{"id":4381,"date":"2010-01-07T22:40:40","date_gmt":"2010-01-07T22:40:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=4381"},"modified":"2010-11-26T19:59:16","modified_gmt":"2010-11-26T19:59:16","slug":"the-white-blackbird-miscegenation-genre-and-the-tragic-mulatta-in-howells-harper-and-the-babes-of-romance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=4381","title":{"rendered":"The White Blackbird: Miscegenation, Genre, and the Tragic Mulatta in Howells, Harper, and the “Babes of Romance”"},"content":{"rendered":"

The White Blackbird: Miscegenation, Genre, and the Tragic Mulatta in Howells, Harper, and the “Babes of Romance”<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Nineteenth-Century Literature<\/a>
\nVolume 56, Number 4<\/a> (March 2002)
\nPages 495\u2013517
\nDOI 10.1525\/ncl.2002.56.4.495<\/a><\/p>\n

Debra J. Rosenthal<\/a><\/strong>, Associate Professor of English
\nJohn Carroll University<\/em><\/p>\n

In this essay I construct a literary genealogy that situates William Dean Howells<\/a> in the middle of a call-and-response literary conversation with popular women writers about race, gender, and genre. Since Howells correlated racial questions with realism, his only novel that treats intermarriage, An Imperative Duty<\/em> (1891), offered Howells an opportunity to deploy his presumably objective, scientific, realist knowledge about race in order to challenge women\u2019s romantic miscegenation<\/a> plots found in Margret Holmes Bates\u2019s The Chamber over the Gate<\/em> (1886) and Alice Morris Buckner\u2019s Towards the Gulf<\/em> (1887), two novels that he had recently read and reviewed. Yet the tragic mulatta<\/a> stereotype, a stock figure of romanticism and sentimentality that was resistant to scientific discourse, ruptures Howells\u2019s goal of representing the figure according to the tenets of realism. In Iola Leroy<\/em> (1892), Frances Ellen Watkins Harper<\/a> cunningly recasts the tragic mulatta stereotype both to critique Howells’s project and to represent the potential of black womanhood. Knowledge of Bates and Buckner can change critical conversation about the influence of women writers on Howells, the understanding of the role of the racialized woman in his fiction, and his conception of the link between the romantic mulatta and realist representation. Likewise, Harper takes issue with Howells\u2019s supposed ironic sophistication about race, and in Iola Leroy<\/em> she rewrites many of his views in order to show the ways that miscegenation is at once a novelistic and a national problem.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The White Blackbird: Miscegenation, Genre, and the Tragic Mulatta in Howells, Harper, and the “Babes of Romance” Nineteenth-Century Literature Volume 56, Number 4 (March 2002) Pages 495\u2013517 DOI 10.1525\/ncl.2002.56.4.495 Debra J. Rosenthal, Associate Professor of English John Carroll University In this essay I construct a literary genealogy that situates William Dean Howells in the middle […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1196,8],"tags":[1726,660,654,1727,91,1725,1728,668],"class_list":["post-4381","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","tag-alice-morris-buckner","tag-debra-j-rosenthal","tag-debra-rosenthal","tag-frances-ellen-watkins-harper","tag-frances-harper","tag-margret-holmes-bates","tag-nineteenth-century-literature","tag-william-dean-howells"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4381","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4381"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4381\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}