CHAPTER THREE

AFFILIATING WITH GEORGE ELIOT

Traveling through Europe as a young woman in 1890, Mary Church Terrell’s final destination was Florence. There, as the Oberlin graduate and daughter of former slaves recounted decades later in her autobiography, A Colored Woman in a White World, she purchased “an edition de luxe of George Eliot’s Romola in two volumes bound in white and trimmed in red” with “photographs of the places and pictures mentioned by the author . . . pasted in the book opposite the pages in which they were described.”1 “It was a delightful experience,” she recalls, “to take this book, visit the places, and look at the pictures to which Eliot referred.”²

That is all Terrell says about Romola or its author, and the diary she kept at the time only adds some specifics about the places visited and pictures looked at.³ Eliot’s historical novel, set in Renaissance Florence, thus seems to have been used by Terrell as a classy guidebook, with the deluxe edition she carried about serving as well as a conspicuous marker of cosmopolitan sophistication. “Bound in white,” the book seems, if not bound up with whiteness, of a piece with the exhilarating freedom from the burdens of racialized identity Terrell experiences in Europe: “But now the time had come for me to return to my native land, and my heart ached when I thought about it. Life had been so pleasant and profitable abroad, where I could take advantage of any opportunity I desired without wondering whether a colored girl would be allowed to enjoy it or not.”⁴ In fact, however, the aspect of Terrell’s experience, as she recounts it, that most recalls Romola is the quintessentially Eliotic tension she feels between her desire for self-fulfillment and her sense of duty and loyalty, combined with the quintessentially Eliotic choice she makes: “I knew I would be much happier trying to promote the welfare of my race in my native land, working under certain hard conditions, than I would be living in a foreign land where I could enjoy freedom from prejudice, but where I would make no effort to do the work which I then believed it was my duty to do. I doubted that I could respect myself if I shirked my responsibility and was recreant to my trust. . . . So I was glad when the steamer began to plough the sea to bring me home.”5 Terrell’s account suggests that she has taken to heart the words of Eliot’s Savonarola, whose “arresting voice” stops Romola on her flight from Florence: “If your own people are wearing a yoke, will you slip from under it, instead of struggling with them to lighten it?”⁶ Like the protagonist of the novel she is reading, Terrell chooses to return to her “own people.”

The year after Terrell’s visit to Florence, Eliot’s novel made a more extended appearance in William Dean Howells’s novella An Imperative Duty, which tells the story of a young woman facing a dilemma very similar to Terrell’s. Like Mary Church Terrell, Rhoda Aldgate is light-skinned enough to live as white, and like Terrell, she can and must decide whether or not to commit to an African American identity and vocation: “I’m going to find my mother’s people,” she declares. “Oughtn’t I to go down there [from Boston to New Orleans] and help them; try to educate them, and elevate them; give my life to them? Isn’t it base and cowardly to desert them, and live happily apart from them . . . ?”⁷ Unlike Terrell, however, Rhoda has been raised in ignorance of her African American ancestry. She learns of this ancestry from her aunt, Mrs. Meredith, who acts out of a sense of duty cultivated by her reading of George Eliot. We first meet Mrs. Meredith engaged in “a long and serious analysis of Romola” that bespeaks her “conscience of prodigious magnifying force, cultivated to the last degree by a constant training upon the ethical problems of fiction.”⁸ “Do you believe that any one can rightfully live a lie?” she demands of her interlocutor, Dr. Olney (Rhoda’s eventual love interest); “Do you believe that [Romola’s husband] Tito was ever really at rest when he thought of what he was concealing?”⁹

Olney concludes that Mrs. Meredith is “hopelessly muddled as to her plain, every-day obligations by a morbid sympathy with the duty-ridden creatures of the novelist’s brain,”¹⁰ and the novella as a whole would seem to agree with him, as no good comes from her revelation of Rhoda’s ancestry. Rhoda’s one attempt to interact with African Americans is a disaster, and while she ultimately decides to marry Olney and continue living as white, she remains haunted by a sense of “guilty deceit.”¹¹ This guilt does not suggest that she should have followed through on her sense of duty, but rather that she would have been better off never having known about the African American strand of her lineage in the first place. A final, ironic echo underscores the un-, indeed anti-, Eliotic stance of the novella: like Romola, Rhoda and Olney return to Florence (where they first met), only for Rhoda this move enacts not a commitment to her ancestral “people” but just the opposite.

While A Colored Woman in a White World and An Imperative Duty thus represent and advocate (explicitly in the former case, implicitly in the latter) opposed positions toward the acknowledgment and embrace of African American identity, both works implicitly align George Eliot on the same, affirmative side of this question. In neither text is a strong link articulated between Eliot and this position; nonetheless, especially in combination, these references to Eliot suggest her felt relevance to this issue. They also adumbrate a larger pattern. When nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century African American writers reference or rework Eliot, they tend to do so not because they view her work as inhabiting a cultural realm that transcends race, nor because they seek to locate themselves or their own work in such a realm. Instead, like Mary Church Terrell, they typically call on George Eliot in the course of, or in support of, their affirmations of specifically racial affiliation and solidarity.

As this chapter will show, Eliot’s presence in African American literature and print culture begins in the 1860s, when she was in the middle of her career and at the height of popularity and prestige. The African American engagement with her work crests in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Eliot’s reputation is usually thought of as being in decline.12 This virtually unknown afterlife takes a range of forms, from brief quotations to extended allusions and borrowed plot devices. We saw in the introduction, for example, that Anna Julia Cooper takes the epigraph for the first half of her essay collection A Voice from the South from Eliot’s little-read poem “How Lisa Loved the King.” Cooper also takes one of the epigraphs to the second half of her book from Eliot’s novel Felix Holt. (Given this affinity for Eliot, it is no surprise that one of the essays in the book contains a devastating attack on An Imperative Duty.) As we shall see in the next chapter, Charles Chesnutt’s novel The House Behind the Cedars is in dialogue with The Mill on the Floss, as are later novels by W.E.B. Du Bois and Jessie Redmon Fauset.¹³ In this chapter, however, I will focus on the one work by Eliot that seems to have been of greatest interest to African American writers and editors at the time. While not quite as obscure as “How Lisa Loved the King,” this work stands, in one critic’s words, as “one of the most conspicuously neglected major works left behind by any Victorian writer of the first rank.”¹⁴ In African American literary culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—as perhaps nowhere else—George Eliot is first and foremost the author of The Spanish Gypsy.

A book-length dramatic poem set in fifteenth-century Spain, The Spanish Gypsy was published simultaneously by Blackwood and Sons in the UK and Ticknor and Fields in the US in 1868. Starting soon after its publication, the poem was repeatedly put to use in efforts to promote African American solidarity and establish a race-affirmative body of literature. Although this African Americanizing afterlife has much in common with those discussed in the previous chapters, it differs from them in one crucial respect: deploying The Spanish Gypsy in positive depictions or discussions of African Americans does not directly flout the poem’s own protocols with regard to race. Whereas Bleak House criticized attention to Africans and people of color in general, and “The Charge of the Light Brigade” enacted what I have called a deracializing decontextualization, The Spanish Gypsy treats a racial minority with respect while foregrounding the role of race in determining individual and group identity. The very act of bringing the poem to bear on the experience of African Americans, then, is not inherently ironic or subversive, and does not brush against the poem’s grain. On the contrary, I will argue that the use the writers considered here make of The Spanish Gypsy shows that they had a greater understanding of and appreciation for the spirit of the poem than did many Victorian critics—and many more recent ones as well.

