Juno's Civil War: Black Knowledge and Racial Resolution in Julia Collins's The Curse of Caste

Abstract

Julia Collins’s The Curse of Caste; or, The Slave Bride was serialized in the Christian Recorder from February to September 1865, beginning before and abruptly ending after the war’s end. Any overt depiction or discussion of the war is decidedly absent from Collins’s historical fiction, but the novel resembles genres often associated with the war and its uses as a boundary for demarking US literary periodization: antislavery sentimental fiction, the Southern or plantation gothic, and genres we might call either “race and reunion” or “race and refusal” literature.1 The last of these are often read as allegories of the war and its aftermath, framing the war as a familial conflict. Authors varied widely regarding their placement of race as central to the war and offering possible solutions for racial reconciliation as its resolution. David Blight locates reunion literature later in the century, though in 1865, Collins’s novel could not yet be situated with its most familiar themes of either plantation nostalgia or anti-nostalgia.2