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

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.