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Abstract
In this dissertation I examine the construction and representation of race in novels by five North American writers of various racial backgrounds. The texts span the years between the end of the Civil War in the United States and the beginning of World War I. Questions of race were crucial in these years in the wake of African American emancipation, because of the expansion of the United States into territory occupied by indigenous and Mexican peoples, and because of the corresponding expansion of U. S. global power.
I investigate William Dean Howells's A Modern Instance (1882), Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton's The Squatter and the Don (1885), Thomas Dixon, Jr.'s The Clansman (1905), Sutton E. Griggs's Imperium in Imperio (1899), and Charles W. Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition (1901). I combine these authors and texts to broaden the scope of previous investigations about race in the period's literature while drawing on those studies' strongest insights.
My concept of "procrustean standards," borrowed from Charles Chesnutt, argues that race is not a natural system of classification, no matter the perceived physical or cultural differences it is based on. Rather, it is a set of discursive, social distinctions which must be constructed, and which must often be violently defended against both critique and changing conditions of racial life which expose older racist presumptions. Race reproduces and justifies social relations of power already in existence. It also, potentially, allows authors to modify the terms by which such relations are understood.
I explore the transformations of race wrought on these authors and texts by historical change and racial difference. I also note the historical and racial changes their texts both reflected and contributed to in their turn. Crucial to these changes were the linkage between racism and capitalist class oppression, the persistence of white supremacy, the burgeoning importance of "evolutionary" thought, and the expansion of racism on an "American" model into the rest of the world. While the tenacity of racist oppression in the years I examine is repugnant, understanding its procrustean operations may provide a basis for continuing to undo it now.
