Race, Romanticism, and the Politics of Feminist Literary Study: Harriet Prescott Spofford's "The Amber Gods"

• Published in: Legacy (Amherst, Mass.) Mass.), 2001-01, Vol.18 (1), p.35-51
• Main Author: LOGAN, LISA M.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 19th century; 19th century AD; Aesthetics; African Americans; Ambiguity; Color; Connotation; Consonance; Criticism and interpretation; Cultural heritage; Cultural history; Culture; Douglass, Frederick (1818-1895); Fear; Feminism; Feminist criticism; Feminist literary criticism; Human relations; Immigrants; Imperialism; Interpersonal communication; Italian language; Legacies; Lips; Literature; Minority & ethnic groups; Narratives; Otherness; Personal relationships; Politics; Romantic art; Romanticism; Slavery; Slaves; Spofford, Harriet Elizabeth Prescott; White people; Women; Women authors; Women writers
• ISSN: 0748-4321; 1534-0643; 1534-0643
• DOI: 10.1353/leg.2001.0006

If the story consistently links the domestic and linguistic transgressions of both [Giorgione Willoughby] and her family's legendary slave to the color yellow, these emphatically racialized links are nonetheless peculiarly ambiguous about specific ethnic categories. Although of Italian descent, Giorgione repeatedly describes herself as "yellow," deeper in color than other New England women. For Giorgione, her epidermis warrants permission to talk and behave with an exoticized sensuality that exceeds cultural norms. In order to reap the benefits of such Othering, the text effects some rather curious contortions. For example, the narrator's "yellow" color is linked to Italy and the tropics, especially the West Indies, rather than Asia. She relates that "when I reached the islands my sight was as clear as my skin; all that tropical luxuriance snatched me to itself at once, recognized me for kith and kin" (46). Perhaps the safety of an insistently Italian heritage and ethnicity enables the otherwise dangerous use of "skin" and "kin" to suggest Giorgione's affinity with West Indian natives. Her skin color denotes a visible consonance with the tropical climate's native inhabitants and their presumed luxurious exoticism, an Otherness based in racial essentialism; at the same time, this Otherness is offset -- made safe, if you will -- by her clearly European ancestry. The linkage of "skin" and "kin" is consistent with late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scientific theories about race. According to Robyn Wiegman, "As late as the 1840s and 1850s, in fact, the preeminent authority on race in the states was still Samuel Stanhope Smith," who in 1787 wrote a "theoretical treatise on the origin of race, which he posited as climate and custom" (34). Stanhope's theory advances "race" as a scientific fact rooted at once in the observer's reading of behavior (culture) and skin (climate). Selectively appropriated by the narrator, these theories about race offer her a culturally acceptable device for asserting a privileged difference from white women and women of color. Sander Gilman observes that "one of the black servant's central functions in the visual arts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was to sexualize the society in which he or she is found" (228). Operating in similar structural fashion, the alliance of the beautiful Giorgione with the Willoughby slave's ambiguous ethnicity accomplishes several ends. First, the exoticization of Giorgione through the pre