"'Ruse it well": reading, power, and the seduction plot in The Curse of Caste.

Readers of fiction in the United States during the 1860s immediately would have recognized the narrative conventions that Julia C. Collins uses to unfold the "dark mystery" (14) of her novel--the story of the ultimately tragic courtship and marriage of Claire Neville's parents, Richard and Lina. In chapters five through 13, Collins presents this story-within-a-story as a fully formed, conventional seduction plot, which might be schematized in its generic terms as follows. The two lovers meet as total strangers to one another and tumble into infatuation at first sight. They quickly pledge their love, heedless of their imperfect knowledge of each other's character or social standing. When their impetuous promises of the heart prove socially untenable, the lovers enter into an elopement opposed by family and community, and facilitated in particular by deception of a parent. They retreat to a remote cottage where they are further isolated from community regulation or contact. Once there, the male lover abandons his new--and newly pregnant--bride. She, upon learning that he has deserted her, promptly succumbs to a lingering and intensely sentimentalized death in childbirth, casting her innocent babe defenseless on the world. Collins flags the full range of this predictable plot for her readers in the very first conversation between Claire's parents. Lina worries, "[P]erhaps you would cease to love me, and, if so, I should die," while Richard swears in response, "I will never desert you, so help me God!" (20). Heavy foreshadowing, this: he will desert, and she does die.

As any reader of The Curse of Caste then or now must testify, though, while Collins crafts the story of Richard and Lina to arrive at each of the formulaic stations of the seduction plot, she nonetheless enormously complicates that most well-worn narrative of mid-century popular American fiction. She expands the cast of characters, calls their intentions into question, redeems the seducer, and silences his victim--invoking the established conventions of the seduction novel it often seems, only to thwart and deconstruct them. In this dance with literary formula and reader expectations, Collins participates in an engagement with mainstream novelistic genre that recent critics have identified as exemplary of antebellum fiction (and, to a lesser extent, crafted autobiography) authored by African American writers. Seeking to explain and to revalue the predilection of these early fiction writers for sentimental romance--a predilection once derogated as insufficiently political and overly obsequious to mainstream precedents like Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin--critics such as Robert Reid-Pharr argue that "one cannot understand how sentimentality operates" in antebellum African American literature, "unless one also understands the methods of its contestation" (90). In a similar vein, Ann duCille proposes that antebellum fiction "often misdiagnosed by critics as sentimental melodrama" in fact creates "an ideologically charged space" by juxtaposing" 'the real' and 'the romantic,' the simple and the sensational the allegorical and the historical" (18).

This important critical movement--toward a more nuanced understanding of the work of mainstream sentimental form in antebellum African American fiction--resonates with a similar quest on the part of US literary historians to account for the relevance of seduction novels in the early Republic. Collins's choice of the seduction plot framework for her novel, as well as its romantically aristocratic Old South setting, may seem jarringly out of touch with the epoch during which she wrote it, oblivious to the momentousness of the year 1865 in the history of African America. But scholars of late-18th-century US literature confront a similar disconnect between historical moment and literary form when they puzzle over the obsession of the founding fathers with the novels of Samuel Richardson, or wonder at the unilateral triumph of Susannah Rowson's formulaic seduction novel Charlotte Temple among American readers just after the Revolution. Their thoughts on the political valences of the seduction plot in the Revolutionary era, then, may provide useful context for contemplating Collins's taking up of the form at the vexed moment of 1865.

To summarize those thoughts perhaps too briefly: in the early Republic, the seduction plot held special relevance for readers living through the upheavals of rapid modernization and social reorganization. By moving the marriage relation out of a broader familial-social context, and into a fraught transaction between two isolated characters, the seduction plot enacted the shift from a society organized around kin networks, community controls, and face-to-face interactions, to a society made up of a collection of atomized and anonymous individuals. (1) In so doing, the plot became an allegory of reading, misreading, and interpretation: if the seducer willfully misrepresents himself and his aims, how can his intended victim read between the lines, so to speak to uncover his deception and protect herself? (2) She never manages to do so successfully, of course--her interpretive failure is itself part of the plot--but seduction novels thereby presented themselves to readers as lessons in critical reading as a matter of modern life--and indeed, as a matter of life and death.