AFRICAN AMERICANIZING THE SPANISH GYPSY

The Spanish Gypsy tells the story of a young woman, Fedalma, who learns that she is not Spanish, as she has believed her whole life, but rather a Zincala, or gypsy. She learns this when by chance she meets her father, Zarca, the king of the gypsies, from whom she was separated as a baby. Zarca demands that Fedalma embrace her ancestral identity and help him lead their people to a new homeland. After much soul-searching, Fedalma accepts her newfound Zincala identity and vocation. Tragic complications ensue, including the murder of Zarca by Fedalma’s Spanish fiancé, Don Silva, who had tried to gain membership in the Zincali himself to preserve his relationship with Fedalma. The poem ends with the gypsies sailing off, led by Fedalma.

I offer this brief plot summary not only because of the poem’s relative obscurity but also to direct attention to the plot itself, which figures centrally in the poem’s African American afterlife. Before turning to this afterlife, however, we should note this plot’s recurrence in Eliot’s own oeuvre: in many respects, the poem’s plot is the same as that of her much better-known work, Daniel Deronda—her final novel, published eight years after The Spanish Gypsy. In both works, the protagonists grow up as members of their society’s dominant race or nationality (Spanish or English, respectively) but learn as young adults that by virtue of their ancestry they belong to a despised minority (gypsy or Jew). Despite this revelation, the characters are in a position to continue living with the identity they grew up with. Instead, though, they choose to affiliate themselves with their ancestral people and dedicate their lives to bettering its lot.

As striking as the fact that Eliot saw fit to tell this story of what I will call unwitting passing and voluntary racial affiliation twice is the fact that virtually no other major British writer ever told it at all.15 By contrast, a number of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American writers—most of them African American—constructed this same scenario, almost invariably in stories about African American identity; the best-known example is Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s novel Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted (1892).¹⁶ Within American literary history, such stories are legible as refutations of what has come to be known as the tragic mulatto/a plot. In stories with this plot, the discovery that a character who has believed him- or herself to be white has some African ancestry is cataclysmic, leading directly to enslavement, sexual violation, madness, and/or death. As many scholars have discussed, this plot was invented before the Civil War to inspire abolitionist sentiment by bringing home to white readers the horrors of slavery, if not the irrationality of the “one-drop rule” of racial categorization. However, to some writers the plot’s equation of African ancestry with tragedy, suffering, and death came to seem limited and offensive—yet instead of rejecting the plot outright, they reworked it to envision less dire consequences to the discovery of African American ancestry.¹⁷ An Imperative Duty is one such narrative, but those written by African Americans tend to transform the tragic mulatto/a plot into the story of solidarity and uplift that Howells’s Rhoda considers but rejects. Iola Leroy, published a year after An Imperative Duty, is often read as a direct response to that work.

Due perhaps to the neglect of The Spanish Gypsy as well as the divide between African American and Victorian literary studies this book seeks to bridge, the similarities between these American narratives of unwitting passing and Eliot’s have gone unremarked by scholars. Yet this kinship was no secret to the authors of these narratives themselves, nor something they sought to hide. On the contrary, African American writers immediately saw the relevance of Eliot’s work to the stories they wanted to tell and causes they wanted to promote, and they made use of her work accordingly. The recovery of this interracial textual affiliation thus revises the genealogy of this plot of genealogical affiliation. In doing so, it refines our understanding of an important strand of the African American literary tradition and reframes The Spanish Gypsy in ways that force a rethinking of the poem’s ideological project as well as its cultural impact. This affiliation also sheds new light on the development of George Eliot’s sense of vocation as an imaginative writer and even, I will suggest, points to a new explanation for her choice of the name “George Eliot” itself.

The African American afterlife of The Spanish Gypsy extends to little-visited precincts of print culture, but it was instigated and shaped by one of the leading African American authors and public intellectuals of the second half of the nineteenth century: Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. Returning repeatedly to the poem over the span of a quarter-century, Harper made The Spanish Gypsy her own, and in doing so established its place in the African American literary and intellectual tradition.

Two of Harper’s four novels feature the Spanish Gypsy plot of unwitting passing and voluntary racial affiliation: not only her best-known work, Iola Leroy, as noted earlier, but also her first novel, Minnie’s Sacrifice. One of three serialized novels by Harper rediscovered in the 1990s by Frances Smith Foster, Minnie’s Sacrifice tells the story of two mixed-race individuals, Minnie and Louis, both of whom are raised believing they are white. Minnie learns of her African American ancestry from her mother and Louis from his grandmother, both of whom are black. Both protagonists eventually embrace this lineage and identity, with their feelings of personal loyalty supplemented in both cases by gratitude for specific acts of rescue—Minnie is nursed to health by her mother, and Louis is helped on his flight to the North by several African Americans. After Minnie and Louis marry, they commit themselves to working for the good of “the colored race,”18 a goal to which Louis reaffirms his commitment at novel’s end, after Minnie is murdered by white supremacists.

Minnie’s Sacrifice was published serially in the African Methodist Episcopal Church’s Christian Recorder in 1869—the year after the publication of The Spanish Gypsy. Notwithstanding this suggestive timing, it is of course possible that Harper arrived at her version of the plot of unwitting passing and voluntary racial affiliation independently. Lydia Maria Child, an originator of the tragic mulatto/a plot, had already begun to rethink that plot in her 1867 novel The Romance of the Republic, and it is certainly the case, as Frances Smith Foster points out, that Minnie’s Sacrifice is “a deliberate retelling of the Old Testament Moses story,” to which Harper openly alludes.19 Indeed, Moses’s story is the ur-version of the plot of unwitting passing and voluntary racial re-identification; Eliot too will explicitly reference it in Daniel Deronda, when Mordecai discusses the advantages of having “an accomplished Egyptian”—that is, someone raised as a privileged member of the dominant culture—as a leader and spokesman for a minority group.²⁰ In Minnie’s Sacrifice, the biblical story serves as a model and catalyst within the narrative itself, as Louis is raised as white at the insistence of his owner’s daughter, Camilla, who is inspired by her reading of the Book of Exodus: “It was a fine story; and I read it till I cried. Now I mean to do something like that good princess. I am going to ask Pa, to let me take him to the house, and have a nurse for him, and bring him up like a white child, and never let him know that he is colored.”²¹ Ironically, of course, this “fine story” proves a closer match than Camilla anticipates, as Louis, like Moses, learns of his lineage and avows the identity it confers.

Yet if Minnie’s Sacrifice begins with the Bible, it ends with The Spanish Gypsy: the final sentence of the novel borrows its phrasing from Eliot’s poem. This verbal echo shows that Harper was not simply aware of the parallels between her novel and Eliot’s poem, but in fact was working closely with her geographically removed precursor text—was engaged, in other words, in close reading at a distance. In addition to confirming the direct connection between Eliot’s version of the Mosaic plot and Harper’s own, this echo pinpoints a moment in The Spanish Gypsy of enduring importance to Harper and later African American writers.

