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6:00 pm |
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Subject: English (Grad) (GENG)
CRN: 21949
Lecture
St Paul: O'Shaughnessy Education Center 212
Requirements Met:
Pre-1900 American Lit.
This course will explore the history of women’s writing about miscegenation and its consequences for women’s lives in the United States. Before the Civil War, “tragic mulatta” tales like Lydia Maria Child’s “The Quadroons” and Dion Boucicault’s popular play The Octoroon invoked sympathy for female characters born in mixed-race unions who are raised as affluent white women only to discover, on their father’s death, that they are legally black by the “one drop” rule and will be sold as slaves. Like the parading of near-white slaves at rallies, these narratives were used in the service of enlisting white support for abolition. Yet more sophisticated texts, like Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Child’s Romance of the Republic worked changes on the “tragic mulatta” tale that allowed these writers to grapple with complex questions of racial identity raised by the highly charged subject positions of mixed-race persons in antebellum society. Obviously, the racial rift in America did not disappear with the ending of slavery; twentieth century writers continued to interrogate issues of identity formation, civil rights, women’s rights, and relational and familial dynamics using the liminal position of the mixed-race woman to define both problems and triumphs. We’ll explore the no-win situations created by Nella Larsen in Quicksand and Passing and the somewhat more hopeful explorations of race offered by current authors like Gloria Naylor (Mama Day) and Natasha Trethewey (Bellotcq’s Ophelia), along with a selection from the compelling body of historical and literary criticism on miscegenation.
3 Credits