The editors and readers of antebellum African American newspapers such as the Christian Recorder shared in precisely such an understanding of critical reading as key to survival in the modernizing world. As Elizabeth McHenry puts it, contributors to these papers "promote[d] reading and literary activity as a component of citizenship ... an essential means of assuming an intellectual identity and introducing [readers] to the public conversations of civic life" (86-87). (3) Indeed, as editors William L. Andrews and Mitch Kachun note at the opening of their exemplary introduction to The Curse of Caste, Collins herself published a "literary manifesto" in the Christian Recorder a few months before the first installment of her novel, in which she valorized "the art of reading" as the clearest path to cultivating "a clear practical way of thinking for ourselves" (xi, 122). According to the conclusions of scholars of the early Republic, the seduction novel had been, for decades, the established fictional form in which authors most didactically urged development of this "art of reading." In this context, Collins's choice of the seduction plot for her first novel seems not a contradiction of her stated political commitments, but rather a fulfillment of them.

None of which is to say that Collins concerns herself in The Curse of Caste with reproducing the plot line of Clarissa or Charlotte Temple. Instead, from the second chapter of the story of Richard and Lina, Collins disrupts the classic lineaments of the seduction plot by intruding into it the laws of American slavery, engineering precisely the "ideologically charged" juxtaposition of "the romantic" with "the real" that duCille identifies as typical of earlier African American fiction (18). As soon as Lina's parentage is revealed and she is constituted as a chattel rather than a full person before the law, she loses the traditional readerly prerogatives of the tragic heroine of the seduction plot. Family and community protections are utterly lost to her; she may no longer choose to forsake those protections for the blandishments of her seducer; and thus Lina's reading or misreading of Richard's character and intent becomes, at the outset of the story, totally beside the point. (4) Collins underscores Lina's disempowerment by confining the scene of her elopement with Richard--the conventional climax of the seduction plot--to a narrative lacuna at the end of Chapter 6. By refusing to portray this central scene--by barring access to Lina's thoughts and feelings as she leaves the place of her birth for an uncertain future with her new lover--Collins insists that Lina's elopement is no matter of choice on her part, but rather her sole option for escape. Fleeing with Richard does not snatch Lina from the loving embrace of family and friends, but rather delivers her from the clutches of master and market. While the conventional heroine of the seduction plot ordinarily meets her seducer at a disadvantage, given her vulnerabilities of femaleness, youth, and (usually) inferior class, Collins shows that Lina's very ability to be deceived by her seducer is foreclosed by slave law. (5) She thereby reminds readers that the act of interpretation is, itself, a matter of privilege.

Indeed, Collins's subsequent reconfiguration of the seduction plot seems designed to encourage her readers to recognize and take advantage of this very privilege that Lina is denied. She preserves the pedagogical function of the conventional plot as a lesson in critical reading by opening a new critical question for readers: who, ultimately, is responsible for Lina's demise? Who is the villain of this tragic seduction story? Collins raises this question of interpretation when she expands the traditionally bilateral characterization of the seduction plot into a triangulation, with the addition of Richard's "equivocal friend," Manville (42). She wastes no time in alerting her readers that Manville is the quite unequivocal villain of her plot: she names the character after the archetypal seducer in American fiction (Montraville of Charlotte Temple, still one of the best-selling novels in the US at mid-century), and she introduces him in unmistakably formulaic terms: "Manville was rich and handsome, and much sought after by those who failed in reading his true character, as did Richard Tracy. But Manville was a villain--the beautiful casket enshrined a heart black as the shadows of Hades, and dead to all the finer feelings" (22; emphasis mine). No shades of gray here: Manville is the pure "villain" of Collins's seduction story, just as Lina is its abject victim. Yet, as the above passage makes clear, the object of Manville's seduction is not Lina, but rather Richard, and it is Richard whose "reading" of Manville's character is at stake. Richard, therefore, occupies a thoroughly in-between position in Collins's triangulated plot: while his actions designate him the nominal villain of the story--he elopes with Lina, then abandons her to her death--the novel labors mightily to exonerate him, to convince readers instead that, as Claire puts it in the last extant chapter, "my poor father was cruelly wronged" (109) by Manville. But conversely, understanding Richard as the ultimate victim of the story seems counterintuitive; his suffering, which consists of eating late breakfasts in France with a "sad, thoughtful brow" (77), certainly pales beside Lina's martyrdom.