Reinforcing her novel’s message of racial loyalty, Harper’s postscript announces that “The lesson of Minnie’s sacrifice is this, that it is braver to suffer with one’s own branch of the human race,—to feel, that the weaker and the more despised they are, the closer we will cling to them, for the sake of helping them, than to attempt to creep out of all identity with them in their feebleness, for the sake of mere personal advantages. . . .”²² The argument and wording here recall the pivotal scene in The Spanish Gypsy in which the Gypsy chieftain Zarca reveals to Fedalma that he is her father and calls upon her to join her ancestral people. Stunned, Fedalma grapples with the notion that she belongs to what she sees as

a race

More outcast and despised than Moor or Jew. . . .

A race that lives on prey, as foxes do

With stealthy, petty rapine; so despised,

It is not persecuted, only spurned,

Crushed under foot, warred on by chance, like rats,

Or swarming flies, or reptiles of the sea

Dragged in the net unsought, and flung far off

To perish as they may.23

Surprisingly, Zarca responds to this extravagantly harsh characterization by declaring, “You paint us well.” But then he continues,

So abject are the men whose blood we share;

Untutored, unbefriended, unendowed;

No favorites of heaven or of men,

Therefore I cling to them! (I.2754–58)

The echo of these lines in Minnie’s Sacrifice is unmistakable: “the weaker and the more despised they are, the closer we will cling to them.”

This Eliotic formulation became something of a talisman for Harper. It appears again two decades later in the last of the three novels Harper published serially in The Christian Recorder, Trial and Triumph (1888–89), and both plot and phrase recur yet again in Iola Leroy. In Trial and Triumph, one character seeks to dissuade another from “pass[ing] as a white man” by arguing: “I do not think it possible that however rich or strong or influential you may be as a white man, that you can be as noble and as true a man as you will be if you stand in your lot without compromise or concealment, and feel that the feebler your mother’s race is the closer you will cling to it.”²⁴ In Iola Leroy, Harper reworks Minnie’s Sacrifice, again telling the story of two individuals (Iola Leroy and her brother Harry) who are raised as white, learn of their African American ancestry as young adults, and refuse opportunities to return to life as a white person. As in Minnie’s Sacrifice, these refusals are motivated first by love of family and later by a desire to help uplift the race.

Like George Eliot, Harper gives her second narrative of unwitting passing and voluntary racial affiliation a happier ending than her first one, as Iola and Harry both marry (Iola to a Dr. Latimer—no relation, it seems, to the Latimer who narrates Eliot’s novella “The Lifted Veil”) and settle into productive lives working on behalf of the “people” with whom they have “cast . . . [their] lot.”²⁵ Like Deronda and unlike Fedalma, they are not placed in a position “with inclination impelling one way and duty compelling another”;26 unlike Fedalma and Minnie, they are not called upon to make a tragic sacrifice. In a possible nod to Daniel Deronda, Harper makes the rare move of ending her novel by quoting several lines of unattributed poetry, as had Eliot—although, in a self-assertive twist, whereas Eliot quotes Milton, Harper quotes herself.²⁷ When Harper does echo Eliot more closely, she does not turn to Daniel Deronda but rather reworks her earlier reworking of The Spanish Gypsy: praising Latimer’s refusal to pass, which she calls “the grandest hour of his life,” Iola declares that “when others are trying to slip out from the race and pass into the white basis, I cannot help admiring one who acts as if he felt that the weaker the race is the closer he would cling to it.”²⁸

This formulation appears in Harper’s nonfiction as well. For example, in one of her most widely circulated lectures, “The Great Problem to Be Solved” (1875), she declares, “Oh, it is better to feel that the weaker and feebler our race the closer we will cling to them than it is to isolate ourselves from them in selfish, or careless unconcern.”²⁹ Yet even as she made Eliot’s words her own, Harper seems never to have lost sight of their origin: in her 1885 essay “A Factor in Human Progress,” published sixteen years after Minnie’s Sacrifice, she shifts from equivocally allusive paraphrase to direct quotation. Harper cites some fifty lines from The Spanish Gypsy, culminating in Zarca’s “Therefore I cling to them” speech, in support of her argument that an individual’s “education is unfinished” unless “he prefer[s] integrity to gold, principle to ease, true manhood to self-indulgence.”³⁰ Celebrating the effects of “the recital, or the example of deeds of high and holy worth” on a “people,” no matter how “low down [they] may be in the scale of character and condition,” Harper demands: “Where in the wide realms of poet[r]y and song, will we find nobler sentiments expressed with more tenderness, strength and beauty?”³¹ As her practice over a quarter-century indicates, for Harper this is indeed a rhetorical question.

For Frances Harper as for Eliot’s Zarca, then, the fact that one’s people is despised and dispossessed motivates solidarity and dedication to their betterment. Harper found in The Spanish Gypsy a phrase to encapsulate this view and a plot to dramatize it. Quite possibly following Harper’s lead, several turn-of-the-century African American writers also approvingly quote passages from Eliot’s poem that call for the uplifting of a downtrodden race and also script versions of the Spanish Gypsy plot. Like Harper, that is, and local variations aside, these writers consistently embrace and mobilize the logic, narrative, and rhetoric of group affiliation and affirmation Eliot’s poem models.

For all these writers, I would stress, as essential as one’s ancestral link to the group in question is that group’s status as “outcast, scorned, and wandering” (I.1468). Far from irrelevant or an impediment to identification and solidarity, this stigmatization and immiseration demand and justify them: “So abject are the men whose blood we share / . . . / Therefore I cling to them!” (emphasis added). This solidarity in turn gives purpose and meaning—“a much grander significance,” as Iola Leroy puts it32—to an individual life.

This dynamic is akin to one that Kwame Anthony Appiah describes in his influential work on contemporary identity categories. Following Ronald Dworkin, Appiah argues that “some of our circumstances . . . act as parameters . . . defining what it is for us to have lived a successful life,” whereas “others are limits [or limitations]—obstacles that get in the way of our making the ideal life that the parameters help define.”³³ Armed with this distinction, he observes that “so many of the identity categories that are politically salient are precisely ones that have functioned as limits, the result of the attitudes and acts of hostile or contemptuous others.” Crucially, though, “categories designed for subordination can also be used to mobilize and empower people as members of a self-affirmative identity”; “as a parameter, identities provide a context for choosing, for defining the shape of our lives, but they also provide a basis for community, for positive forms of solidarity.”³⁴ This process whereby stigmatized identities are transformed from limitations into parameters—and, I would emphasize, become parameters not despite but rather by virtue of their current status as limitations—is the story Harper and other African American writers after her extract from and associate with The Spanish Gypsy.

