Using black feminist theory and African American studies to read Victorian culture, Impossible Purities looks at the construction of Englishness as white, masculine, and pure and Americanness as black, feminine, and impure. Brodys readings of Victorian novels, plays, paintings, and science fiction reveal the impossibility of purity and the inevitability of hybridity in representations of ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and race. She amasses a considerable amount of evidence to show that Victorian culture was bound inextricably to various forms and figures of blackness.
Opening with a reading of Daniel Defoes A True-Born Englishman, which posits the mixed origins of English identity, Brody goes on to analyze mulattas typified by Rhoda Swartz in William Thackerays Vanity Fair, whose mixed-race status reveals the unseemly origins of English imperial power. Examining Victorian stage productions from blackface minstrel shows to performances of The Octoroon and Uncle Toms Cabin, she explains how such productions depended upon feminized, black figures in order to reproduce Englishmen as masculine white subjects. She also discusses H.G. Wellss The Island of Dr. Moreau in the context of debates about the new woman, slavery, and fears of the monstrous degeneration of English gentleman. Impossible Purities concludes with a discussion of Bram Stokers novella, The Lair of the White Worm, which brings together the books concerns with changing racial representations on both sides of the Atlantic.
This book will be of interest to scholars in Victorian studies, literary theory, African American studies, and cultural criticism.