Abstract

In the early twentieth century, the widespread belief that young white women were at risk of being captured and forced into sex work led to significant legislative victories, and this crisis also shaped US literature in surprising ways. When writing about so-called white slavery crossed over from the spheres of journalism, social reform, and the law into fiction, authors devised a suite of quasi-empirical literary techniques that turned the dubious facts of white slavery into the stuff of popular art. Novelists drew heavily on juridical and social scientific evidence to lend authority and specificity to stories that they insisted (counterfactually) were gravely true. White slavery fiction marries empiricism with sensationalism, data with melodrama, cold statistics with exaggeration and falsehood. This essay examines the literary empiricism of Reginald Wright Kauffman’s 1910 novel The House of Bondage and the amateur literary criticism of progressive anti-vice reformers to examine a tradition of mutual borrowing between nonfictional genres such as the report, tract, and newsletter and modern US fiction. An analogy between slavery and forced sex work was pivotal to the social critique that white slavery novels existed to forward. Yet the genre’s catalyzing metaphor circulated a radically dehistoricized, racist conception of enslavement for a twentieth-century white readership, drawing its figurative vocabulary and sense of political urgency from chattel slavery while eliminating any concern with Black men, women, or children.

中文翻译：

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白色奴隶小说，所谓

摘要

在20世纪初，普遍认为年轻的白人妇女有被捕的风险，并被迫从事性工作，这导致了重大的立法胜利，而这场危机也以令人惊讶的方式塑造了美国文学。当撰写有关所谓的白人奴隶制的新闻，社会改革和法律跨入小说领域时，作者设计了一套准经验的文学技巧，将白人奴隶制的可疑事实变成了流行艺术。小说家大量利用司法和社会科学证据为自己坚持的（反事实的）故事赋予权威和特殊性。白色奴隶制小说将经验主义与耸人听闻的故事，数据与情节剧，虚假的统计数据夸张地结合在一起。奴役之家和对进步的反维权改革者的业余文学批评，考察了非虚构类型（例如报告，短片，时事通讯和现代美国小说）之间相互借鉴的传统。奴隶制和强迫性工作之间的类比对于白人奴隶制小说存在的社会批判至关重要。然而，这种体裁的催化隐喻却散布着一种激进的，非历史性的，种族主义的奴役观念，用于二十世纪的白人读者群体，从动产奴隶制中汲取了比喻的词汇和政治紧迫感，同时消除了对黑人，妇女或儿童的任何担忧。