For example, Emmett J. Scott, the executive secretary of the Tuskegee Institute, cites Eliot’s poem in the first chapter of Tuskegee and Its People: Their Ideals and Achievements (1905). Arguing that “the school teaches no more important lesson than that of cultivating a sense of pride and respect for colored men and women who deserve it because of their character, education, and achievements,” Scott “borrow[s] a line from George Eliot” to drive home the importance of “pride of race”; indeed, he borrows ten lines—five from Zarca’s “Therefore I cling to them” speech followed without a break, as if part of the same sentence, by lines the gypsy leader speaks later in the same scene:

Because our race has no great memories,

I will so live, it shall remember me

For deeds of such divine beneficence

As rivers have, that teach men what is good

By blessing them—

And make their name, now but a badge of scorn,

A glorious banner floating in their midst,

Stirring the air they breathe with impulses

Of generous pride, exalting fellowship

Until it soars to magnanimity.35

For Scott, the appeal of Eliot’s lines stems from their eloquent and authoritative affirmation of the crucial role “race pride” plays in “race development” for a stigmatized race—but also, more specifically, for a race that cannot turn to its past to cultivate that pride or counter that stigma. Two recent Spanish Gypsy critics, Herbert Tucker and David Kurnick, both note that, in contrast to Daniel Deronda’s Jews, The Spanish Gypsy’s gypsies are represented as lacking any “proud cultural tradition” or cherished “grounding myth of origin” on which to base their collective identity.³⁶ Tucker calls this a “unique ethnic handicap,” but for some African American writers it became instead a source of identification—and one reason, we might infer, to turn to The Spanish Gypsy rather than Daniel Deronda.³⁷

We see this aspect of the poem’s appeal even more clearly in “Club Movement among Negro Women,” a 1902 essay by Fannie Barrier Williams, a leader of that movement. Despite appearing in a volume expansively titled Progress of a Race; or, The Remarkable Advancement of the American Negro from the Bondage of Slavery, Ignorance and Poverty to the Freedom of Citizenship, Intelligence, Affluence, Honor and Trust, Williams’s essay emphasizes the barrenness of a past still to be overcome: “In America,” she declares, “the Negro has no history, no traditions, no race ideals, no inherited resources, either mental, social or ethical, and no established race character.”³⁸ According to Williams, the task of “colored women” is therefore to help “make history for a race that has no history,” to furnish “material for the first chapter which shall some day recite the discouragements endured, the oppositions conquered, and the triumph of their faith in themselves.”³⁹ This ambition, Williams declares, resembles that of “old Zarca in George Eliot’s ‘Spanish Gypsy,’” and she too quotes the passage about transforming “a badge of scorn” into “a glorious banner.” “No race can long remain mean and cheap,” she comments, “with aspirations such as these.”⁴⁰

Like Harper, Fannie Barrier Williams not only cites The Spanish Gypsy but also adapts its plot—in Williams’s case, in one of her only forays into fiction. Published the same year as “Club Movement among Negro Women,” Williams’s short story “After Many Days” again tells the story of a privileged young woman, raised as white, who learns that her mother was an enslaved African American (the story is set in the 1880s). “No one need ever know, no one ever can or shall know,” her maternal grandmother tells Gladys Winne, yet Gladys refuses to keep this aspect of her identity secret.41 Learning of the disparate attitudes of her white and black relatives—“Only think of it, through all the years of my life, and though I have many near relatives, I have been cherished in memory and yearned for by only one of them, and that an old and despised colored woman”—Gladys overcomes her initial horror at her grandmother’s revelation, declares that “the almost infinitesimal drop of [the grandmother’s] blood in my veins is really the only drop that I can consistently be proud of,” and tells her white fiancé of her parentage.⁴² In a departure from both The Spanish Gypsy and Harper’s novels, the story ends on a note of interracial harmony—literally so, as Gladys Winne and her fiancé come together while the voice of a white singer “mingl[es] in singular harmony with the plaintive melody as sung by a group of dusky singers.”⁴³ Strikingly, though, the story says nothing about the couple’s future, a silence which reads less as a betrothal-plot convention than an implicit acknowledgment of the difficulty of imagining this future.⁴⁴

Williams’s “After Many Days” was one of several short stories featuring the plot of unwitting passing to appear in the first decade of the twentieth century in the Colored American Magazine, published in Boston.⁴⁵ Marie Louise Burgess-Ware’s “Bernice, the Octoroon,” which ran nine months after Williams’s story, adds further twists in its version of the story. Like Eliot’s Fedalma, when Burgess-Ware’s Bernice learns of her ancestry she refuses to continue living as a member of the dominant race, proclaiming that “if one drop of that despised blood flows in my veins, loyal to that race I will be.”⁴⁶ Also like Fedalma, Bernice takes this step even though she believes it will separate her from her beloved, who is white; although he does not reject her, Bernice herself sees the barrier as insurmountable. However, Burgess-Ware’s dénouement revises Eliot’s: in the poem Fedalma’s fiancé, Silva, tries and fails to renounce his Spanish identity and become a gypsy so that he can still be with Fedalma, whereas in the story, Bernice’s fiancé eventually learns that he too is a mulatto. Eliot’s Silva kills Fedalma’s father and at the end of the poem watches Fedalma depart before embarking on his effort to restore his good name as a Spaniard; in Burgess-Ware’s story, by contrast, Bernice and Garrett end up happily married and active on behalf of “the race with which they are identified.”⁴⁷

By the time of Burgess-Ware’s story, enough stories of unwitting passing and voluntary racial affiliation had been published that the connection to Eliot’s poem may seem attenuated at best. Some of the ways in which Bernice resembles Fedalma are also ways in which she resembles her immediate precursor Gladys as well as Harper’s earlier unwitting passers, and in some ways Bernice’s story differs greatly from Fedalma’s. Burgess-Ware’s careful formulation, “the race with which they are identified,” suggests she may have had Iola Leroy in mind as her model, as there we see Iola looking ahead to “a brighter future for the race with which she was identified.”48 Yet Burgess-Ware explicitly links “Bernice, the Octoroon” to The Spanish Gypsy by giving Bernice the same last name as Fedalma’s beloved: Silva. The use of this name adumbrates the story’s departure from the poem, as the assignment of the last name of the fiancé from the earlier text to the heroine of the later one allusively foreshadows her eventual marriage, a marriage denied Fedalma and her Silva. This revision moves “Bernice, the Octoroon” closer to Daniel Deronda while maintaining the commitment to racial exclusivity shared by both of Eliot’s works.

THE SPANISH GYPSY’S STIGMA

The Spanish Gypsy that emerges through its African American afterlife is especially remarkable because it differs dramatically from the poem as it was understood and evaluated by contemporary white British and American reviewers and critics as well as by recent scholars. While the poem’s critical reception was mixed, critics tended to single out for harsh treatment the very plot point that African American writers saw fit to celebrate and reproduce: Fedalma’s decision to affiliate with the Zincali. Objections were made on both psychological and moral grounds, often inflected by racial considerations. Henry James was the rare critic to note and grudgingly admire the logic and rhetoric of solidarity so important to African American writers: “The reader will admit that it is a vision of no small beauty, the conception of a stalwart chieftain who distils the cold exaltation of his purpose from the utter loneliness and obloquy of his race.”⁴⁹ Yet even James argues that Eliot “committed herself to a signal error, in a psychological sense,—that of making a Gypsy girl with a conscience.” He explains: “Either Fedalma was a perfect Zincala in temper and instinct,—in which case her adhesion to her father and her race was a blind, passionate, sensuous movement, which is almost expressly contradicted,—or else she was a pure and intelligent Catholic, in which case nothing in the nature of the struggle can be predicated.”50

Pitching his criticism of the poem’s psychology differently, while rejecting its morality as well, John Morley declares that “The single point in which the structure [of the poem] appears to us less nicely conformable to the rigours of fact and the often tragic demands of duty, is the nature of the circumstances that draw Fedalma away from her love.” He develops this criticism at length:

Is it compatible with what experience teaches us of the known probabilities of character, that the suddenly awakened sense of kinship should instantly suffice to overthrow the long and solidly reared fabric of training and the common life; that the apparition of Zarca should in a moment steal all their colour and force from the traditions of young and of riper days, and immediately choke up the streams of thought and affection that had their beginnings from the earliest conscious hours? . . . The question arises whether it is true or ethically sound to assume that in the past of a maiden of twenty summers all that has befallen her from childhood may be taken to count for nothing in the sum of influence and duty. . . . It is surely, too, as ethically doubtful as it is ethologically unreal. . . .⁵¹

The objection to the morality of Fedalma’s choice is perhaps voiced most strongly by Leslie Stephen, in his 1902 book on Eliot. “Her doctrine, stated in cold blood,” he writes, “seems to be that our principles are to be determined by the physical fact of ancestry,” and he makes clear his view of this doctrine, in particular as it plays out in the poem: “to throw overboard all other ties on the simple ground of descent, and adopt the most preposterous schemes of the vagabonds to whom you are related, seems to be very bad morality whatever may be its affinity to positivism.”⁵² Stephen thus blames Eliot’s failure on her philosophical commitments, seeing Fedalma’s choice as a version of the altruism that was Comtean positivism’s highest value. His phrasing suggests, however, that it is not simply the value attached to ancestry that he finds objectionable, but more specifically or especially the value attached to ancestors who are members of a dispossessed, despised people: “vagabonds.”

Aiming his contempt elsewhere, William Dean Howells, while finding it “poetic, if not probable,” that Fedalma might yield briefly “to the wild motions of her ancestral blood,” caps his criticism of “[her] renunciation, at her father’s bidding, of Don Silva, Spain, and Christianity” by proposing, “That [Fedalma] should act as she did was woman’s weakness, perhaps,—the weakness of Miss Evans.”53 This swerve from racism to sexism notwithstanding, it is no surprise that the future author of An Imperative Duty would bridle at the poem’s evident endorsement of an individual responding to the discovery of her descent from an oppressed race by choosing to affiliate herself with that race—Howell’s Rhoda Aldgate decides against just such a choice. Indeed, the novella’s divergence from the poem in this regard suggests that The Spanish Gypsy may be Howells’s true Eliotic target in An Imperative Duty, despite its references to Romola.

Alternately, Howells may have never noticed the similarity between the scenarios he and Eliot conjure up. This seems quite possible, because Howells saw The Spanish Gypsy as “representing a conflict between national religions and prejudices and personal passions and aspirations.”⁵⁴ It was left to African American writers to notice the way Eliot’s poem resonated with narratives concerned specifically with revelations of African American ancestry, and the aftermath of such revelations. As we have seen, their perspective helps them locate the poem in a different literary-historical context than the ones its white British and American reviewers highlighted, and to see it as engaging in a different project. Rather than exemplifying a moral philosophy, exploring “the conflict of love and duty,”⁵⁵ or dramatizing “those aspirations for independent national existence, which now more than ever before are stirring,”⁵⁶ these writers saw The Spanish Gypsy as a politically salutary effort to break the narrative link between discovered minority ancestry and victimization, and to imagine such a discovery instead as the occasion for affirmative identification and heroic (if potentially sacrificial) action.

Although critics no longer point to Eliot’s sex or Fedalma’s race to explain The Spanish Gypsy’s failings, they still rarely view the Zincali’s debased status as central to the poem’s aspirations, let alone its place in literary history. The same oversight is true of Daniel Deronda criticism, although the Jews share with the gypsies this status as dispossessed and stigmatized.⁵⁷ For example, Anthony Appiah turns to Daniel Deronda not to demonstrate the transformation of limitations into parameters, as one might expect, but instead to support his own advocacy of a “partial cosmopolitanism” that balances or combines “the partialities of kinfolk and community” with a sense of membership in “a broader human community.” For Appiah, Deronda’s embrace of his Jewishness is exemplary because “in claiming a Jewish loyalty . . . [he] is not rejecting a human one.”58 Strikingly, while Appiah here is talking about identities and loyalties in general—the passage comes in the introduction to his Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers—this brief discussion of Daniel Deronda appears virtually verbatim in a lecture he published several years earlier, where he uses it to capture the stance of W.E.B. Du Bois: “The challenge of cosmopolitanism is to combine this recognition of the need for partiality and the value of difference with the recognition of the value of encounter across identities. Du Bois, I believe, almost always got this balance right.”⁵⁹ Yet even here, the shared status of African Americans and Jews as stigmatized minorities does not underwrite the comparison of Du Bois to Deronda; instead it drops out, despite the massive role this status plays in structuring the “encounter[s] across identities” of both historical individual and fictional character, and in determining each one’s vocation.

Viewed as a belated contributor to the African American tradition of enlisting George Eliot to promote a particular relationship to one’s genealogical identity, the Ghanaian-American Appiah stands out for his use of Eliot to model the proper balance between that identity and a more global perspective, rather than allegiance to that identity. Within recent Eliot criticism, the question of whether Eliot does successfully model a “partial cosmopolitanism” of the sort Appiah describes, or if she even seeks to, has been vigorously debated.⁶⁰ Like Appiah in his brief remarks, however, even the best Eliot critics in their sustained treatments of her work typically treat the stigmatized status of gypsies and Jews as incidental to her consideration of ethnic, racial, and national identity as such.⁶¹ Why Eliot focuses on dispossessed minorities in particular, and how this status influences the characters’ sense of identity and vocation, are questions that rarely arise.⁶²

Eliot’s critics tend to obscure the importance of stigma and differentials in power and status in her texts by highlighting parallels between minority and majority groups—Gypsy and Spanish in The Spanish Gypsy, Jewish and English in Daniel Deronda. The protagonists’ mode of membership or participation in their dispossessed, stigmatized group becomes, on this reading, a model for that of members of the dominant group, most immediately for the potential love-interests from whom the protagonists are separated by their differences in group identity: the Spanish Silva from the Gypsy Fedalma, the English/Christian Gwendolen Harleth from the Jewish Deronda. For example, James Buzard argues that “Gwendolen’s consciousness of Daniel’s different national consciousness, her incorporation of his positive and irreducibly alien aspirations into her own mentality, decenters her (English) nationalism but also provides the impetus for more valuably recentering it.”63 According to Buzard, “the category of race” determines “for Daniel and for Gwendolen alike which culture and which nation are properly theirs,” and therefore “would seem to be preparing the way for a ‘repatriation’ of both.”⁶⁴ “Only the stubborn persistence of the intermarried, admirable Klesmers [she an English heiress, he an ambiguously Jewish musician] in England,” he continues, “stands in the way of a recommendation for the wholesale ethnic cleansing of each nation and the clean partitioning of the civilized world into airtight container-nations for the occupation of single races.”⁶⁵

