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Abstract
My dissertation analyzes representations of race relations in Progressive Era American fiction through focusing on the trope of the “octoroon.” From 1850–1938, both white women and African Americans struggled for inclusion in American politics and society. As mainstream anxiety about the place of blacks and women in United States culture and politics increased, the figure of the octoroon came to represent the fraught and unstable relationships among race, gender, and sexuality in constructing an inclusive template for American citizenship. The first chapter explores how the possibilities for an autonomous black female identity within Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of A Slave Girl (1860) differ remarkably from those proffered by her white feminist editor, Lydia Maria Child, whose heroines in Romance of the Republic (1867) must rely on the civic virtue of a white husband for their freedom. Julia Collins, Child and Jacobs all use racially mixed heroines to explore the possibilities of black women gaining freedom through interracial relationships. In the second chapter, I focus on Frances Watkins Harper. Paired with numerous medical texts, anthropological studies, and plays about miscegenation like Dion Boucicault's “The Octoroon” (1861) and Charles O'Bryan's “Lugarto the Mulatto,” (1850), Harper's novels Iola Leroy, Minnie's Sacrifice, and Trial and Triumph perform a remarkable intervention in public beliefs regarding miscegenation and black sexuality. Chapter Three focuses on novels by three women concerned with transforming a nation divided by race, class, and gender into a modern democratic republic. Elizabeth Livermore's Zoe; or, The Quadroon's Triumph (1855) and Alice Wellington Rollins' Uncle Tom's Tenement (1887) are compared with Pauline Hopkins' novels Contending Forces, Hagar's Daughter, and Of One Blood (1900–1904). Chapter Four examines several unpublished works by Georgia Douglas Johnson (1910–1920) that illustrate her interest in cultural syncretism and pluralism. Johnson uses the metaphor of the octoroon woman to establish her own ideal of a modern, democratic republic incorporating racial and gender difference.
