City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 2-2016 The Fictions of Whiteness: Transatlantic Race Science, Gender, Nationalism, and the Construction of Race in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction (1823-1867) Philip E. Kadish Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/725 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] i The Fictions of Whiteness: Transatlantic Race Science, Gender, Nationalism, and the Construction of Race in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction (1823-1867) by Philip E. Kadish A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in English in partial fulfillment for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2016 ii Copyright 2016 Philip E. Kadish All Rights Reserved iii Date: This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in English in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Prof. David S. Reynolds, ____________________________________________ Chair of Examining Committee Date Prof. Mario DiGangi _______________________________________________ Executive Officer Date Prof. Hildegard Hoeller Prof. Marc Dolan Supervisory Committee The City University of New York iv Abstract Fictions of Whiteness argues that political beliefs preceded and determined the race science theories which nineteenth century American white novelists applied or invoked in their work, the inverse of the current critical consensus. For issues ranging from Indian removal to slavery and Reconstruction, and utilizing theories from of Condorcet, Buffon, Camper, Louis Agassiz, James Pritchard, Johannes Blumenbach, and George Borrow these authors shifted allegiances to divergent race theories between and within works, applied those theories selectively to white, black, and Indians characters, and applied the same scientific race theories to politically divergent rhetorical ends. By analyzing shifting application of different theories of race across an author’s body of work, I conclude that Cooper, long labeled the “first anti-miscegenationist” in American literature, actually came to praise race mixing between whites and Indians as a means of acquiring for whites nativeness in North America, and that Stowe, long associated with the romantic racialist depiction of African American racial character seen in Uncle Tom’s Cabin later came to parse African Americans by their tribal origins in order to depict Mandingo-descended slaves as capable of violent revolt while maintaining a general notion of their non-Mandingo peers as naturally submissive. By comparing the use of a body of related race science theories about the charming inferiority of “exotic” European races, such as gypsies and Italians, and their resemblance to race science ideas about American mulattoes in the works two novelists, I reveal the proslavery v Hentz as a feminist chaffing at the patriarchal restrictions of antislavery ideology and Child, long celebrated for her progressive ideas on race, as a firm believer in Saxon supremacism and the most thoroughly versed in transatlantic scientific theories of racial inequality of any novelist of the period. Ultimately, however, the single race science theory that went unchallenged and was shared by all of these politically diverse white writer was that of Saxon supremacism and the naturalness and rightness of Saxon hegemony in the United States. vi Acknowledgments I would like to acknowledge my debt in completing this dissertation to the following: David S. Reynolds, my dissertation chair, advisor, and mentor, for his consistent encouragement over the years, his belief in my skills as a writer and scholar, and his model as a literary critic. Hildegard Hoeller, for guiding me as a dissertation committee member towards better handling of research and sources in my writing and spurring me to always improve my arguments, with a combination of gentleness and firmness. Marc Dolan, for joining my dissertation committee on short notice and for a wonderfully diverse American studies course that drew from popular culture, music, literature, and history. Adam McKible, whose course on racial pseudo-science and American literature in the 1920s got me hooked on race science’s influence on literature as a research path. David Greetham, for his instruction on research methodology and his on-going interest in and advice on my archival research; Robert Reid-Pharr and Zee Dempster of the Institute for the Study of the African Diaspora (IRADAC) for providing funding and encouragement in my final dissertation year, and my fellow IRADAC fellows Ashley Williard, Tristan Stryker, Akissi Brittan, Simone White, Fabienne