Again and again, Collins poses Richard's status as conventional villain and unconventional victim to her readers as an interpretive challenge. She repeatedly models how easily Richard may be converted from the former into the latter, as her characters in the present of the novel attempt to unravel the "dark mystery" of Claire's parents--and each time, her readers sit in ultimate judgment on Richard's status. For instance, in the chapter titled "Mrs. Butterworth's Revelation" (95), two characters, each with access to a different part of the whole seduction story available to readers, meet on a train in Connecticut and offer up opposite interpretations of Richard's role in Lina's demise. Mrs. Butterworth, Lina's former nurse, has witnessed Lina's tragic death years (or chapters) earlier, and she recounts that scene, closing with her own reading of it: "Poor, young thing! It was well she died as soon as she did ... for her husband was a villain" (95). When her auditor, Monsieur Sayvord, presses Mrs. Butterworth to explain "what induced [her] to think that Mrs. Tracy's husband was a villain" (96), Collins indicates the credibility of Mrs. Butterworth's sensible reply by noting her "honest eyes" and spontaneous feeling: "'Why,' replied the old lady, her round, honest eyes flashing with indignation, 'if he had been a good and honorable man, he would have written to his poor little heart-broken wife, as a husband ought. He would never have gone to Europe without her knowledge, leaving her among strangers, to die alone. May God forgive the wicked man, wherever he may be!'" (96). With his access to another side of the story, Sayvord authoritatively parries Mrs. Butterworth's interpretation by inserting Manville and triangulating the marital relation: he avows that Richard Tracy "is a true and noble man, and mourns yet the early death of his young and gentle wife, who, with himself, was the victim of that designing vil lain, Manville" (96; emphasis mine). When Mrs. Butterworth immediately submits her own interpretation of the story to Sayvord's, Collins validates the conversion of Richard from "villain" to "victim" with a rare interruption of her free indirect discourse. She closes the chapter with a didactic affirmation of the new interpretation from an omniscient narrator who presumes union with the reader: "Mrs. Butterworth ... readily transferred her indignation from Richard to Manville. And our friend possessed her sympathy as he has always had ours" (96-97).

But within this triangulated seduction plot, what does it mean to "transfer" the sympathy of the reader from abject, martyred Lina to elite, ultimately redeemed Richard? Collins keeps this critical question alive for her readers, as, despite such emphatic assurances that Richard should be excused from charges of villainy, she weaves into her narrative hints at the responsibilities that might be understood to accompany his privilege of critical reading. From her first introduction of villainous Manville, Collins notes that Richard unreflectively "sought[-]after" Manville's "gay, good-looking" companionship, even as he "sometimes felt the subtle influence that this Manville exerted over him" (22). Operating from a position of social invulnerability, Richard can refuse to be bothered to think critically about Manville's character, even as he intuitively senses its evil. More damningly, he can afford to be entertained by his own seduction, being "alternately attracted and repelled" by the seducer as a diversion (20). (6) Here Collins joins a number of her novelist contemporaries in subtly protesting the sexual double standard that would condemn a fallen woman as a permanent social outcast, while conferring upon her male partner only "an unpleasant notoriety for a season" (39-40).

More important, Collins indicates that Richard's interpretive nonchalance becomes a serious moral failing--and a precipitator of tragedy--precisely because the law gives him dominion over the well-being of dependents. Collins concludes the chapter in which Lina dies with another of her rare interjections of an omniscient narrative voice: "Richard, so deeply wronged, so basely deceived, should have known that 'a man may smile and be a villain still'" (38; emphasis mine). (7) In a society organized by slave law, Collins shows that the seduction plot itself is, like Rose Cottage, "the property of Richard and the home of Lina" (26): Richard's interpretations of the world direct the action, while Lina lives out the consequences of his misreading. Their unilateral interpretive relationship becomes particularly plain as Collins raises, and then violates, the expectations of an epistolary novel--still, since Richardson, the most common vehicle for the seduction plot. Lina must wait and wait for letters from Richard, while writing no letters herself and receiving none from any other characters. In spite of Richard's ostensible standing as "the uncompromising advocate of equity and justice" (77), and in spite of his love for Lina across the barriers of caste, his textual interactions with her remain strictly one-way, strictly hierarchical.

