Before the 1960s, there was very little literary criticism on the presence of race and culture in Herman Melville’s texts. However, racial events, such as the Civil Rights Movement, have been influential in causing intellectuals, such as Samuel Otter, Eric J. Sundquist, and Carolyn Karcher, to revisit Melville’s texts through the lens of race. This thesis is aligned with such critics, and it takes their ideas a step further - by contending that the racial performance found in Melville’s work develops increasingly during the 1850s, becoming more complex by Melville’s last published work prior to the Civil War. Moreover, I argue that these textual representations of racial performance are often ambiguous echoing the national and ethical dilemmas of the decade prior to the Civil War. 

Chapter One establishes the beginning of my argument by contending that whiteness is implicitly performed in the staged theatrical production that Melville includes in White-Jacket. Chapter Two moves my argument forward as I examine the ways that race is performed in Moby-Dick. I suggest that the book is a development from Melville’s White-Jacket because the racial performance that takes place is more explicitly about race and is also extempore. Whereas Chapter One and Two focus on staged and extempore performances of race, Chapter Three moves my analysis of racial performance to social enactments of race. Specifically, I analyse the ways that the Senegalese slaves and Spanish crew perform race on board the San Dominick. I contend that Benito Cereno develops the racial performance found in Melville’s 1850s texts by offering a critique of slavery while the earlier writing did not. The last Chapter of the thesis concentrates on the racial performance in Melville’s last publication of the 1850s, The Confidence-Man. I propose that this text marks the height of racial performance found in Melville’s work as a result of the Black guinea’s ambiguity. Collectively, the chapters in this dissertation will provide a new reading of Melville through the lens of racial performance, by demonstrating how that racial performance develops in Melville’s work throughout the 1850s.

Floating stages : racial performance in Herman Melville's 1850s texts

The Origin of Dewey's Instrumentalism.

The fictions of Nella Larsen have long been understood as daring explorations of black women’s sexuality and subjectivity. Deborah E. McDowell is one of the earliest and most influential exponents of this idea, suggesting that Larsen portrays “black female sexuality in a literary era that often sensationalized it and pandered to the stereotype of the primitive exotic” (xvi). According to Hazel V. Carby, Helga Crane in Quicksand (1928) is “the first explicitly sexual black heroine in black women’s fiction” (“It” 471). Similarly, Cheryl A. Wall claims: “Both Quicksand and Passing contemplate the inextricability of the racism and sexism that confront the black woman in her quest for selfhood” (89). The association between Larsen’s work and black women’s subjectivity was so entrenched by the time that Judith Butler wrote on Passing (1929) that she hesitates before applying psychoanalysis to the novel: “There are clearly risks in trying to think in psychoanalytic terms about Larsen’s story, which, after all, published in 1929, belongs to the tradition of the Harlem Renaissance, and ought properly to be read in the context of that cultural and social world” (173). (It becomes clear from Butler’s subsequent remarks that the “context” she has in mind is primarily racial, particularly in her claim that “both stories revolve on the impossibility of sexual freedom for black women” [178].) More recent studies have maintained this view of Larsen’s fiction, bearing such titles as “Queering Helga Crane: Black Nativism in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand” (2011) and “The New Negro Flâneuse in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand” (2008). I mention but a few of the many examples of the critical tendency to take for granted that Larsen was chiefly concerned with black women, but they suffice to reveal what strikes me as an “elephant in the room” in Larsen studies: that all of her heroines are racially ambiguous, if not explicitly biracial. In numerous ways, Larsen takes pains to show that something about her major women characters significantly sets them apart from the less ambiguously black women around them, whether it be that they can pass for white or that they have a white parent. If Larsen had intended to explore the experiences, psychology, or sexuality of black women specifically, it seems odd that she should have chosen to do so, in both novels she wrote, through such ambiguously raced women. Why did she not concentrate instead on a woman like Felise Freeland, a spirited

Nella Larsen Reconsidered: The Trouble with Desire in Quicksand and Passing

Accusations of sexual impropriety have been used against women public speakers at least since the Renaissance, and nineteenth-century America was no exception. In constructing public personae that worked with prevailing gender ideologies, women tried to preserve the appearance of sexual purity. This concern for chastity carried over into fictional representations of women public speakers. While some authors depicted such figures negatively, the three examined here—Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Louisa May Alcott, and Frances E. W. Harper—all defended the woman public speaker by providing warrants within the narrative structure for her chastity and by giving her a public mission that was appropriately feminine according to nineteenth-century gender ideology. These women authors also provided a utopian moment in their narratives in which the social benefits of allowing their protagonists to speak in public are dramatized. Studying the literary representations of women speakers, in any era, can help to illuminate ...

Chastity Warrants for Women Public Speakers in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction

In recent years, the phenomenon of the “40+ mother” has generated much media attention in Denmark. Within these discussions, 40+ mothers are regularly labelled as ridiculous, bad, or irresponsible, their access to assisted reproductive technologies is restricted, and their right to them is questioned. This rhetoric is explored here within the particular context of the Danish welfare state, which commonly takes pride in being family-friendly and is often seen as liberal in terms of its gender policies. This paper analyses these debates and argues that the ideological category of the “old mother” is another formulation of sexist and ageist discourses that identify feminine ageing with decline and emptiness. Drawing on feminist age studies, these media representations are considered here as a manifestation of middle-ageism, in which 40+ mothers undergo a process of accelerated ageing as they fail to act their age. The analysis traces these emerging discourses and discusses some of the alternatives th...

“Like Having New Batteries Installed!”: Problematizing the Category of the “40+ Mother” in Contemporary Danish Media

(34). Although she contends that she created the term in order to distinguish it from possessive individualism, she does not expand upon the two sufficiently to create a stark enough contrast. Another element of Owning Up that might justify greater explanation is the definition of “life writing.” Obviously, the category includes biography and autobiography, but by also including novels and nonfiction manifestos in her study, Adams seems to stretch the meaning to indicate any text that presents a human life story. Thus, it becomes hard to determine what she would not include in the genre, since virtually every text represents a life in some way. These reservations about theoretical constructs are minor, however. On the whole, Owning Up offers compelling interpretations of a series of undervalued and often overlooked texts in order to reveal how women writers—as much as male writers—contributed to understandings of privacy in nineteenth-century America.

Sex Expression and American Women Writers, 1860-1940 (review)

Gender Protest and Same-Sex Desire in Antebellum American Literature by David Greven (review)

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Sex Expression and American Women Writers, 1860-1940 (review)

Gender Protest and Same-Sex Desire in Antebellum American Literature by David Greven (review)