Affiliating With George Eliot

This chapter looks at George Eliot's usage of the “unwitting passing and voluntary racial affiliation” scenario in her works and what it means for African American writers. Virtually no other major British writer ever told it at all. By contrast, a number of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American writers—most of them African American—constructed this same scenario, almost invariably in stories about African American identity. Within American literary history, such stories are legible as refutations of what has come to be known as the tragic mulatto/a plot. In stories with this plot, the discovery that a character who has believed himself or herself to be white has some African ancestry is cataclysmic, leading directly to enslavement, sexual violation, madness, and/or death.