{"id":47458,"date":"2016-06-09T00:40:02","date_gmt":"2016-06-09T00:40:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=47458"},"modified":"2019-03-25T13:55:39","modified_gmt":"2019-03-25T13:55:39","slug":"she-passed-down-orleans-street-a-polished-dandy-the-queer-race-romance-of-ludwig-von-reizensteins-the-mysteries-of-new-orleans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=47458","title":{"rendered":"\u201c[She] Passed Down Orleans Street, a Polished Dandy\u201d: The Queer Race Romance of Ludwig von Reizenstein\u2019s The Mysteries of New Orleans"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201c[She] Passed Down Orleans Street, a Polished Dandy\u201d: The Queer Race Romance of Ludwig von Reizenstein\u2019s The Mysteries of New Orleans<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Studies in American Fiction<\/a>
\nVolume 43, Issue 1, Spring 2016<\/a>
\npages 27-50
\nDOI: 10.1353\/saf.2016.0005<\/p>\n

Lauren Heintz<\/strong><\/a>
\nDepartment of English
\nCalifornia State University, Los Angeles<\/em><\/p>\n

Ludwig von Reizenstein\u2019s sensational, serialized novel, The Mysteries of New Orleans<\/em> (1854\u20131855), opens with the lament that in New Orleans, \u201cthe chains of a maligned race rattle day and night\u201d because \u201cno angels have yet appeared to our Negritians to announce the birth of a Toussaint L\u2019Ouverture<\/a>!\u201d Foreshadowing what is to come at the end of Reizenstein\u2019s five-volume text, the prologue provides the first and only glimpse of the prophetic child, the \u201csun-god\u201d Toussaint. The reincarnated revolutionary leader will deliver the entire U.S. South from the \u201cevils\u201d of slavery, instigating a bloody race war at the future date of 1871. Shortly after this auguration<\/a>, we meet the couple that is to give birth to the new Toussaint. Much of the novel hinges on the fact that Toussaint L\u2019Ouverture is to be born of a light-skinned mulatto<\/a> woman (Lucy) and an effeminate, white German aristocrat (Emil), both of whom are introduced as an eroticized, cross-dressing couple. Curiously, it is when they are masquerading in each other\u2019s clothes that the text\u2019s revolutionary design is announced: an anachronistic and anatopistic<\/a> re-imagination of the Haitian revolution led by the now interracial Toussaint.<\/p>\n

Reizenstein is somewhat of a self-professed rogue novelist. In a spat between the newspaper that Reizentein\u2019s text was published in, Louisiana Staats Zeitung<\/em><\/a>, and its rival newspaper, the Deutsche Zeitung<\/em>, the editors of the latter denounce the \u201cwanton wiles\u201d of Reizenstein\u2019s text as \u201cbetraying a lack of propriety that borders on moral decadence,\u201d a decadence that \u201cshould not be brought into the family for a few cents\u201d (Mysteries xxi). Reizenstein returns the stab to mock the kind of domestic, sentimental piety in fiction that \u201cwill only be read by shy, superannuated virgins\u201d (Mysteries xx). Rejecting the genre of sentimentality, Reizenstein takes his rebuttal one step further as he, too, separates himself from the \u201cdisreputable novelist Ned Buntline,\u201d who Reizenstein claims \u201claunched the literature of mysteries on American soil and thereby utterly killed all their enchantment\u201d (Mysteries 1). Whether or not Reizenstein was attempting to revamp the sensational \u201cmysteries\u201d genre or distance himself from it, and despite Reizenstein\u2019s all out refusal of sentimentality, he still predominantly employs the trope of the \u201crace romance\u201d that remains typical to both sensational \u201cmysteries of the city\u201d novels as well as sentimental domestic fiction. Yet in Mysteries<\/em>, the cross-dressing, extramarital race romance between Lucy and Emil is certainly bawdy enough for an illicit readership searching for something beyond the sentimental romance.<\/p>\n

While the race romance in Mysteries<\/em> between Lucy and Emil is caught up in gender-play, adultery, licentiousness, and scandal, the race romance as a predominant trope in nineteenth-century sensational and sentimental fiction most commonly dramatizes the scenario of a white man falling in love with a woman of color, who is often described as being tragically light skinned<\/a>. The race romance seeks to advance the promise of incorporating the person of color into the imagined white republic of the United States. But also, the race romance most often hinges on the quintessential sensationalist promise of the mixed-raced child, one who is born of an interracial union that ushers in a type of racialized utopianism. The intent of the race romance is to instigate the dissolution of the races through the appropriation and incorporation of the interracial child into whiteness. Yet, while the above is the idealized scenario of the race romance introduced in nineteenth-century fiction, more often than not the race romance unravels as an all out doomed enterprise by the end of the novel. In Dion Boucicault\u2019s<\/a> The Octoroon<\/em> <\/a>(1859), for example, in the U.S. version of the play, the story ends with the tragic death of the octoroon<\/a> heroine Zoe in the arms of her white lover George; in Lydia Maria Child\u2019s<\/a> Hobomok<\/em><\/a> (1824), the \u201cnoble savage\u201d Hobomok leaves his white lover, Mary, and their son, Hobomok, for the sake of white domesticity as Mary nurtures her…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201c[She] Passed Down Orleans Street, a Polished Dandy\u201d: The Queer Race Romance of Ludwig von Reizenstein\u2019s The Mysteries of New Orleans Studies in American Fiction Volume 43, Issue 1, Spring 2016 pages 27-50 DOI: 10.1353\/saf.2016.0005 Lauren Heintz Department of English California State University, Los Angeles Ludwig von Reizenstein\u2019s sensational, serialized novel, The Mysteries of New […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,666,1196,369,8,20],"tags":[24013,24023,24022,1438,19965],"class_list":["post-47458","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-gaylesbian","category-literary-criticism","category-louisiana","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-baron-ludwig-von-reizenstein","tag-lauren-heintz","tag-ludwig-von-reizenstein","tag-new-orleans","tag-studies-in-american-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47458","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=47458"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47458\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57812,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47458\/revisions\/57812"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=47458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=47458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=47458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}