Against this stark disparity of interpretive power in the slavery-shadowed story of Richard and Lina, Collins offers her readers an array of characters in the present of the novel who model reading for themselves as they unravel the "dark mystery" (14) of the past. Three of the most important of these characters--Juno, Singleton, and the heroine Claire--all bear names that indicate their critical insight into the seduction plot. Juno shares her name with the guardian of women and hearth, Singleton's moniker attests to his single-mindedness, and Claire's name bespeaks clarity. All three characters, furthermore, share a middling status, for while they are not subject to slave law, they occupy positions of service to the master-class Tracys and the titled Sayvords, whether as housemaid, governess, or physician. Though Juno and Singleton, in particular, seem miles apart as stock characters--the "old colored nurse" (8) versus the "worthy son of Aesculapius" (61)--Collins grants them remarkably similar roles as interpreters of her seduction plot. Both possess superior ethical intuitions about the characters they meet and about the progress of the narrative itself: when Singleton "form[s] an idea of his own" about Claire's parentage he is, "with his usual acuteness, ... very nearly correct" (62), just as when Juno has "her 'suspicions,'" about the trouble with Richard and Lina's marriage, "the remarkable part of it is, [she is] nearly always right" (30). But neither character rests upon intuition alone; rather, each methodically collects and analyzes narrative and linguistic evidence. "What was the solution of this strange language?" (44), Singleton wonders upon his first encounter with a delirious Richard Tracy, while later he "carefully not[es] the opinion of the masses" as to Claire's identity, and seeks to obtain additional "necessary information" from Manville "[i]f not by direct inquiry, perhaps by strategy" (62). Juno, meanwhile, rehearses a back-story of Colonel Tracy's "overweening family pride and love of wealth and position" to deduce what might be "not satisfactory in relation to Richard's marriage" (29, 30); later, she "interpret[s]" (90) her own "strange dreams" (89) and sends her husband to "ask [Miss Ellwood] all about Claire" (90).

In other words, both Juno and Singleton perform the act of critical reading as Collins describes it in her 1864 "literary manifesto": "[W]hile we read, we must think. We must combine anew the items of knowledge. We must reflect upon them often, and draw from them fresh influences and new truths for ourselves. It is only by such processes that we become truly intelligent" ("Mental Improvement" 122). Juno and Singleton attend to their interpretive intuitions about the story of Richard and Lina, and then they systematically follow those intuitions out--taking account of narrative patterns, hidden meanings, and missing logical links. And Collins rewards both characters for their interpretative work in the novel by allowing them finally to hit on solutions to the "dark mystery" of the story of Richard and Lina. On the one hand, Singleton solves the seduction plot itself: he both uncovers Richard's and Lina's parental relation to Claire, and exposes Manville's villainous role in the tragic end of their marriage. Juno's solution, on the other hand, is Collins's overarching moral: she reaches beyond the triangle of characters to identify a caste-riven society as the ultimate source of the tragedy. With Juno, Collins hypothesizes the necessary conditions for a happy resolution of the present action of the novel: not hiding the fact that Claire is "tainted with black blood"--as did those who attempted to protect Lina--but rather fighting the erroneous assumption that "black blood ain't just as good as white," will save Claire from living out a repetition of her mother's fate (89).

Claire is indeed under threat in the present of the novel, for while Singleton and Juno serve as model critical readers of the seduction plot that is her parents' past, Claire possesses far less clear interpretive abilities. Fundamentally at stake in the main action of the novel is Claire's development as a critical reader: will she be able to identify her personal connection to the story of Richard and Lina? And will she discern the parallels between that story and her own situation that will enable her to act to avoid her mother's end? For Collins threatens to repeat the triangulated seduction plot in the present of the novel, with Claire in Lina's tragic role; she alerts her readers to the parallel between the plots by both introducing (in Chapter 4) and concluding (in Chapter 14) the Manville/Richard/Lina story with analogous descriptions of the relationships between Belle, Sayvord, and Claire. Belle without question serves as the villainous seducer of the present scene, counterpart of Manville: with her "searching black eyes" that "seemed to scintillate hatred," she is introduced deliberately destroying a stock symbol of female purity, "thoughtfully tearing to pieces a beautiful rose and scattering the leaves at her feet" (11, 13). Meanwhile, Collins casts Sayvord in the in-between role of the triangle with precisely the same phrase she will use two chapters later to describe Richard's relationship to Manville: he has "thus far ... failed in reading [Belle's] true character" (11). Finally, Collins ominously predicts that Claire, like her mother before her, will suffer most from the seducer's villainy, as Belle's "fierce black eyes" haunt her waking and sleeping thoughts, leading Claire to ask rhetorically, "Did it augur evil, or what?" (11).