Herbert Tucker’s similarly bracing reading of The Spanish Gypsy argues that the poem constitutes “a set of variations on one theme: Heredity Equals Destiny,” as “Gypsy and Jew and Christian and Moor alike find their identities and acts biologically foredoomed—and culturally policed, for good measure.”⁶⁶ Comparing Fedalma’s discovery of her identity with Don Silva’s “parallel plot of identity-confirmation,” Tucker does acknowledge differences between their situations, but he glosses these as a difference between “majestic simplicity” and “comparative complexity”: while for Fedalma “to adopt a Zincala identity and lead her people to their appointed North African home is simply to become what she always was,” Silva, “as a man, and one moreover to the manor born . . . moves in a richer web of allegiances and antagonisms than Fedalma has known.”⁶⁷ Tucker also addresses the Zincali’s distinctive lack of a storied past, but on his account this is not a deficit to be remedied, as it is in the African American citations of the poem we have looked at, but instead portends the failure of their national project.⁶⁸ He concludes by grouping Fedalma with Daniel Deronda and Middlemarch’s Dorothea Brooke as three characters through whom Eliot “grappled with the question what the freedom of the cosmopolitan liberal—if freedom is what it was—might prove good for.”⁶⁹

Viewed through the lens of Eliot’s African American reworkings and citations, readings such as these seem too quick to collapse (when they acknowledge at all) the difference between stigmatized and unstigmatized identities. Pace Buzard, for example, Daniel Deronda offers no suggestion that Gwendolen’s sense of English identity as such is renewed or newly motivating at the end of the novel: any hope of a meaningful existence resides in her sex, not her Englishness, and the last we hear of her, in her passive-aggressive note to Daniel on his wedding day, does not inspire confidence: “I have remembered your words—that I may live to be one of the best of women, who make others glad that they were born. I do not yet see how that can be, but you know better than I.”⁷⁰ Similarly, rather than demonstrating the equation Heredity=Destiny, as Tucker argues, The Spanish Gypsy dramatizes the process by which Inherited Stigma is embraced as the site where one’s Destiny gets worked out. Tucker does not ask why the alternative Eliot repeatedly offers to illusory cosmopolitan liberalism is affiliation with a dispossessed and stigmatized race or nationality; by contrast, the African American writers considered here make visible a Spanish Gypsy dedicated to exploring the burdens and opportunities afforded by just such affiliation.

This emphasis on power- and status-differentials also explains a seeming inconsistency in Eliot’s treatment of inherited identity itself. “What makes The Spanish Gypsy particularly intriguing,” notes Sylvia Kasey Marks, “is that all the novels up to and including Felix Holt portray a character who opts for the past of his experience, or his adopted past. In The Spanish Gypsy, and in Daniel Deronda which follows it, the character determines in favor of his hereditary or racial past.”71 The most prominent Eliot characters who choose their “adopted past” over their “hereditary . . . past” are Eppie in Silas Marner and Esther Lyons in Felix Holt. In both these cases, though, the adopted past to which the character remains loyal is working class, while the hereditary one she eschews is upper class: as in The Spanish Gypsy (and Daniel Deronda), then, characters choose—and, Eliot makes clear, rightly choose—to affiliate with the lower status group.⁷²

As we have seen, the ways in which African American writers took up The Spanish Gypsy illuminate and potentially recuperate aspects of Eliot’s work many critics have found troubling. But if this more positive view depends in large part on what African American writers chose to highlight, it also depends on what they chose to change or omit. The African American engagement with The Spanish Gypsy is highly selective and involves fundamental changes in form and genre as well as referent and setting. But two departures from this chosen intertext are especially revealing—one because it involves the wholesale rejection or discarding of the aspect of the poem that would seem to clinch the connection between African Americans and Zincali, and the other because it involves a subtle reworking of the very aspect of the poem these writers embrace most fully. In addition to mitigating some of the most off-putting dimensions of Eliot’s “unpleasing poem,”⁷³ such pointed departures underscore these writers’ own key commitments.

The more obvious of these departures from The Spanish Gypsy pertains to its vision of the future. The lifework in which Zarca enlists Fedalma is the establishment of a homeland for their people. In the very next sentence of the speech Fannie Barrier Williams and Emmett J. Scott both quote about transforming the Zincali’s name from “a badge of scorn” to “A glorious banner,” Zarca announces his plan to “guide [their] brethren forth to their new land” (I.2823–28). The depth of Eliot’s commitment to this nationalist model of group identity is reinforced by Daniel Deronda, where the lifework to which Deronda commits himself is the founding of a Jewish national state, and both poem and novel end with the title character’s departure from the land in which she or he was raised to embark on this mission. As best I can determine, however, African American texts that adapt Eliot’s plot uniformly jettison this nationalist/emigrationist project, and with one exception (to which I will return) African American citers of The Spanish Gypsy never mention this aspect of the poem.

This omission is particularly striking because Eliot’s Zincali originate in Africa, and it is to Africa they plan to return to establish a homeland. Yet this common geography plays no apparent role in the African American engagement with the poem. This is so even though there did exist at the time an active back-to-Africa movement. Indeed, one leader of this movement, Edward Blyden (who was born in Saint Thomas and spent most of his life in Liberia), does cite Eliot—albeit a different work—in an 1883 speech (reprinted as a pamphlet) on “The Origin and Purpose of African Colonization.” Explaining that “We do not ask that all the colored people should leave the United States and go to Africa,” since “For the work to be accomplished much less than one-tenth of the six millions would be necessary,” Blyden quotes a passage from Eliot’s little-read last book, Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879), which states that “Plenty of prosperous Jews remained in Babylon when Ezra marshalled his band of forty thousand,” but “in a return from exile, in the restoration of a race . . . the question is not whether certain rich men choose to remain behind, but whether there will be found worthy men who will choose to lead the return.”74 However, neither The Spanish Gypsy nor Daniel Deronda seems to have been cited in support of the back-to-Africa movement.

Frances Harper openly addresses the question of emigration in Iola Leroy, and the scene in which she does so virtually stages this break from Eliot. Like chapter 42 of Daniel Deronda, chapter 30 of Iola Leroy, “Friends in Council,” presents a set-piece political and philosophical discussion that brings together main characters with a number of characters who, while assigned names and given basic identifying features (such as appearance or occupation), appear only in this one chapter to serve as mouthpieces for various positions. The main topic of debate at the working-class Philosopher’s Club meeting to which Deronda accompanies the proto-Zionist prophet Mordecai is whether the Jewish “race” should have a nation of its own, while the “select company of earnest men and women deeply interested in the welfare of the race” who gather in Harper’s novel begin their evening with a discussion of “a paper on ‘Negro Emigration’” prepared by a “Bishop Tunster”—a thinly veiled stand-in for a leading American advocate of emigration, Bishop Henry McNeal Turner.75 Just as Mordecai’s interlocutors—with the signal exception of Deronda himself—reject his position, so too do Tunster’s reject his, with the final word going to Iola Leroy, who states, “We did not . . . place the bounds of our habitation. And I believe we are to be fixtures in this country.”⁷⁶ Iola’s next sentence, “But beyond the shadows I see the coruscation of a brighter day,” stands as a particularly authoritative pronouncement, as it echoes the novel’s subtitle and is echoed in turn in the final lines of the poem by Harper that ends the novel: “Yet the shadows bear the promise / Of a brighter coming day.”⁷⁷ This echo of Iola’s statement reinforces the novel’s locating of this better future in the United States—which is to say, the echo reinforces the novel’s rejection of Eliot’s emigrationist solution.

