Mixed Victoriana: Mixed-Race Identity in Victorian Literature, 1850-1914

这个项目考察了从维多利亚时代中期到后期，混血身份的想法如何在一系列文学流派中找到了虚构的形式。通过结合当代非虚构材料阅读这部小说，我探索了关于维多利亚时代关于个人主体性、社会凝聚力和国家命运的话语，如何理解被描绘为来自两个或更多不同种族背景的父母的孩子的人物。虽然20世纪关于混血身份的文学描述受到了相当大的批判性关注，但这个主题几乎没有受到19世纪学者的关注，除了对勃朗特的S·伯莎·梅森等边缘人物病态的、可怕的威胁感兴趣之外。尽管这个项目将详细阐述这种最基本的种族差异的描述，但它也探索了一些文学作品，将扩大对维多利亚时代小说中形成的不同口音、不同种类的混合种族身份的批判性理解。此外，它还考虑了关于英国身份、国家地位和帝国的思想，这部文学可以理解为借鉴并激发了活力。这个项目围绕五个不同的文学体裁或子体裁进行组织：国内现实主义；海上探险；哥特式；英印浪漫；以及生活写作。这让我能够审视关于混血身份的话语和辩论，他们所编码的复杂性，并考虑非典范小说，其中一些是由混血作家写的，这些作家基本上被当代学者遗忘了，还有主导批评性讨论的典范文学作品。因此，我的论文认为种族异质性既是一种生活体验，也是一种虚构的现象。第一章从19世纪中期的性别意识形态和种族话语出发，考察了国内现实主义流派中对混血教育的描绘，考察了玛丽·伊丽莎白·布拉登(Mary Elizabeth Braddon)的《章鱼》(The Octoroon，1861)和黛娜·克雷克(Dinah Craik)的《橄榄》(Olive，1850)与当代关于女性、教养和环境的论文的关系，因为它们与身体健康和行为礼仪有关。第二章探讨了麦克斯韦尔·菲利普的小说《艾曼纽尔·阿帕多卡》(1854)中对不同种族海盗的刻画如何挑战了围绕英国水手所体现的英国男子气概的主流话语。在这里，除了非虚构的来源，我还研究了飞利浦的同时代人R.M.巴伦坦和玛丽亚特船长如何代表英国水手。第三章考察了哥特式小说中关于弗洛伦斯·玛丽亚特的《热带的女儿》(1887)和《吸血鬼的血》(1894)中关于堕落话语的混血女性，并指出，尽管这些小说表达了维多利亚晚期对生物上的种族差异概念的焦虑，但它们也突显了混血人群的困境。第四章考察了维多利亚晚期英印浪漫史中对混血关系的刻画。它分析了爱丽丝·佩林的《更强烈的要求》(1903)和比西亚·玛丽·克罗克的《公司的仆人》(1908)和《老马德拉斯》(1913)，分析了英国统治时期印度的欧亚社区，探索了这些作家如何利用所谓的非政治浪漫形式巧妙地批评和支持帝国价值观。第五章考察了混血自传，探讨了玛丽·西科尔的《奇妙历险记》(1857)如何利用奴隶制和大英帝国主义的叙事，并将她的自传与盎格鲁-加勒比海殖民政府的立法话语中对种族异质性的描述联系起来。

This project examines how the idea of mixed-race identity found fictional form across a range of literary genres from the mid to late-Victorian era. By reading this fiction in conjunction with contemporary non-fictional material, I explore ways in which characters, portrayed as children of parents from two or more different racial backgrounds, can be understood with regards to Victorian discourses concerning individual subjectivity, social cohesion and national destiny. While twentieth-century literary depictions of mixed-race identity have received substantial critical attention, the subject has received little attention from scholars of the nineteenth-century, other than an interest in the pathologized, monstrous threat of marginalized figures such as Brontë's Bertha Mason. Although this project will elaborate such accounts of liminal ethnic alterity, it also explores literatures that will expand critical understanding of the differently accented, distinctive kinds of mixed-race identity that took shape within Victorian fiction. Additionally, it considers ideas about Britishness, nationhood and empire this literature can be understood to have drawn upon and energized. This project is organized around five different literary genres or sub-genres: domestic realism; maritime adventures; fin-de-siècle gothic; Anglo-Indian romance; and life-writing. This allows me to examine discourses and debates about mixed-race identity, the complexities they encoded and consider non-canonical fiction, some written by mixed-race writers, which has largely been forgotten by contemporary scholars, alongside the canonical literary works that dominate critical discussion. Thus, my thesis considers ethnic heterogeneity as both a lived experience and a fictional phenomenon.Chapter One examines portrayals of mixed-race upbringing within the domestic realism genre in light of mid-nineteenth century gender ideology and racial discourse, examining Mary Elizabeth Braddon's The Octoroon (1861) and Dinah Craik's Olive (1850) with relation to contemporary treatises concerning womanhood, breeding and environment as they related to physical health and behavioural propriety. Chapter Two considers how the portrayal of ethnically diverse pirates in Maxwell Philip's Emmanuel Appadocca (1854) challenges dominant discourses surrounding British masculinity as embodied by the British sailor. Here, in addition to non-fiction sources, I examine how Philips' contemporaries R.M. Ballantine and Captain Marryat represented British sailors. Chapter Three examines the mixed-race femme-fatale in fin-de-siècle gothic fiction with regard to discourses of degeneration within Florence Marryat's A Daughter of the Tropics (1887) and Blood of the Vampire (1894) and suggests that whilst these novels speak to late-Victorian anxieties regarding biologised notions of racial difference, they also highlight the plight of mixed-race people. Chapter Four examines the portrayal of mixed-race relationships within late Victorian-era Anglo-Indian romances. It analyses Alice Perrin's The Stronger Claim (1903) and Bithia Mary Croker's The Company's Servant (1908) and In Old Madras (1913) in the context of the "Eurasian" community in India during the British Raj, exploring how these authors utilise the supposedly apolitical romance form to subtly critique and endorse imperial values. Chapter Five examines mixed-race self-writing, exploring how Mary Seacole's Wonderful Adventures (1857) taps into narratives that arose from slavery and British imperialism and considers her autobiography in relation to depictions of ethnic heterogeneity within the legislative discourses in Anglo-Caribbean colonial administrations.