This map holds various poingnet historical and geographical landmarks in the Victorain age which shaped the conceptions of whiteness housed within the pages of Harriet Wilson's and Charlotte Bronte's novels.  By contextualizing these novels, and their ideas surrounding race, we hope to clarify their meanings more fully and to discuss the implications of their texts and ideas.

Introduction:

Our project looks to analyze the racial identities in Victorian society in regard to the complexity of mixed characters seen in Victorian literature. Further examining the issue, we will have a focus on the humanity awarded to white women versus women of color. Race being a constructed idea allowed it to be manipulated throughout history so we will be using historical and geographical points to contextualize the works of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Harriet Wilson’s Sketches from the Life of a Free Black. Our inspiration behind this topic was derived from the characters of Bertha Mason and Frado. We discussed in class how interesting of a character Bertha is in Jane Eyre and a lot of our curiosity was driven from her racial ambiguity. We really derived our research from comparing her experience as a racially ambiguous character to Frado’s experience because they are so distinct. These two characters exemplify the interconnectedness of class, race, and location through a historical lense so we wanted to use our final project to share with you guys our research about it. We have prepared a map for you as we thought this best since the novels that we chose to work with actually fall under our class category of transatlantic since Jane Eyre is an English work and Sketches from a Life of a Free Black is an American work. So, we are each going to take you through some of the locations on our map today for you to get a look into some of our research.

Conclusion: 

In conclusion, our joint research project sought to, through various different mediums and methods, discover what the Victorian conception of whiteness was, particularly as it pertains to the novels which we have read in class.  Considering that, race is a societally conceived construct, and furthermore that the Vicotrian age was pivotal in its construction and definition, we used research to discover how legal precedents, medical journals, transatlantic articles, and sociological analysis established and could enlighten our research into the definition of whiteness.  As it pertains to our primary texts, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, and Sketches of the Life of a Free Black by Harriet Wilson, we discovered that there were substantial differences which occurred in between their twenty year publishing gap which influenced their writings differently.  For Bertha, in Jane Eyre, race was a construct that was very much undefined-racial hierarchies existed, namely through colonization and slavery, but race and its implications were still unclear.  Whiteness had to do with heritage.  For Frado, in Sketches of The Life of a Free Black, race and its implications were much more clearly defined.  To be white was a difference in biology and soul.  It was impossible for Frado, despite her white mother, to become white herself.  Both these author’s own conceptions of whiteness infiltrate their storylines and are heavily influenced by the contexts of their societal and social surroundings.  Our research has, we are convinced, only brushed the surface of an incredible and very much under researched topic.  We hope that in presenting to you some of the context and history that makes up the complicatedness that is “Victorian Literature and Conceptions of Whiteness” that we have inspired in you an interest which you yourself will continue to explore.