‘No Drop of Black Blood Marred Him in My Sight’: Reconstructing the Nation through Interracial Union in Louisa May Alcott’s Abolitionist Fiction

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article argues that Alcott’s representation of interracial relationships challenges scholarly perceptions of her work as embedded in racist discourses of white purity. I claim that Alcott exposes the socially constructed nature of the racial hierarchy surrounding her by using her biracial heroes’ ability to “pass” as a means of uncovering the prejudices and misassumptions that force them into socially inferior positions. Alcott’s biracial protagonists reject the ways in which their bodies are read by the outside world through representing their scars as symbols of their resistances to slavery and the duality of their ethnically-mixed heritages. As such, these characters challenge Alcott’s white heroines to interrogate the falsely constructed nature of the racial hierarchies in which they are embedded, thereby facilitating the moral and spiritual transformations of these women. Throughout her canon, Alcott argues that interracial unions are integral to the development of an equitable society. Her mature young adult fiction portrays the obstruction of interracial relationships as precipitating the erasure of the biracial subject from the nation state and the psychological stagnation of his white love interest. Alcott’s vision of reconstruction therefore incorporates the interracial union and the subsequent possible multiracial generations it evokes into the newly formed nation.