beauty to Mortimer Percy, an American planter, Gilbert asks his acquaintance if he knows who the lovely beauty is. Mortimer responds: “No. But I can do more. I can tell you what she is.” The southerner then explains to the naïve British gentleman that Cora is the daughter of a slave: “Had you been a planter, Gilbert, you would have been able to discover, as I did, when just now I stood close to that lovely girl, the fatal signs of her birth. At the extreme corner of the eye, and at the root of the finger nails, the South[ern] American can always discover the trace of slavery, though but one drop of the blood of the despised race tainted the object upon whom he looked.”1 Gilbert is not the only character unable to read the signs of Cora’s racial ancestry. While American Tragic Mulatta narratives traditionally pivot on the mixed-race woman’s discovery that she is not free, Braddon’s story revolves around a more shocking secret: Cora does not know she is an octoroon! Upon learning that her father has been injured in a slave revolt on his plantation, she returns to New Orleans ignorant of her racial ancestry. “The courted, the caressed, the admired beauty of a London season” soon learns, however, that she is not white.2 Braddon’s 66 / “oh heavens! what am i?” novel follows Cora’s struggle to escape a narrative that offered only two choices to mixed-race women: sexual violation or death. In American abolitionist texts, such as Lydia Maria Child’s “The Quadroons ” (1842), Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), and William Wells Brown’s Clotel (1853), the Tragic Mulatta is a sentimental figure of true womanhood whose compromised bloodline prohibits her from marrying her white suitor. However, as British sensation authors such as Braddon capitalized on the popularity of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the Tragic Mulatta was transformed into a figure of mystery in the 1850s and 1860s. In lesser-known texts, such as Captain Mayne Reid’s The Quadroon ; or, a Lover’s Adventures in Louisiana (1856), Dion Boucicault’s play The Octoroon (1859), and Braddon’s serial, the mixed-race slave becomes an embodiment of dangerous secrets as British authors coupled abolitionist sentiment with narratives of detection and discovery. Although literary history has maintained a national divide between British and American sensation authors, I argue that American abolitionist fiction gave rise to British sensation fiction. Indeed, although Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860) is traditionally given as the starting point for British sensation fiction, this genre begins to emerge in the sensational American Tragic Mulatta narratives of the 1840s and 1850s.3 Although the abolitionist works of Child, Brown, and Stowe are traditionally categorized as sentimental texts meant to elicit tears and sympathy from readers, the realities of slavery interrupt these narratives by introducing mysterious identities, sexual transgressions, madness, and violence—elements that would later define British sensation fiction— into the genteel drawing rooms of characters and readers alike. In fact, a review in the English Woman’s Journal expressed concern about the ways in which British consumer culture sensationalized the realities of American slavery. Citing recent abolitionist articles, the reviewer declares: “We are not at liberty to fancy or hope that the practice of the South in the matter of slavery is better than its theory. ‘The Character of the Southern States of America,’ by F. W. Newman, and ‘The Essence of Slavery,’ by Isa Craig, are but renewed attempts to make the English public realize that though ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ may be a sensation novel, the Key to...

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