Blood Work

Imagining Race in American Literature, 1890--1940

Shawn Salvant

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780807157862
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The invocation of blood-as both an image and a concept-has long been critical in the formation of American racism. In Blood Work, Shawn Salvant mines works from the American literary canon to explore the multitude of associations that race and blood held in the consciousness of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Americans. Drawing upon race and metaphor theory, Salvant provides readings of four classic novels featuring themes of racial identity: Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894); Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood (1902); Frances Harper's Iola Leroy (1892); and William Faulkner's Light in August (1932). His expansive analysis of blood imagery uncovers far more than the merely biological connotations that dominate many studies of blood rhetoric: the racial discourses of blood in these novels encompass the anthropological and the legal, the violent and the religious. Penetrating and insightful, Blood Work illuminates the broad-ranging power of the blood metaphor to script distinctly American plots-real and literary-of racial identity.

CHAPTER 1

Mark Twain and the Essence of Ink

When used as a metaphor for race, blood makes a difference. This is the “work” that blood performs as a metaphor for race, the work of altering the way race is conceived and practiced. This work can be observed when considering the conceptual differences between the rule of hypo-descent and the “one-drop rule.” In Patterns of Race in the Americas (1964), anthropologist Marvin Harris identified the practice of giving determinative weight to an individual’s racial ancestry from a socially subordinate group, using the term “hypo-descent” to describe this uniquely American system of racial accounting. As he described it, Harris marveled derisively at the “ingenious computation” and suspension of disbelief required by the rule. “This descent rule requires Americans to believe that anyone who is known to have had a Negro ancestor is a Negro. We admit nothing in between” (56). In terming the practice “hypo-descent,” Harris sought to underscore the rule’s ironic but strategic concession of determining power to the underprivileged racial category. “Hypo-descent means affiliation with the subordinate rather than the superordinate group in order to avoid the ambiguity of intermediate identity,” he writes (56). Hypo-descent is the willful, ironic, and politically motivated denial of determining power to the genealogy of the “superordinate” race with the purpose of avoiding the anxiety of ambiguity in racial intermediacy.

By the time Harris gave hypo-descent this anthropological description and terminology, the rule had been practiced for three hundred years in America and, by the end of the nineteenth century, it had become more popularly known as the “one-drop rule.” While Harris’s description articulates the rule’s social functions, it also brings into relief the differences between what are actually two related practices, one represented through the anthropological language of “hypo-descent” and another through the language of the “one-drop rule.” Harris’s hypo-descent has nothing to do with blood, although his use of the prefix “hypo” resonates vaguely with the one-drop rule’s obsession with blood, a hypodermic substance. The “one-drop rule,” the more popular term for the practice of hypo-descent in the American context—where the socially subordinate category of blackness dominates genealogically over the socially superordinate category of whiteness—overlays the American practice of hypo-descent with a myriad other “collective fantasies,” some biological, others psychological and symbolic, drawn from the cultural discourse of blood. Consequently, while the rule of “hypo-descent” and the “one-drop rule” may seem to refer to the same social construction, they do not mean the same thing in practice. Indeed, it is through the many cultural connotations of “blood” that the one-drop rule enacts its particular ideological commitments in the practice of American racialism. The one-drop rule is more than the practice of hypo-descent, and blood makes all the difference.

Although the one-drop rule employs natural imagery, it conveys a sense of unnaturalness to the racial relationships it attempts to construct. The one-drop rule figures the disproportionate genealogical power it decrees through the unnatural logic imaged in one drop of blood that paradoxically rules. Like all metaphors, the one-drop rule draws meaning from the tension between the literal and figurative conditions it expresses. Here, the unnatural physics depicted in the metaphor instills a certain tension between the natural and the unnatural as part of its racial meaning. There is a sense of unnaturalness that is a critical part of the meaning of the one-drop rule, but that becomes lost in paraphrase when the rule is approximated as a rule of “hypo-descent.” Through the unnatural image of one drop of blood performing in a way that it does not perform literally, the metaphorical premise of the one-drop rule conveys a sense of circumstances that are more subversive, insidious, and intolerable than those depicted by hypo-descent.