When, after the nine-chapter seduction-plot interlude, Collins returns to the main action of her novel, she makes the resonances between the past tragedy and Claire's present dilemma even more plain for her readers. Belle is now fully infernal: just as Manville has two chapters earlier destroyed Richard's life-saving letter to Lina with "scornfully curling ... lips, and a sinister light flashing from his eyes," so now Belle sits plotting against Claire "with contracted brow, flashing eyes, and compressed lips, while a crimson spot burned on each cheek" (46, 51). And Claire becomes ever more vulnerable to Belle's malevolence, finally succumbing to the "brain fever" in which "she imagine[s] Isabelle some destroying spirit from whose baleful influence there was no escape" (86, 88).

Unlike her enslaved mother, Claire is free to read critically--to interpret her own position in the plot, the probable narrative of her past, the motives of the characters with whom she interacts--and to act accordingly to protect herself. But while her ethical intuitions are good--she immediately senses Belle's evil nature, just as she "shrank from" Manville with "instinctive dislike" (8) as a child--Claire seems almost maddeningly resistant to putting together the textual evidence that surrounds her. When Mrs. Tracy tells her the story of Richard and Lina, Claire responds as not a critical, but rather a sensational reader, simply registering her immediate emotional response: "What was there in that history, sad though it was, to make the blood thrill through her veins and her heart to throb almost painfully?" (55). And when she gazes upon the portrait of her father--"an exact counterpart" of her own face--she asks her employer/mistress to interpret the scene for her: "'Mrs. Tracy, who am I?'" (57). These are exactly the questions that Claire must answer herself to act in her own defense. They are also questions that Collins has equipped her readers to answer when Claire poses them, which is to say that Collins dramatizes Claire's struggle to make sense of her story in a way that causes readers to become cognizant of their own interpretive work in reading the novel. When the heroine raves in her fevered delirium, "Who am I? Oh, some one tell me! This suspense will kill me" (87), Collins seems to deliver Claire's plea for eclaircissement directly to the readers of The Curse of Caste.

Within the novel itself, Claire's imminent salvation in the threatened seduction plot seems poised to come from Sayvord's mentorship of her fledgling readerly insights. As the novel progresses, Sayvord's critical insight replaces Richard's sloppy inattention to Manville's machinations; Sayvord perceives both Belle's villainy and Claire's vulnerability. And the main difference between Richard and Sayvord, Collins carefully notes, is that Sayvord is a mindful student of literature: while Richard has not read his Shakespeare carefully enough to take to heart Hamlet's admonition that "one may smile, and smile, and be a villain" (1.5:109), Sayvord proves able to discern Belle's true nature precisely because "he ha[s] read much ... and [is] also a close observer of human nature" (52; emphasis mine).

More important, Sayvord seeks an egalitarian textual relationship with Claire that is quite the opposite of Richard's authoritative one-way correspondence with her "slave bride" mother. As Claire begins to descend into mental "chaos ... doubt and perplexity" (67), Sayvord works to advance Claire's education as a critical reader equal to himself, encouraging her to read both literature and her own situation:

   ... Claire sought her own room to
   think over the exciting events of the
   last twenty-four hours. In a little while
   Rose entered, holding a neat little volume
   of Tennyson's poems very gingerly.

      "Massa Count Sayvord say to present
   dis book and hopes you will 'ruse
   it well." (67)

At a desperate moment for Claire, Sayvord instructs her both to read "well," and (in his note inside the volume Rose presents) to write back to him.

Collins's rendering of dialect in this crucial passage is simply brilliant, and further stresses the significance of critical reading for those who are socially disempowered. In delivering Sayvord's uplifting injunction to Claire through the servant Rose, Collins marks the speech as that of an enslaved person in part by conflating the word peruse with the word ruse. She thereby suggests that reading is a stratagem of escape for the vulnerable: to "peruse" is to "ruse," in the sense of the intransitive verb. (8) In the context of the passage, the book that Sayvord presents to Claire is both a ruse--a means of hiding his secret note to her--and a text to be perused. Both ways, Collins invokes the doubled meaning of the dialect rendering "'ruse," implying that literary matters can help threatened individuals negotiate a world wherein they are disadvantaged. The book literally contains two kinds of information that Claire can use to save herself. As a ruse, it holds Sayvord's knowledge of Richard's whereabouts, as well as his budding romantic interest in her. As a work of literature to be perused, the "neat little volume of Tennyson's poems" is not an idle specification on Collins's part. Her contemporary readers almost certainly would have perceived a reference to the first version of Idylls of the King (1859), Tennyson's most recent and by far most popular book. The slender volume contains just four narrative poems--then titled "Enid," "Vivien," "Elaine," and "Guinivere"--each of which details the travails of a Middle English heroine navigating a maze of power, sex, romance, and restriction in the Arthurian Court. The lessons to be gleaned from reading such a "neat little volume," Collins implies, surely have application in the setting of the antebellum, deep-South Tracy household where Claire finds herself imbricated in a similarly dangerous, intriguing, and medieval scene.