Snowden. To my fellow graduate students at the GC with whom I shared many courses: Joost Burgers, Edwin Demper, the late Diana Colbert, Sari Altshuler, and Diana Epelbaum. To my colleagues and supervisors at Hunter College (Sarah Chinn, Trudy Smoke, et al) who have provided me with a substantial teaching experience and welcoming teaching community during the completion of my degree. Finally, I’d like to acknowledge the scholars upon whose work I have drawn and by which I have been inspired in the process of working on my dissertation. Thank you, all. I wish to dedicate this dissertation to my wife, Lael Jacobs, without whose intellectual engagement and enthusiasm, encouragement, and patience and I would never have completed my PhD; to my mother, Irene Grumman, without whose love of reading and commitment to racial justice I would not have found my way to my subject matter; and to my son, Ronan, who reminds me of the possibility of fresh beginnings. vii Epigraph “… the disposition everywhere evident, among [whites] to separate the Negro from every intelligent nation and tribe in Africa, may fairly be regarded as one proof… that they have aimed to construct a theory in support of a foregone conclusion.” Frederick Douglass, “The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered.” (July 12, 1854) viii Table of Contents List of Tables …………………………………….………………………..page xi Introduction …………………………………….……………………….....page 1 The Flexible Strength of American Racism & the Construction of American Whiteness Chapter 1 …………………………………….…………………………...page 27 Behind the Scrim: Transatlantic Race Science Before Darwin and American Race Politics Before Jim Crow Chapter 2…………………………………….………………………….....page 62 The Pro-Amalgamation Anti-Miscegenationist: James Fenimore Cooper’s Shifting Theorizations of Race Chapter 3…………………………………….……………………......…page 105 “We Will Slay Them Utterly”: Dred and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Shift from Romantic Racialism to Mandingo-Saxonism Chapter 4…………………………………….………………………...…page 144 The Mulatta’s “Gipsy Hue”: Transatlantic Gypsy Discourses & the (Re)Racination of the Mulatta in Caroline Lee Hentz’s The Planter’s Northern Bride Chapter 5…………………………………….………………………...…page 179 Euphemizing the Mulatta: Exotic European Races & the (Re)Racination of the Mulatta in Lydia Maria Child’s A Romance of the Republic Afterword…….…………………………….……………………………page 217 Counter-Ethnologies & Counter-Counter-Ethnologies: Competing Interpretations of African Ethnology in Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany, & Harriet Beecher Stowe Tables…….…………………..…………….…………………………….…page 233 Endnotes……………………………………………………………………page 236 Works Cited………………………………….………………………….…page 264 ix List of Tables and Illustrations Chapter One: Figure One: Camper’s angle as visualized by Ransom Dexter (1874) Page 30 Figure Two: Profile of Amistad captives. Page 32 Figure Three: “Mandingo and Guinea Ethnographic Types.” Page 36 Chapter Three: Figure One: Mali Empire Map. Page 124 Figure Two: French map of Mandingo and Guinea territories in West Africa. Page 129 Chapter Four: Figure One: “Claudia and Eulalia.” Page 144 Figure Two: “Eleftheria Dimopoulou.” Page 144 Figure Three: A Romani poster from 1852 advertising the sale of gypsy slaves. Page 174 Chapter Five: Figure One: “Zaluma Agra, the Star of the East, Now on Exhibition at Barnum’s Museum.” Page 199 Figure Two: “Barnum’s Freaks.” Page 201 Afterword: Figure One: Etching of Ramses II from James Cowles Prichard’s Natural History of Man. Page 226 End Notes: Figure One: “Test proves Bulgarian woman mother of mystery girl from Gypsy camp.” Page 257 Figure Two: “A Roma Family in Nikolaevo, Bulgaria.” Page 257 Figure Three: “The Greek Slave.” Page 261 Table 1: Use of Race Science in Portrayals of Black-White, Black-Indian, and White- Indian Mixtures in Six Works by James Fenimore Cooper. Page 233 Table 2: Scientific Race Theories, Gender, and Religion in Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Dred, and Men of Our Time. Page 234 Table 3: Race Science, Literary, and Folklore Discourses Regarding Exotic European Races (Gypsies, Italians, Spaniards, Jews, & Circassians) in Hentz’s The Planter’s Northern Bride and Child’s A Romance of the Republic. Page 235 1 Introduction: The Flexible Strength of American Racism American racism seems depressingly consistent at the moment. On June 17, 2015, twenty-one-year-old white supremacist Dylann Roof shot nine African-Americans in a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina.1 A Web site attributed to the shooter brimmed with racial paranoia and defended both segregation and the kind of attack