Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Alicia Mireles Christoff, and Amy R. Wong have argued that despite the fact that the nineteenth-century British studies represents “a period and geographical center that consolidated a modern idea of race” Victorian studies ironically “lacks a robust account of race and racialization” (370). This paper turns to the immensely popular representation of liminal and illegible racial bodies on the Victorian stage as a way of complicating our understanding of Victorian theories of “race and racialization.” While, as Daniel Hack and others have pointed out, the Victorians were interested in plots of “unwitting passing and discovered identity,” a number of popular operas and plays in the 1840s and 50s focused on reverse passing. Rather than expose an invisible blackness as many (conscious or unconscious) passing plays, these plays and operas expose a hidden and invisible whiteness. I focus on Edmund Falconer’s The Cagot: Or, Heart to Heart (1856) which centers on an ethnic group of unknown origin, unclear history, and ambiguous race found in the Pyrenees, on the west-coast of France and in the Basque region of Spain. At the same time, the Cagots were characterized by an excessive whiteness. Rather than simply dramatize the failure to identify a core racial ‘essence’ (whether black or white) invisible on the surface of the body or on stage, The Cagot at once asks audiences to see whiteness as a form of racial difference while also undermining a theory of racial embodiment based on differences in skin color (visible or invisible). In the end, it argues for a form of racial difference and familial affiliation that are not only performative but voluntary. Taken together, these popular plays suggest that the Victorians were drawn to representations of the instability of the very racial structures that the they are credited with creating and maintaining.

Bio:
Daniel A. Novak is associate professor of English at the University of Alabama. He is author of Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge University Press) and co-editor with James Catano of Masculinity Lessons: Rethinking Men’s and Women’s Studies (Johns Hopkins University Press). He has published essays in Representations, Victorian Studies, Novel, Criticism, and other venues. This paper is part of a book project entitled Victoria’s Accursed Race.