The Spanish Gypsy itself was brought to bear on the emigration debate on at least one occasion, and with reference to Bishop Turner in particular. However, in this rule-proving exception, the poem was deployed to help make the case against emigration to Africa. Thus, a 1902 editorial in the Indianapolis-based Freeman aligns Turner with Zarca, but only to reject their shared position. Titled “Bishop Turner,” the editorial takes as its epigraph a long extract (two dozen lines) of dialogue between Zarca and Fedalma from the end of book I, where Zarca wins over the hesitant Fedalma by daring her to

Let go the rescuing rope, hurl all the tribes,

Children and countless beings yet to come,

Down from the upward path of light and joy,

Back to the dark and marshy wilderness

Where life is nought but blind tenacity

Of that which is. (I.3108–13)⁷⁸

The editorial does not spell out the passage’s relevance, but the reader is implicitly invited to see Zarca as a figure for the subject of the editorial it heads. Yet rather than aligning itself with Eliot, the editorial rejects the Zarca/Turner position, treating it as a last resort whose time has not come: Turner’s “chimera must not become our dream,” the editors argue, “until the age grows so palsied with social and political infirmities that the future stands an endless blight.” Moreover, the very alignment of Turner with Zarca serves not to aggrandize Turner but rather to diminish him by highlighting their shared rhetorical violence: Turner is described as using “terrific language—cloud compelling—jovian” to heap “censure and abuse” on “Negroes” who continue to hope for a future in America. The proper reaction to this onslaught is not acquiescence or even a response in kind, but rather, devastatingly, a condescending admiration: “Everybody loves [Bishop Turner],” the editorial explains, “because he seems so sincere, so picturesque.”79 Implicitly, the same is true of Zarca as well, in a rare questioning of his—and Eliot’s—authority.

Clearly, then, African American writers ignored the advocacy of a separate homeland showcased in Eliot’s work not because they found it irrelevant to their concerns but rather because they rejected it as a goal, even as they were drawn to other aspects of Eliot’s rhetoric and narrative strategy.⁸⁰ The disarticulation of Eliot’s racial-affiliation plot from its emigrationist, homeland-founding conclusion is particularly striking because both The Spanish Gypsy and Daniel Deronda seem to conflate the protagonists’ affiliation with their discovered ancestry with their adoption of a nationalist project, as if the former entailed the latter. Yet for Harper and those who follow her lead, the establishment of a homeland does not constitute the inevitable telos and ultimate truth of the kind of story Eliot tells. In Iola Leroy in particular, however, traces of this model remain: as Hazel Carby observes, “the overall structure” of Harper’s novel progresses “increasingly toward a complete separation of the black community from the white world.”⁸¹ From this perspective, the didactic explicitness with which the novel confronts and rejects “Negro Emigration” reflects both the felt necessity of placing a limit on this separatist trajectory and the strain involved in doing so—a strain generated, I am suggesting, not only by the historical existence of the “Negro Emigration” movement but also by the Eliotic narrative Harper is adapting.⁸²

Just as African American writers who make use of The Spanish Gypsy reject its nation-based model of racial collectivity, so too do they depart from its understanding of racial identity itself. This is the case even though, as we have seen, these writers reproduce versions of its plot whereby individuals choose to affirm—that is, to own and make central to their sense of identity—their newly discovered, genealogically determined membership in a dispossessed, stigmatized people; and these writers regularly cite or borrow rhetoric from the poem in support of this choice. Despite these textual affiliations, these writers do not fully share Eliot’s understanding of the nature of and motivation for the choice that gets made.

The characters who choose to affirm their identity as African American in Minnie’s Sacrifice, Iola Leroy, “After Many Days,” and “Bernice, the Octoroon” do so for two primary reasons: out of a sense of loyalty and gratitude toward specific African Americans who have welcomed, aided, and loved them (coupled with resentment of or disgust at the hostile reaction their revealed ancestry garners from whites); and out of a belief in the nobility of, and prospects for doing good through, publicly owning one’s membership in an oppressed people. The Spanish Gypsy features versions of both these reasons, albeit in a much darker key. Thus, it is not her father’s love but rather his sense of loss that affects Fedalma: “when you looked at me my joy was stabbed— / Stabbed with your pain. I wondered . . . now I know . . . / It was my father’s pain” (I.2710–12, ellipses in original). And while Zarca voices the rhetoric of uplift African American writers will seize upon, Fedalma herself dwells less on what is right and hopeful about identifying with her suffering ancestral people than on the guilt she would feel at refusing to do so: “Father, I choose! I will not take a heaven / Haunted by shrieks of far-off misery” (I.3115–16).

But there is another factor in Fedalma’s choice absent from the African American texts that recall The Spanish Gypsy: her “fully text-endorsed conviction,” as Herbert Tucker puts it, that she is being restored “to her true identity.”83 The first hint of a tension between Fedalma’s social identity and her essential self comes early in the poem, when she scandalously breaks into dance in the public square, “sole swayed by impulse passionate” (I.1315). Comparable, Eliot writes, to the “dance religious” of “Miriam, / When on the Red Sea shore she raised her voice / And led the chorus of her people’s joy” (I.1318–20), this dancing expresses Fedalma’s unassimilated and unassimilable difference even as it foreshadows her Mosaic destiny. While Eliot does not explicitly attribute Fedalma’s impulse to her gypsy ancestry, Fedalma’s avowal to Silva suggests that she herself comes to understand such moments in these terms. “’Twas my people’s life that throbbed in me,” she explains to Silva: “An unknown need stirred darkly in my soul, / And made me restless even in my bliss” (III.1060–62).

Writing about late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American passing narratives, Walter Benn Michaels argues that these texts increasingly represent the choice of one’s race less as “a question of personal honesty” than of “personal identity,” with race increasingly treated as “an object of affect,” and with “racial pride . . . supplemented . . . by what is understood to be racially appropriate behavior.”84 Michaels sees this development as reflecting the ascendance of what he calls “nativism” or, more provocatively, “pluralist or nativist racism.”⁸⁵ Yet African American writers who adapt and invoke The Spanish Gypsy eschew this nativist rhetoric and ideology; in fact, Iola Leroy serves as Michaels’s main example of the “personal honesty” model: in Iola Leroy, he observes, the choice not to pass “is made for reasons that are not themselves racial—Harper’s characters feel they can do more good work among poor Negroes as a Negro, or they scorn to conceal from the white world the ‘one drop’ of Negro blood in their veins.”⁸⁶ Michaels claims that Harper’s approach is not characteristic of fictions about passing and implies that it reflects an increasingly outmoded concept of race; in M. Giulia Fabi’s similar, more explicit formulation, Iola Leroy represents “a nineteenth-century concern with race loyalty” as opposed to “a twentieth-century preoccupation with defining a distinctive African American identity.”⁸⁷ As we have seen, however, both models are in play in The Spanish Gypsy, and therefore both were readily available to Harper. The absence of the “identity” model in her work, despite its presence in her chosen precursor text, makes it clear that this absence did not simply reflect her historical moment but instead was a deliberate choice on her part.

This choice may be where Harper in particular comes closest to brushing The Spanish Gypsy against the grain: that is, by representing the affiliation of her unwitting passers with the African American portion of their ancestry as itself a fully deliberate choice—a simultaneously rational and sentimental affiliation that requires a biological link but does not constitute a capitulation to or expression of one’s authentic self or racial essence. Ironically, then, when Harper uses The Spanish Gypsy to tell stories about African Americans and advocate a commitment to the betterment of their condition, she is not racializing or reracializing Eliot’s work, as we have seen writers do with Dickens and Tennyson, but instead in this sense rendering it less racial. By the same token, while Harper and her protagonists have been accused at times of being too “Victorian,” a fuller commitment to the very idea of “racially appropriate behavior”⁸⁸ would have brought her even closer ideologically to her Victorian predecessor—that is, would have made her more Victorian.