Perhaps it is the assured demise of this pseudo-feudal South that reinvigorated the seduction plot for Collins and her readers in 1865. While the plot remained a staple of popular fiction at this time, the great heyday of the US seduction novel, as I noted at the outset, had been in the post-Revolutionary decades--a moment when, as Cathy N. Davidson has put it, "readers were increasingly eager to participate in the creation of meaning, of public opinion, of culture--not just to serve as the consumers of meanings articulated by others" (45). (9) In 1865 a second American revolution was transforming the southern order from one in which the few read for the many--as in the story of Richard and Lina--into an order in which the many would read for themselves--as do Juno, Singleton, and (hesitantly) Claire. With expanded individual freedom and political autonomy in the 1780s and '90s had come the concern that the education and critical thinking of newly empowered citizens might prove inadequate to the task of thoughtful self-determination: that these new citizens would be easily seducible, or as John Adams famously put it, that "Democracy is Lovelace and the people are Clarissa" (qtd. in Fliegelman 237). 75 years later, Collins re-animates the seduction plot as a key register for dramatizing the expansion of liberal individuality, this time under Emancipation. By innovating on the 18th-century form of the plot, she further encourages her readers to consider the extent to which this emancipated status will remain a "burdened individuality" (as Saidiya Hartman has termed it), providing liberation from slave law but continued subjection to "the curse of caste." As Collins triangulates the standard bilateral plot, she stresses the alienation of her heroines from the prerogative of critical interpretation. And as she unfolds two interrelated generations of threatened seductions, she encourages readers to meditate on what has changed, and what has stayed the same, between Lina's story and Claire's.

Much like her hero Sayvord, Collins hands her readers a slender volume of instructional narrative and invites them--and us--to "'ruse it well." She calls on readers of The Curse of Caste to make the interpretive moves that her historically constrained characters cannot. We must judge the culpability of "old, sweet, winning" Richard (77) in the tragic past of slavery that he so strenuously disavows. We should perceive that traveling south--especially "on board the beautiful steamer Alhambra" (18)--always forebodes danger. (10) And we might discern a relationship between the heroine of the novel and the "troop of frightened negroes, whose dusky faces throng every available door and window" (85) of the southern mansion in which Claire's drama takes center stage. As Collins draws attention to the pedagogical function of her novel as a lesson in critical reading, she implicitly argues--as did many post-Revolutionary authors--for the significance of imaginative literature in a time of political exigency and social upheaval. Far from a frivolous diversion, this novel from Collins's pen serves as a site for interpreting the past, trying out new ideas, and working through methods of reasoning and deduction--as a space in which to practice negotiating an uncertain and rapidly changing world. Like many writers of seduction plots before her, Collins exhorts us to recognize critical reading as a matter of life and death--especially for the disempowered, and especially in a time of revolution and reaction.

I wish to thank Joycelyn Moody for introducing me to Collins, Veta Tucker for her supportive editorship of the special issue, and the anonymous readers of the essay for their most helpful critique.

Works Cited

Andrews, William L., and Mitch Kachun, eds. The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride: A Rediscovered African American Novel by Julia C. Collins. New York: Oxford UP, 2006.

--. "Editors' Introduction." Andrews and Kachun xi-lxvi.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Ed. Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981.

Collins, Julia C. The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride. 1865. Andrews and Kachun 3-111.

--. "Mental Improvement." 16 Apr. 1864. Andrews and Kachun 121-22.

Davidson, Cathy N. Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America. New York: Oxford UP, 1986.

duCille, Ann. The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women's Fiction. New York: Oxford UP, 1993.

Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel 1960. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive P, 1997.

