Race, romance, and imperialism: Interracial relationships in Victorian literature

My dissertation argues that many Victorians mediated their ambivalent relationships with their imperial subjects through interracial romances in literature, and that these narratives flourished even when British colonial authorities discouraged actual interracial romances. I contend that most of these works do not function as transgressive challenges to Victorian racial ideology, but are ways to acknowledge British desires and fears for their colonial subjects. The interracial narratives manipulate Victorian romantic conventions--especially female sexual agency and male display--in order to heighten or dampen their sexual allure. The free choice of the imperial hero by an attractive native in these narratives validates the superiority of the hero, while sexual coercion by the imperial antihero shows his or her fall into savagery.;Not only did interracial romances offer an avenue for Victorians to express their desires and fears, I contend that the complexity of interracial relationships allowed British authors to explore the complexity of local colonial politics. My project examines a range of canonical and non-canonical authors including Aleph Bey, Joseph Conrad, H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, Philip Meadows Taylor, and Robert Louis Stevenson, whose settings for their interracial relationships span India, the South Seas, Jamaica, and Africa. Specific cultural practices--like the taboo traditions in the South Seas, widow abuse in India, and racism in Britain--became ways for the Victorians to acknowledge, and sometimes tame, colonized culture. The varied nature of these relationships reflects changes in attitudes toward the colonies during the nineteenth century and changes in their relationships with different colonized peoples and cultures. The flexibility of these narratives allowed the Victorians to express their divergent and contradictory impressions of indigenous people. I contend that this diversity suggests that Victorians did not have a single racial ideology or belief in "the Other," but a variety of "racisms" and "others."...