Coloring History and Mixing Race in Levina Urbino's Sunshine in the Palace and Cottage and Louise Heaven's In Bonds

Abstract

While figure of is writ large in American literature and literary criticism, (1) this essay shares a recognition most recently advanced by William L. Andrews and Mitch Kachun: What is remarkable though not always acknowledged ... is fact that majority of beautiful in American novels before 1865 ... do not end up unfulfilled (xliii). Andrews and Kachun note that Metta Victoria Victor's Maum Guinea, H. L. Hosmer's Adela, John T. Trowbridge's Neighbor Jackwood, Mayne Reid's Quadroon, and E. D. E. N. Southworth's Retribution feature mixed-race female characters who, though they must endure a stint in slavery and withstand intimidation by lascivious slave owners and brutal overseers, often than not ... eventually encounter a northerner or a European on whose love they can rely (lxv, n. 45; xliii). While it is still too early to make judgments about the majority--especially given that Andrews and Kachun's own work illustrates that we need to be hesitant about assuming any complete sets--this essay shares sense that mixed-race characters who are not mulattas have been absent from our discussions for too long. (2) This absence is complicated by disproportionately larger presence in our scholarship of archetypal examples of tragic mulatta type in works such as Lydia Maria Child's The Quadroons, William Wells Brown's Clotel, and Elizabeth Livermore's Zoe, even though these works were neither more popular nor exceedingly better than some of novels noted by Andrews and Kachun. reasons for this imbalance are complex and beyond scope of this essay; it may come in part from Child's early imprint on a vast amount of antislavery literature (including Brown's story) and in part from limited senses of racial definition that have dominated much contemporary scholarship. Regardless, dominance of figure of tragic mulatta in our scholarship has limited our consideration of race and racial identity. This imbalance seems to me, for example, to be partially to blame for Lauren Berlant's dismissal of full range of types of political efficacy available to mixed-race characters--a formation scholars such as P. Gabrielle Foreman have challenged when applied to Black women's texts. (3) It has also, among other gaps, led many of us to locate first real resistance to figure of tragic mulatta in works such as Child's Reconstruction-era Romance of Republic and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's Iola Leroy. This essay thus begins by acknowledging that there were several early examples of a discourse of mixed-race heroines running counter to figure of tragic mulatta--one in which mixed-race heroine not only avoids a tragic end but actually embraces her genealogy, uses her visual racial indeterminacy to aid nation-building and self-empowerment, and finds fulfillment in a multi-racial family housed within larger Black community. Specifically, I examine two previously unknown mixed-race heroines who are ultimately far from tragic--indeed, who seem almost consciously constructed as revisions to tragic mulatta type. This essay argues that, in different ways, protagonists of both Levina B. Urbino's Sunshine in Palace and Cottage (1854) and Louise Palmer Heaven's In Bonds (published in 1867 under pseudonym Laura Preston) explode many of expectations of tragic mulatta type. Through this work, I hope to begin to re-imagine contours of our sense of mixed-race female character (tragic mulatta and otherwise) in American literature. I focus on a pair of now unknown novels by now relatively unknown authors for a set of reasons. Both were popular in their day: Sunshine went through four editions (under different titles) in six years, and In Bonds, published in both San Francisco and New York, seems to have launched a successful if spotty career. Both have publication circumstances of interest to students of race: publisher of Sunshine's fourth edition (which carried entirely new title Home Angel) was Thayer and Eldridge, who also contracted to publish Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in Life of a Slave Girl before bankruptcy forestalled their doing so; publisher of In Bonds founded Overland Monthly and was a colleague of Mark Twain (who would, of course, write works key to considerations of race in American literature). …