Women in Literature: Marrying
High and Low from
Chair: Karlyn Crowley
St. Norbert Coll.
“In Some Country of
Our Own”: The Fantasy of a Miscegenated Nation
Alice Rutkowski
SUNY-Geneseo
www.geneseo.edu/~rutkowsk
This paper will examine four women writers writing after the Civil War, Lydia Maria Child, Rebecca Harding Davis, Anna Dickinson and Frances E. W. Harper. Their texts from early Reconstruction veer into increasingly radical territory, particularly in the love plots they represent. Although antebellum literature did depicted interracial romances, most often it was through the figure of the black woman as the stereotypical “tragic mulatta.” The Reconstruction novels depict miscegenetic unions in radically different configurations: mixed-race women often figure centrally, as before, but are more complex and less tragic; and more radically, white women are matched with black men, a relation which in a few short years becomes the racist justification for widespread violence against black men. The three white writers also employ a neat formal trick to make the idea of a romantic alliance with the average freed slave – visibly black, poor and uneducated – more palatable. Instead of tracing a single romance in their novels, they depict two: one interracial romance between a white lover and a middle-class, educated, light-enough-to-pass black individual; and one romance which incorporated working-class whites. Disengaging the issues of class and race made the solution of intermarriage as a cure for racial prejudice seem more feasible.
Publicizing Eleanor Porter's Boy Book
Amy Blair
amy.blair@marquette.edu
Though Eleanor Porter's
_Pollyanna_(1913) and _Pollyanna Grows Up_(1914) had been runaway best-sellers
for the author and her first publisher, L. C. Page, her second publisher,
Houghton Mifflin, did not have the same success with her next novel, _Just
David_(1916). Perhaps readers who had
been drawn to a sunny little girl were not interested in an eponymous male
hero; in any case, four months after the initial publication of _David_,
Houghton began an aggressive promotional campaign soliciting letters from
readers testifying to the way the book had been an "inspiration" in
their lives. Houghton received over four
hundred letters in response, a trove of problematic testimonials for scholars
of historical reception studies. In this
presentation, I will address the letter-writing competition from the
publisher's perspective, focusing on the initial campaign and on the letters
that were publicized as the winning entries.
_Just David_'s brief life on the bestseller
lists had ended by March 1917 when the contest winners were announced, but the
three winning letters were carefully selected and molded by Houghton to serve
the new Porter novel and their Spring 1917 list. More intriguingly, the three
"winning" letters abandon the idea of engaging young boys as the
audience for a male Pollyanna, carefully appealing to both rural and urban(e)
adult women readers, to the romance reader and to the fan of "realism.
" Furthermore, one of the letters
makes an explicit plea for the
Soul Work: Oprah and
the Black New Age
Karlyn Crowley
St. Norbert Coll.