BECOMING GEORGE ELIOT

The African American engagement with The Spanish Gypsy is significant for its role in African American literary history and George Eliot’s reception history—and for marking the intersection of these histories. Yet given the selectivity of the African American engagement with The Spanish Gypsy, and its softening if not abandonment of the poem’s ethnic nationalism and racial essentialism in particular, we may begin to wonder if this engagement does not so much illuminate the poem as falsify it—creating, as it were, a kinder, gentler Spanish Gypsy by smoothing over its most disturbing elements and downplaying its negativity. It remains the case, however, that while the poem is undoubtedly more conflicted and even rebarbative than its African American afterlife indicates, this afterlife makes newly visible and compelling Eliot’s attention to stigmatized collective identities.

Moreover, beyond serving as a valuable corrective, African American deployments of the poem may paradoxically be truer to the poem’s origins than is the poem itself. That is, rather than transport Eliot’s work into an African American context, they may be bringing it back into this context. Going further, we might entertain the possibility that these writers do not so much turn The Spanish Gypsy into a response to the tragic mulatto/a plot as pick up on and highlight the ways it already was one. Ostensibly reframing the poem, they return it and its author to their roots.

Although there is no evidence that Eliot ever read anything written by an African American, several critics have detailed the importance of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novelistic depictions of African Americans for her work, especially Daniel Deronda.89 But the alacrity with which African American writers beginning with Frances Harper brought Eliot’s work to bear on their own concerns, and the affinities their efforts reveal, suggest that the literary treatment of African Americans may be even more germane to Eliot’s project as an imaginative writer than we have realized. It may also have been germinal: after working for years as a translator, reviewer, essayist, and editor, Eliot turned to writing fiction a mere three days after appreciatively reviewing Stowe’s Dred, which she praised for its focus on “that grand element—conflict of races.”⁹⁰

One can only speculate about why Eliot herself did not write about African Americans, but we might conjecture that she was ceding that territory to American writers such as Stowe. In writing about contemporary European Jews she extends rather than duplicates Stowe’s project, while her focus on gypsies in fifteenth-century Spain suggests a desire to address her interests on a more general and less immediately topical level (she began work on the poem in 1864, in the midst of the American Civil War). Tellingly, though, one of the few instances in her writing when Eliot does refer to blacks comes in her own reflections on The Spanish Gypsy, in a posthumously published essay called “Notes on the Spanish Gypsy and Tragedy in General.” Describing fit subjects for tragic presentation, Eliot conjures “a woman, say, [who] finds herself on the earth with an inherited organisation: she may be lame, she may inherit a disease, or what is tantamount to a disease: she may be a negress, or have other marks of race repulsive in the community where she is born, &c., &c.”91 Blackness serves here as the quintessential inherited stigmatized identity.

Eliot’s use of a stigmatized “negress” to exemplify “Tragedy in General” paradoxically threatens to obscure the extent to which her own poem participates in and revises the specific tradition of the tragic mulatto/a plot. Yet the very fact that Eliot makes this reference perhaps hints at an awareness on her part of the special relevance of “negress[es]” to the story she is telling.⁹² In fact, Eliot’s desire to revisit the tragic mulatto/a plot may even explain her choice of the name “George Eliot” soon after she began publishing fiction—a choice that has never been adequately explained.⁹³ This name—spelled “George Elliot”—appears in what may be the first tragic mulatta story: “The Quadroons,” an 1842 story by Lydia Maria Child, a white American abolitionist author with whom Eliot corresponded (as she did with Stowe). An Englishman in Georgia, George Elliot is the fiancé of a woman whose African ancestry is discovered. Attempting to save his beloved from the brutal consequences of this discovery, Elliot is killed; she too dies. In what we might see as a tribute to this heroic English character, Marian Evans takes his name and succeeds where he failed—transforming the revelation of her unwitting passers’ minority ancestry from a source of unmitigated suffering into an occasion for meaningful sacrifice, from a death sentence into a calling.

This theory is speculative, but by no means outlandish; we do not know if it reflects Eliot’s conscious motives, but Frances Harper and her successors show why it would make sense. By African Americanizing her poem about unwitting passing, they make visible the close kinship of “George Eliot” to “George Elliot,” whether Eliot was aware of it or not.

The preceding analysis ignores one profound difference between George Eliot’s version of the plot of unwitting passing and voluntary racial affiliation and the American versions with which, I argue, it is in dialogue. All the protagonists of the latter versions are mixed race—“mulattoes” and “mulattas”—whereas Fedalma, and Daniel Deronda as well, are not. This means, among other things, that although both sets of characters are choosing between the identity with which they were raised and their ancestry, the American characters are also choosing between different strands of their ancestry. This difference would seem to affect the fundamental nature of the choice the characters make, and its omission sidelines a host of additional issues typically addressed through the representation of mixed-race characters, such as sexual violence, the “one-drop” rule of racial identity, and the possibility of racial amalgamation.

In overlooking this difference, however, I have simply followed the lead of the writers I discuss. Eliot, for her part, may have chosen not to write about mixed-race characters precisely in order to sideline the specific issues raised by racial mixing and keep the focus where she wanted it: on the drama of voluntary affiliation with a stigmatized, dispossessed people.94 The use of Eliot by Harper and the other African American writers discussed here reflects and reinforces the priority they themselves placed on highlighting and promoting such affiliation—to the point where the very mulattoness of the erstwhile tragic mulatto/a becomes secondary.

A very different situation pertains in the work of the author to whom we turn next. As we shall see, Charles Chesnutt’s career-long engagement with Victorian literature is tightly bound up with his career-long exploration of racial mixing, and he is preternaturally alert to even fleeting references to “mulattoes” in that literature. Chesnutt will seize upon and reimagine such moments in the work of all three Victorian authors we have seen as having particularly intense African American afterlives: Dickens, Tennyson, and Eliot—the latter’s eschewal of mixed-race characters in The Spanish Gypsy and Daniel Deronda notwithstanding.

Beginning with the chapter on Chesnutt, the second half of this book flips the organizational structure of the first half: whereas each of the first three chapters tracked African Americanizing engagements with the work of a single Victorian author—for the most part, with a single work—each of the second three will explore a single African American author’s engagement with fiction and poetry by multiple Victorians. For these turn-of-the-century writers—Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, and W.E.B. Du Bois—late-Victorian literature in particular continues to matter for its contemporaneity or near-contemporaneity. Increasingly, though, British literature from earlier in the nineteenth century loses this sense of immediacy yet retains a particular historical position: that is, the works writers engage with have not quite passed into the timeless realm of the classic or canonical, but instead remain identified with the recent past. In addition, though, and more unexpectedly, certain authors and texts will remain worth engaging for these writers precisely because of their prior African American afterlives. Ultimately, as we shall see, the very citation of Victorian literature will become a form of meta-citation, a way of referencing and engaging in dialogue with prior African American citations of that literature.