Unbound: Analyzing White Supremacy in American Literature, 1892–1903.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This dissertation examines seven works of American literature from the turn into the twentieth century—Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), Pauline Hopkins’ Of One Blood (1903) and Contending Forces (1900), Charles Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars (1900) and The Marrow of Tradition (1901), Kate Chopin’s “Desiree’s Baby” (1893), and Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892). Each of these texts centers on African American or mixed-race characters as they navigate the dangerous terrain of racism and Jim Crow segregation in the United States. As literary critics have long recognized, these works expose the contradictions inherent in American racial ideology, ultimately revealing the socially constructed nature of “race” itself. But too often examination of these texts ends with this conclusion, which seems to suggest that race isn’t really real after all. In this dissertation, I begin with the recognition that these authors used their art to demonstrate the constructedness of racial inequality and then focus my analysis on their depictions of the way that inequality gets constructed. I argue that these literary texts serve as critical and theoretical tools in understanding the way that structures of white supremacy forcefully reasserted racial hierarchy.My approach is informed by critical race theory and whiteness studies, as well as the concept of postcritique. As Rita Felski argues, the field of literary studies has long been dominated by “critique,” which she defines as an analytical method grounded in suspicion, and the omnipotence of this form of “militant reading” has often left little space for other interpretive modes (1). I want to eschew the suspicious gaze of critique both because it has already been rigorously applied to the texts I am studying and because such a gaze carries an inherent power relation that, as a white critic reading literature largely written by writers of color, I do not want to perpetuate. Instead, I consider what these texts and these writers have to offer us as twenty-first century readers and show that they have much to teach about the way whiteness and white supremacy continue to function.In Chapter One, I examine Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson and Pauline Hopkins’ Of One Blood, texts that demonstrate the ways in which white supremacy has been upheld through a social and legal hierarchy that designated Blackness as servitude and whiteness as valuable property and through devaluing, erasing, and silencing Black culture. Chapter Two explores two Charles Chesnutt novels, The House Behind the Cedars and The Marrow of Tradition, alongside Kate Chopin’s short story, “Desiree’s Baby,” to argue that white racial anxiety stems from the precariousness of racial divisions. That instability poses a threat to whites’ social position, as they recognize the vulnerability of their own positions of power, and it is this fear that activates the backlash that Carol Anderson has dubbed “white rage.” In Chapter Three, I pair The Marrow of Tradition with Pauline Hopkins’ Contending Forces, considering the ways that both novels depict lynching within broader patterns of violence. I demonstrate that for Chesnutt, lynching is coterminous with the less visible, more quotidian forms of structural violence within the Jim Crow system, whereas Hopkins emphasizes the continuities between lynching and sexual violence enacted on Black women, as both forms of assault are about intimate bodily violation. My final chapter reads Contending Forces alongside Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy. I suggest that although both novels are critical of white hypocrisy, Hopkins uses her writing as a call-to-action for white allyship while Harper leaves little space for interracial solidarity, instead drawing attention to the ways that seemingly progressive whites fail as allies—failures that I argue can be read as manifestations of what Robin DiAngelo has called “white fragility.”Although my focus is on history and literature at the turn into the twentieth century, I engage this project with an eye toward our contemporary moment, which is similarly marked by the rise of populism, white nationalism, and hate crimes. The past I am investigating in this study is not really past; it’s a fundamental part of race relations in the United States today. I argue that unless we learn from it, we are bound to repeat it.