Blackface and Pale Gaze: Racialist Sentiment in Stowe, Melville, and London

This dissertation examines the role of minstrelsy and romantic racialism in three American writers, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Herman Melville, and Jack London. While Melville’s fiction is critical of facile racial categories, Stowe’s commitment to the abolition of slavery, and London’s commitment to socialism are both vitiated by their racism. Both Stowe and London are deeply indebted to the liberatory tradition of the slave narrative, but ultimately select sentiment, the call of the mythic wild, and the call of the domestic cabin, rather than freedom.