• The Interracial Marriage Plot:Suicide and the Politics of Blood in Romantic-era Women's Fiction
• Deanna P. Koretsky (bio)

The term "Romantic suicide" tends to evoke sentimental modes of personal expression associated with well-known white men like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Werther, John Keats, and Thomas Chatterton. Yet as a number of scholars—including many contributors to this volume—have recently demonstrated, the idea of suicide was just as commonly used to explore a range of complex sociopolitical questions. We are only now beginning to appreciate the full scope of what suicide signified in Romantic-era culture: for example, how these writers used the notion of an individual's right to their own body to interrogate liberal notions of gendered subjectivity; how legal challenges to the criminality of suicide defied long-accepted ideas about the individual's relationship to the state and called forth new debates about national identity; and how the use of suicide in anti-slavery discourses highlighted contradictory ideas about the meaning of freedom and thus helped to reveal liberalism's inability to escape or deny its complicity with racialized exclusion.¹

Like suicide, incest is ubiquitous in Romantic literary culture. Its highly evocative symbolic capacity enables equally potent social critiques. This essay considers the complementary functions of incest and suicide in three early nineteenth-century women's texts. Maria Edgeworth's Belinda, an anonymous short story long attributed to Edgeworth called "Love and Suicide," and Mary Shelley's Mathilda mine the political signification of incest and suicide in order to explore interlocking structures of inequality that underwrite liberal modernity. Belinda and "Love and Suicide" register anxieties about ongoing changes to European social hierarchies along the axes of race and class, while Mathilda extends these critiques to consider how racism and classism are indissoluble from patriarchy. Using notions of blood purity inherent in the idea of incest to call forward long-held assumptions of whiteness in constructs of the properly "English" family, these texts grapple with changing notions of British culture and national identity, and, in the process, they reveal liberalism's precarious relationship to the social imbalances it purports to correct. [End Page 1]

Although they would seem to be totally oppositional, taboos around incest and marital or sexual relations between people of different racial, ethnic, and class backgrounds both boil down to an obsession with blood purity. Werner Sollors's extensive body of work on this topic has demonstrated how over the course of the nineteenth century, seemingly unrelated fears about incest (the ultimate form of endogamy) and miscegenation (a form of exogamy) became conflated in legal and literary language, such that the term "intermarriage" came to mean both. Sollors draws on the work of the sociologist Robert K. Merton to explain how this phenomenon developed linguistically:

Incestuous marriages are often termed intermarriage. This would appear to be an instance of the rhetorical fallacy of catachresis, in which one term is wrongly put for another. Its source is possibly the following. In lay language, the term intermarriage commonly denotes those marriages which deviate from endogamous norms. This attribute of non-conformity and group disapproval has come to be the identifying characteristic of intermarriage. Hence, incestuous marriage—which is also commonly condemned, comes mistakenly to be assimilated to the category of intermarriage, which is interpreted as tabooed marriage.

(qtd. in Sollors 315; emphasis in original)

Much more has been made of this strange conflation in American literary studies, even as the marriage plot's negotiation of endogamy and exogamy continues to draw considerable interest among scholars of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British culture. This is likely because England, unlike the United States, did not legally prohibit interracial marriage. Still, even a cursory survey of the cultural milieu in England reveals highly vexed views on the subject.

In a 1788 editorial in The Public Advertiser, Olaudah Equiano writes in favor of the "open, free, and generous love upon Nature's own wide and extensive plan . . . without distinction of the colour of a skin" (332). Equiano, who would marry a white woman, Susannah Cullen, in 1792, presents his support of sexual freedom as a strategy to assuage racial tensions in England:

The mutual commerce...

• 异族婚姻情节：浪漫时代女性小说中的自杀与血统
• 迪安娜·科瑞斯基（Deanna P.Koretsky）（生物）

“浪漫自杀”一词往往会唤起与约翰·沃尔夫冈·冯·歌德的《威瑟》，《约翰·济慈》和托马斯·查特顿等著名白人相关的情感表达方式。然而，正如最近许多学者（包括对该书的许多贡献者）所表明的那样，自杀的观念被广泛用于探讨一系列复杂的社会政治问题。我们才刚刚开始理解浪漫时代文化中自杀所指的全部范围：例如，这些作家如何利用个人对自己身体的权利这一概念来质疑性别主观性的自由主义概念；对自杀犯罪的法律挑战如何反驳了人们长期以来对个人与国家关系的看法，并引发了关于民族认同的新辩论；^1个

像自杀一样，乱伦在浪漫主义文学文化中无处不在。它极具启发性的象征能力使人们对社会的批评同样有效。本文考虑了19世纪初三部女性著作中乱伦和自杀的互补作用。玛利亚·埃奇沃思（Maria Edgeworth）的《贝琳达》（Belinda）是一个匿名的短篇小说，长期以来被埃奇沃思（Edgeworth）称为“爱与自杀”，玛丽·雪莱（Math Shelley）的玛蒂尔达（Mathilda）则挖掘了乱伦和自杀的政治含义，以探索支撑自由现代性的不平等联系的结构。贝琳达和《爱情与自杀》对沿着种族和阶级的轴心不断改变欧洲社会等级制度感到担忧，而马蒂尔达则对此表示担忧。扩展这些评论，以考虑种族主义和阶级主义如何与父权制密不可分。这些文字运用乱伦观念中固有的血液纯度的概念提出了长期存在的关于“英国”家庭结构中白度的假设，这些文本努力应对英国文化和民族认同观念的变化，并在此过程中揭示了自由主义与其所纠正的社会失衡之间的不稳定关系。[结束页1]

尽管它们似乎完全是对立的，但围绕种族，种族和阶级背景的人们之间的乱伦和婚姻或性关系的禁忌都归结为对血液纯度的痴迷。Werner Sollors在该主题上的广泛研究表明，在19世纪的过程中，似乎对乱伦（内婚的最终形式）和流产（外婚的一种形式）的恐惧似乎与法律和文学语言混为一谈， “通婚”一词的含义是两者兼而有之。Sollors利用社会学家Robert K. Merton的工作来解释这种现象在语言上是如何发展的：

乱伦的婚姻通常被称为间的婚姻。这似乎是白痴症在言辞上的谬论的一个例子，其中一个术语被错误地代入了另一个术语。其来源可能如下。在捻语言，术语通婚通常表示那些婚姻偏离从内婚规范。的该属性不符合和组不赞成来是通婚的识别特性。因此，通常也被谴责的近亲通婚被错误地同化为通婚的类别，通婚被解释为禁忌婚姻。

（qtd。在Sollors 315中；重点放在原文中）

在美国文学研究中，对这种奇怪的混淆进行了更多的研究，即使婚姻情节对一夫一妻制和一夫一妻制的谈判继续引起18世纪和19世纪英国文化学者的极大兴趣。这可能是因为英格兰与美国不同，英国没有在法律上禁止异族通婚。尽管如此，即使对英国的文化环境进行粗略的调查也显示出对该主题的高度不满的看法。

Olaudah Equiano在1788年的《公共广告商》社论中写道，“对自然界广泛而广泛的计划……开放，自由和慷慨的爱……不分肤色”（332）。Equiano于1792年与白人妇女Susannah Cullen结婚，提出了他对性自由的支持，以缓解英格兰的种族紧张局势：

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