A review of a review of “What Answer?”

[walkitout]

broke my rule about reading Atlantic articles, because I ran across this:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1869/01/review-what-answer-by-anna-e-dickinson/557933/

Having not read the book, perhaps I misunderstood the review. But I think that the reviewer (and I mean, how wild is it that this is William Dean Howells) is simultaneously saying that Dickinson’s book should have been much _more_ radical even than it was at the time (“she should have been obviously very dark skinned”, I believe he means to say, but in the way of the 19th century, he used a lot more words to do so) and _also_ unwilling to agree with the proposition that, yes, anti-mixed marriage prejudice and law needs to be comprehensively jettisoned from our society. Further, look at the date that Howells is willing to revisit the proposition.

I _should have_ realized that the Atlantic has basically been this way from the beginning: You Are Not Extreme Enough And Also I Will Refrain from Supporting Obviously Good and Correct Things Because of Awkwardness with My Social Standing. But somehow, this really drove it home.

I’ll be going back to NOT reading the Atlantic.

https://www.baystatebanner.com/2023/03/08/colonial-era-marriage-challenged-race-norms/

Priestess and I visited the Museum of African American History in Boston yesterday, and during some discussion about the legal status of various marriages, I found the above article. It covers pretty much everything. When Lydia Craft got married, she had to strategize to identify someone to perform the marriage. A specific law that would have prevented her from getting married would not be passed for another couple years. Finally, a lot of married couples were never “formally” married, but behaved as married and that was good enough for everyone involved’s purposes. There is _so_ _much_ that you need to know about how this society differs from our own in order to make any kind of sense of any of it.

Comments

[ethelmay]

I think you are (partly) misunderstanding Howells. He is certainly being naive about racism (and/or being mealymouthed enough to be publishable on the subject), but he is against what he sees of it. ("we are not saying that it [pure cussedness] ought not to be warred upon as long as it exists at all.") He is sanguine enough to think that eventually white people will stop maintaining the color bar when it becomes obvious that it would be far easier to drop it. He's wrong - it takes a whole lot of work before you get to the point where such motivations are sufficient to tip a significant number of people over - but he's not wrong that at some point people can do the decent thing out of self-interest, laziness, etc. And he thinks that in the case of someone who can pass for white, that in reality white society already does accept "mixed" marriages, and thinks the author should have known that. (It's one of those "I would have written the book differently" reviews that is probably missing the point, I agree, but I don't think he misses it as badly as you think.)