This sense of subversion conveyed through unnatural blood imagery has been one of the targets of the one-drop rule’s various critiques. It is not the illogic of hypo-descent but rather the illogic of the one-drop rule, for example, that Homer Plessy’s lead counsel, the activist and author Albion Tourgée, invokes during his brief before the U.S. Supreme Court in Plessy submitted in 1895 when he asks, “ Will the court hold that a single drop of African blood is sufficient to color a whole ocean of Caucasian whiteness?” (Olsen 98). To do so, Tourgée suggests, beggars belief. Strategically extending the metaphor’s own terms to their logical conclusion, Tourgée’s objection argues that the application of the one-drop rule seems as unnatural and irrational—and as corruptive to the proper practice of the law—as the suggestion that one drop of any substance could dominate materially over the innumerable proportions in which this particular drop is rhetorically, if not literally, subsumed.

But, as I want to demonstrate through the following discussions of the one-drop rule and a reading of Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, such critiques of the legal and social implications of the one-drop rule are ultimately ineffectual in that they only indicate the very work that the rule’s metaphorical performance is designed to do. In particular, they indicate the one-drop rule’s strategic conflation of two interrelated but different functions and forms of racial blood: a racial blood that allows for a mixability of racial character and a racial blood that materially marks identity. While both discourses employ the figure of blood, they do so by drawing from different metaphorical entailments of blood for different purposes. While the rhetoric of racial blood used in nineteenth-century American racial science was devoted to imagining gradations of racial character produced by the mixture of unseen essences, nineteenth-century American race law, for its own particular project of codifying race, adapted the figure of blood to mark, to print, and to make supposedly natural differences readable.

In order to accomplish these cooperating yet distinct missions, the scientific and legal discourse of American racialism employed the figure of blood divergently. While the rhetoric of racial blood as an expression of racial psychology and character entails the figure of blood with its property of mixture, the legal rhetoric of racial blood entails blood as a pigment or marker—a form of legal ink. Distinguishing between these connotations of blood becomes important for truly understanding the ideological, social, and psychological work performed by the language of racial construction that is the “one-drop rule,” and seeing that the rule’s aim is not (or at least not only) a pretense of biologism (only one suggestion conveyed by the image of blood). Indeed while the imagery of the “one-drop rule” may suggest a belief in a racial biologism determined by blood, its seeming paraphrase, “the rule of hypo-descent,” Harris writes, is “an invention which we in the United States have made in order to keep biological facts from intruding into our collective racist fantasies” (56). And, as Tourgée and others have learned, attempts to point out the logical inconsistencies in the one-drop rule’s biological imagery only serve to further obfuscate the strategies behind the rule of hypo-descent that the one-drop rule represents and supports. That is, while Tourgée objects that the rule makes no sense, on the contrary, the rule does exactly that; it makes sense for American racialism. Despite Tourgée’s plea for a more natural logic for determining race, the unnaturalness of the rule that he derides presents no problem for the purposes of American race law. Because the law’s very aim is to create an unnatural relationship between blackness and whiteness; indeed, the entire purpose of the one-drop rule is to make blood behave unnaturally.

As I argue here and in my reading of Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), one of the particular problems resolved by American racialism’s commitment to blood is precisely the need for both a rhetoric that allows for proportions of racial character and a more binary rhetoric for the purposes of marking and stigmatizing. The tension between mixable and codifiable forms of racial identity provides much of the energy behind the plot of Pudd’nhead Wilson. In Twain’s novel, this tension is resolved through the device of a bloody fingerprint, a device that synthesizes the ability of blood to figure both characterological mixture and stigmatizing mark. The novel defamiliarizes the interrelated operation of these two discourses and presents a new form of forensic evidence by which the pseudoscientific and the legal discourses—mixture and marking—are fused into one image or sign.

Moreover, in Twain’s plot, this new forensic technology provides a material sign that does the work of racial blood rhetoric even as it demonstrates the stakes of such rhetoric—what would have to happen in order for this rhetoric to signify what it claims to signify—what would have to happen for blood to indicate racial character, racial identity, and rights to property all at once. Addressing the need for a drop of blood that figures character while remaining undiluted for the purposes of marking the inheritors of property (the same conundrum that Albion Tourgée would present to the Supreme Court soon after the publication of Pudd’nhead Wilson), the bloody fingerprint that resolves the novel’s plot racializes the subject (Tom) through one legally legible sign that also conveys character, meeting the seemingly illogical and incompatible demands of the one-drop rule.¹ This bloody fingerprint dramatizes the stakes involved in the law’s appropriation of this metaphor by demonstrating the violence suggested in the rule’s blood imagery, the violence truly necessary for the project of racial physiognomy, the evasive turning of the body inside out that takes place when the racial body’s internal substances are mapped onto its external form.

