"The fire that lights those big black eyes of his is not an easy fire": (Ir)rationalizing Blackness in Armadale and The Guilty River

Abstract:As texts that unconventionally feature mixed-race characters as protagonists, Armadale and The Guilty River collectively interrogate the pervasive structure of racial binarism and question the assumption that blackness is a fixed racial essence. In that way, these texts propose an alternate perspective on the reading of the English social landscape, articulating a belief that "all scenery … derives a splendor not its own" and that the "splendor" of the British Empire is neither a pre-existing essence nor a standard of comparison, but a manifestation of the ever-fluctuating "interfusions" of white and nonwhite Britons of multiple racial and cultural backgrounds.