Transatlantic Spectacles of Race: The Tragic Mulatta and the Tragic Muse

239 Pages·2012·3.71 MB·English

by  Kimberly Snyder Manganelli

Transatlantic Spectacles of Race

Transatlantic Spectacles
of Race
The Tragic Mulatta and the Tragic Muse
kimberly snyder manganelli
Rutgers University Press
new brunswick, new jersey, and london
Copyright © 2012 by Kimberly Snyder Manganelli
All rights reserved
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Manufactured in the United States of America
library of congress cataloging-in-publication data
Manganelli, Kimberly Snyder.
Transatlantic spectacles of race : the tragic mulatta and the tragic muse
/ Kimberly Snyder Manganelli.
p. cm. — (American literatures initiative)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8135-4987-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8135-4988-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8135-4991-0 (e-book)
1. Racially mixed women in literature. 2. Tragic, The, in literature. 3. Race in
literature. I. Title.
PN56.W6M35 2012
809'.933522—dc23
                                                            2011023487
A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the
British Library.
A book in the American Literatures Initiative (ALI), a collaborative
publishing project of NYU Press, Fordham University Press, Rutgers
University Press, Temple University Press, and the University of Virginia
Press. The Initiative is supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
For more information, please visit www.americanliteratures.org.
To Joe,
for showing me the ocean

Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: “I Thought That to Seem Was to Be”:
Spectacles of Race in the Nineteenth-Century
Transatlantic Imaginary 1
1 “Stamped and Molded by Pleasure”: The Transnational
Mulatta in Jamaica and Saint-Domingue 17
2 “Fascinating Allurements of Gold”: New Orleans’s
“Copper-Colored Nymphs” and the Tragic Mulatta 37
3 “Oh Heavens! What Am I?”: The Tragic Mulatta
as Sensation Heroine 65
4 “I Wonder What Market He Means That Daughter For”:
The Beautiful Jewess and the Tragic Muse 92
5 “After All, Living Is but to Play a Part”: The Tragic Mulatta
Plays the Tragic Muse 128
Conclusion: “I Know What I Am”: Race and the Triumphant
“New Woman” 159
Notes 189
Index 219

Acknowledgments
Tracing the textual genealogies of the Tragic Mulatta and Tragic Muse
has taken me from archives in Charleston and New Orleans to libraries
in London and Paris. It would have been impossible to study the trans-
atlantic circulation of textual bodies explored in this book without the
generous support of Cornell University’s English Department and Clem-
son University’s English Department and College of Architecture, Arts,
and Humanities. The research travel grants provided by these institu-
tions allowed me to visit the Historic New Orleans Collection’s Williams
Research Center, Howard-Tilton Memorial Library’s Special Collections
Division at Tulane University, the Louisiana Division of the New Orleans
Public Library, the South Carolina Historical Society, the Schomburg
Center for Research in Black Culture, the British Library, and La Biblio-
thèque Nationale de France in Paris.
This book, which began as a dissertation at Cornell University, was
shaped by my advisors, James Eli Adams, Shirley Samuels, and Laura
Brown, whose encouragement and expertise made the research and
writing of this project such a pleasurable pursuit. I am especially grate-
ful to Jim Adams for providing detailed comments on multiple drafts
of the dissertation chapters. The project also benefited from conversa-
tions with Trevor Hope, Dorothy Mermin, Molly Hite, and Hortense
Spillers. While I was an undergraduate and master’s student at Auburn
University, Paula Backscheider and Alicia Carroll provided the founda-
tion in research and writing that prepared me for my studies at Cor-
nell. I am also indebted to Jim McKelly, whose undergraduate class
on the American novel introduced me to the beautiful complexities of
x / acknowledgments
William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, a work that continues to haunt
and inspire me. These acknowledgments would be incomplete without
also thanking Mary Ann Rygiel, my first teacher of Victorian literature,
whose dynamic classes on Jane Austen, the Brontës, and Thomas Hardy
inspired me to become a professor of English so I could share the works
of these authors with my own students.
While in graduate school, both my life and research were enriched by
the friendship of Shea Stuart, Sharyn Pulling, Joanne Campbell Tidwell,
and Jessica Van Slooten at Auburn University, and Derek Matson, Zubair
Amir, Katherine Terrell, Mimi Yiu, Ed Goode, Hilary Emmett, Mike
Garcia, Jen Dunnaway, Akin Adesokan, Wyatt Bonikowski, Andy Rehn,
Robin Sowards, Danielle St. Hilare, Jade Ferguson, Kate Hames, Ogaga
Ifowodo, Susan Hall, Meghan Freeman, Dwight Codr, Shirleen Robin-
son, Anita Nicholson, and Janice Ho, at Cornell University. I am espe-
cially grateful to Sarah Heidt, Amber Baird-Baidinger, Alice Te Punga
Somerville, Nadine Attewell, and Hyowon Kim for making my time at
Cornell the experience of a lifetime.
At Clemson University, I have had the good fortune to join an English
Department that has been a congenial, supportive, and intellectually in-
vigorating environment for research and writing. In short, I thank all of
my fabulous colleagues for making the English Department such a fun
place to work. I owe special thanks to Sean Williams, my department
chair, for providing funds for the reproduction of images in this book,
Lee Morrissey, whose counsel and resourcefulness during his tenure as
department chair were instrumental in shaping my career at Clemson, as
well as Jonathan Beecher Field for always taking time to share articles and
other materials related to my project. I am also grateful to Susanna Ashton,
Catherine Paul, Martin Jacobi, Steve Katz, Clifton “Chip” Egan, Barton
Palmer, Michelle Martin, Lisa Dykstra, Amy Monaghan, Aga Skrodzka,
and Jillian Weise for encouraging and supporting me in innumerable
ways. In addition to their well-timed pep talks, enthusiasm, and unwav-
ering support, Rhondda Thomas, Dominic Mastroianni, Brian McGrath,
Mike LeMahieu, Elizabeth Rivlin, Will Stockton, Erin Goss, and David
Coombs took time to bring law and order to early drafts of the chapters
that follow. I also thank my students, who read several of the books ex-
amined in this project, especially Deanna Dixon, whose directed study
helped me reenvision the book’s conclusion, and the students in my course
on the English novel, who read Daniel Deronda with me each spring. In
addition, I thank Aglaia Kargiatlis and Ashley Crider for providing sum-
mer research assistance, and James Funk for helping me in the final stages.