Fliegelman, Jay. Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority, 1750-1800. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1982.

Haag, Pamela. Consent: Sexual Rights and the Transformation of American Liberalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1999.

Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford UP, 1997.

McHenry, Elizabeth. Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African-American Literary Societies. Durham: Duke UP, 2002.

Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989.

Reid-Pharr, Robert. Conjugal Union: The Body, the House, and the Black American. New York: Oxford UP, 1999.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. 1602. Ed. Harold Jenkins. London: Methuen, 1982.

Tennyson, Alfred. Idylls of the King. London: E. Moxon, 1859.

Warner, Michael. The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1990.

Notes

(1.) Fiedler provides a classic account of the way that "the sentimental tale of seduction ... adopted from European prototype ... [profoundly] influenced American fiction" (217): "the archetypal act of seduction" "in its mythological form" dramatizes a wide-scale process of social modernization as a struggle between two individuals, one of whom represents the "aristocratic" past and the other of whom represents the "bourgeois" (national-industrial) future (69).

(2.) Fliegelman describes the aim of the seduction plot as instilling a critical and deductive consciousness, "to form the rational faculty ... to make the credulous skeptical" (88): "It is no accident that the rise of the English novel coincided with a new social emphasis on the moral and cultural significance of education, for it was only as a form of pedagogy that most of 18th-century fiction was considered acceptable and useful" (36).

(3.) McHenry also traces this antebellum understanding of "reading, writing, and print" as "technologies of power" (42) to the Revolutionary era, citing Warner's influential formulation of print as "the dominant mode of the political" in the early Republic.

(4.) Hartman intervenes productively in literary studies of the seduction plot by uncovering a related "discourse of seduction in slave law" that "makes recourse to the idea of reciprocal and collusive relations" (81) to evade "the crisis of consent or consensual sexual relations under domination" (102): "How does one grapple with issues of consent and will when the negation or restricted recognition of these terms determines the meaning of enslavement?" (81). Hartman then examines how Harriet Jacobs re-appropriates the "frame of seduction" in Incidents to "preclude facile distinctions that would enable us to disentangle desire and domination or purportedly willed exchange from coercion"--a reading of Jacobs that bears relevance to Collins's adoption of the seduction plot for her story of a "slave bride," and a reading that illuminates the silence with which Collins surrounds Lina's moment of ostensible consent to elope with Richard.

(5.) As Fiedler notes, "typically, the [seducer] is a nobleman, the girl he attempts to seduce of humbler stock" (71). Haag traces a shift in legal conceptualization of seduction during the antebellum period in the US, proposing that the increasing criminalization of seduction at this time indicates a popular discomfort with the assumed inequality in social power between seducer and victim; to understand seduction as a crime for which one individual (the seducer) alone is guilty is to negate the possibility of consent across differentials of social power (25-60). The seduction plot thus can serve, by mid-19th-century, as an allegory for examining the injustice of all sorts of socially sanctioned power differentials between individuals.

(6.) In this particular passage, Collins is describing Richard's conflicted reaction to a character even more morally loathsome than Manville: Ralph Hartly, the half-brother who is conveying Lina down the river under false pretences so that she may be sold into slavery in Louisiana. Even before Manville's entrance into the story, then, Collins foregrounds Richard's unwillingness to read others critically-to look beyond the "courteous and gentlemanly" surfaces of southern society-as his major characterological flaw.

(7.) By using the slightly altered quotation from Hamlet here, Collins indicts not only Richard's failure to read Manville's character accurately, but also his failure to read literature as a guide to negotiating life--a point to which I return below.

(8.) "Of a hunted animal: To make a detour or other movement in order to escape from the dogs" (OED).

(9.) Davidson builds her interpretation of the function of the early US novel on Bakhtin's theory of the way that the novel as genre relocates authority in the interpretations of the individual who reads it, allowing "the individual [to acquire] the ideological and linguistic initiative necessary to change the nature of his own image" (38)--an understanding of the genre that also influences my reading of Collins.

(10.) Indeed, Collins's use of the loaded trope of the Alhambra--the 14th-century palace of the Moorish kings in Granada, Spain, and the title subject of a popular 1832 collection of tales and sketches by Washington Irving--prepares readers to enter both a romantic tropical locale with a storied past and a racially and culturally hybrid society with a history of violence and injustice.

Jennifer Rae Greeson is Assistant Professor of English at Princeton University.