In “Darkness Made Visible: Law, Metaphor, and the Racial Self,” legal scholar D. Marvin Jones explains the problem American race law encounters as it becomes increasingly metaphorical, increasingly literary, in its efforts to legislate race. Arguing that “race lies beyond the ken of the conventional legal theory,” Jones describes the deleterious effect of the race concept itself on the tissue of legal logic, tracing this breakdown to the Dred Scott decision of 1857: “It is here that law as a structure of reason begins to collapse into race, creating a structure of incoherent categories and meanings. This is why race construction is destabilizing to the law. . . . [Supreme Court Justice] Taney maintained power relationships in Dred Scott, but at the expense of jettisoning all pretense of stability in the very categories needed to create law in the slave regime” (440, 464–65). The project of racial construction destabilizes the law, Jones suggests, because it is much easier to imagine and figure racial difference than to practice it legally. Nineteenth-century American race law thus struggles to manage racial essences while preserving its dedication to rationality.

It has been suggested that, as a recourse to such instability, the figure of blood has been employed to impart notions of natural difference and thus predictability and determinability to the law’s construction of race. As we have seen, legal accounts of how the metaphor of blood works to construct race in the American context have emphasized the use of blood for purposes of reification. By figuring race in terms of blood, it is argued, American racial rhetoric figures race as essential and natural difference; the image of blood serves to create the illusion of race’s biological validity. Thus Eva Saks explains that, “By choosing the internal, biological res of blood, miscegenation jurisprudence transformed race into an intrinsic, natural, and changeless entity: blood essentialized race” (48). In practice, however, the use of this metaphor often requires the cooperation of a willful suspension of disbelief, even a kind of bad faith. Because in order for the law to translate pseudoscientific and popular notions of natural difference into legal rights, particularly property rights—in order for the law to get blood to do what it wants race to do—the law inevitably requires blood to perform so unnaturally as to shamelessly reveal, if not flaunt, its own status as mere metaphor. Racial blood rhetoric exhibits a metaphoricity that indicates its defiance of rather than its adherence to natural logic. References to black or white blood raise conceptual contradictions that undermine their own employment in the naturalization of race.

Race theorist Colette Guillaumin studies this defiance of natural logic as a central part of her critique of the race concept in “Race and Nature: The System of Marks” (in Racism, Sexism, Power, and Ideology (1988)). Identifying the critical contradictions raised by racial blood rhetoric’s claim to the natural, Guillaumin decries the naturalness of race implied by this rhetoric as merely a pretense, an “adulterated naturalness” or “mask of naturalness” (137). For Guillaumin, this pretense becomes evident in “the American system” of hypo-descent, in which “even one ancestor out of sixteen makes you belong to a determined social group” (137).² Guillaumin’s critique focuses on the illogical naturalism suggested by such a rule.

For logically, if one takes the suggestions of natural realism literally (and not figuratively), having seven white great-grandparents certainly means being white. But this is not so! You are not white, you are ‘black,’ for it is the social system that decides. . . . Why then speak of pre-social, outside-of-society, ‘scientific’ classification—in a word, of ‘natural’ classification? It is this which makes us ask ourselves about this ‘natural’ that claims to be natural while being something else than what it claims to be . . . (137).

To take the one-drop rule’s “suggestions of natural realism literally,” Guillaumin argues, is to fall under the sway of a “naturalist false consciousness” as deep as that required of the South African system of apartheid, where “There are supposed to be two races, one white, the other black, each exhibiting its own characteristics and its own nature, and another race, completely different, without any relation to the preceding ones, a pure product in and of itself” (137).

But Guillaumin’s particular objection to the American racial classification system can only quibble with its implications without attacking its core. For even the alternative Guillaumin imagines as a more natural application of the rule cannot escape the underlying illogic of racial proportionment, since it would retain the notion that blackness and whiteness are matters capable of being tallied into ratios. That is, if we were to do as Guillaumin proposes and “[take] the suggestions of natural realism” in this system “literally (and not figuratively),” of what proportion of “whiteness” would those supposedly whole-white “white” great-grandparents be? And, in the supposedly more “logical” conclusion that having these “seven white great-grandparents certainly means being white,” what has happened to the one “black” great-grandparent if he or she has not been rendered as oddly and unnaturally irrelevant as the white great-grandparents are rendered under the terms of the logic that Guillaumin critiques? As Guillaumin herself explains, “All this rests on the clever finding that whites bear whites and blacks bear blacks . . .” and the “social idea of natural group rests on the ideological postulation that there is a closed unit, endo-determined [determined from within], hereditary and dissimilar to other social units” (136). Despite Guillaumin’s well-intentioned comparison, then, between what happens to racial essences in the rhetoric of the American system and what would happen if the language were taken “literally,” moving down an axis of figuration from metaphorical to literal provides no exit from the mystification of race.

