Passing fictions: Reading identity in nineteenth-century America (Frederick Douglass, Harriet E. Wilson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frances E. W. Harper, Nathaniel Hawthorne)

This dissertation considers the phenomenon of “passing” to explore the ways in which race, gender, and sexuality interconnect in culture. I examine passing, however, not as a bodily event but as a paradigm for interpretation. The texts I analyze are not primarily concerned with the literal act of passing in its familiar race-, sexuality-, and gender-based manifestations. I consider, instead, the ways in which key works of nineteenth-century American literature (and their readings in contemporary culture) engage two of the issues most central to passing: what we see (visibility); and how we know (epistemology).; I contend that texts, like bodies, have specific identities routinely attached to them, ones that are linked in significant ways to the generic forms expected of particular authorial identities. I examine how these works reject visibility (authorial and textual) as a guarantor of knowledge, both about their authors and about what these texts “do.” In works by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Wilson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frances E. W. Harper, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, I trace intersections among identity categories to consider how these authors negotiate the cultural mandate that they write “as” representatives of their respective racial, gender, and class positions.; Accordingly, I analyze these novels as a series of distinct, though mutually complementary, performances—presentations designed to satisfy their audiences' expectations, but also implicitly to critique the cultural belief that author and genre inevitably correspond. The dissertation thus engages recent Americanist work that attempts to think through binary conceptions of literary history but proposes a new angle of inquiry. In highlighting what I call a thematics of passing, my analysis registers an anti-essentialist argument while it simultaneously respects the very real effects of these texts' (and their authors') public identities.