For the truth is that there is no measure of whiteness or blackness that can be observed operating in any “literal” way from which the one-drop rule’s metaphor of racial proportionment can be said to depart into mere figure. The unnaturalness of racial proportionment comes not only in speaking of a person with one black great-grandparent and seven white great-grandparents as black, but also in speaking of great-grandparents as essentially black or white in the first place (and then, in another formulation, speaking of them in terms of their essentializing blood). Even if this language of proportions could be taken literally, “having seven white great-grandparents” and one black great-grandparent would certainly not mean “being white.” Rather, it would mean being exactly what the fraction denotes; it would mean being the mixture, seven-eighths white and one-eighth black.

Such efforts to undermine the implications of the one-drop rule, while well intentioned, rely upon a misunderstanding or underestimation of racialism’s approach to using blood as a figure for racial identity. Such misnaming and misdescribing are what metaphors always do, and making race behave unnaturally is exactly what the rhetoric of race is always trying to do. So while blood may perform unnaturally in the rhetoric of race, this unnatural behavior is not so much a contradiction in the logic of racialism as it is one of the key functions that blood is called upon to perform. To charge the language of racial blood with being unnatural is not to undermine it but only to describe what it does. Put another way, to ask the figure of blood to “act naturally” in the rhetoric of race launches no critique of racialism per se; it is only to ask the discourse of race to be less metaphorical and ultimately less itself.

Nevertheless, the value of such critique (the same critique that is, as we shall see, implicit in Twain’s novel) lies in its revelation of just how racial blood rhetoric indicates, through its very unnaturalness, its underlying purposes and ideological origins. Despite their ostensible denotative meaning, fractions of racial blood deliberately imagine an unnatural form of blood in stasis, a blood whose precise proportions can only be measured because it is a blood that, quite unnaturally, does not mix. The language of racial proportion is designed not to express a mixture of races but rather to prevent the races from mixing (cognitively and imaginatively, socially and legally). Despite the language of fractions that it deploys, the entire aim of the one-drop rule is to render the ratio of blackness to whiteness irrelevant, such that the proportion of blackness to whiteness does not make any difference; that is, such that the difference the proportions should make by the natural logic of the metaphor is actually unmade in reality. In this sense, the fractions expressing the one-drop rule signify precisely the opposite of what they denote, namely, that the larger denominator in the racial fraction matters less than the relatively miniscule proportion of blackness in the numerator.³ Both graphically and psychologically, this vaguely mathematical language of racial fractions, what Werner Sollors has called the “calculus of color,” isolates blackness from whiteness, achieving a kind of segregation. In this way, although they reference no real measurements whatsoever, these fractions of blood yet still do the work of race.

While these fractions of blood describe the genealogical strains of which the racial subject is supposedly composed, what they actually count and represent as a vulgar fraction are the “black” and “white” bodies of an imagined sexual history. In discussing the origins of racial blood rhetoric in American race law, Winthrop Jordan describes the psychological impulse for a typical white male colonist to invest in categorizing mulattoes as black as a reaction to his own inability to control his sexual drives directed toward his black slaves. Despite the social prohibition against such acts, the offspring of these unions testified to the male colonist’s inability to refrain from such intercourse and “strikingly symbolized a union he wished to avoid. If he could not restrain his sexual nature, he could at least reject its fruits and thus solace himself that he had done no harm” (178). Thus the colonial statutes that categorized the offspring of these forbidden relationships as black by blood worked to undo the act that the colonist had done. “For the separation of slaves from free men depended on a clear demarcation of the races, and the presence of mulattoes blurred this essential distinction. Accordingly he made every effort to nullify the effects of racial intermixture. By classifying the mulatto as a Negro he was in effect denying that intermixture had occurred at all” (178). Saidiya Hartman argues similarly that the emphasis on blood in the American rhetoric of miscegenation speaks to the institution’s particular “fixation on imagined sexual trespasses [that] revealed the degree to which the integrity and purity of whiteness depended upon black subjugation” (185).

Racial blood rhetoric thus retroactively polices against the supposed crime of miscegenation by returning t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Mark Twain and the Essence of Ink
• 2. Frances Harper and the Blood of Sacrifice
• 3. Pauline Hopkins and the End of Incest
• 4. William Faulkner and the Color of Blood
• Afterword
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index