Family Money: Property, Race, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century

Family Money explores the histories of formerly enslaved women who tried to claim inheritances left to them by deceased owners; the household traumas of mixed-race slaves; post-Emancipation calls for reparations; and the economic fallout from anti-miscegenation marriage laws. Authors ranging
from Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frank Webb, and Harriet Beecher Stowe to Charles Chesnutt and Lydia Maria Child recognized that intimate interracial relationships took myriad forms, often simultaneously sexual, marital, coercive, familial, pleasurable, and painful. Their fiction confirms that the
consequences of these relationships for nineteenth-century Americans meant thinking about more than the legal structure of racial identity. Who could count as family (and when); who could own property (and when); and how racial difference was imagined (and why) were emphatically bound together.
Demonstrating that notions of race were entwined with economics well beyond the direct issue of slavery, Family Money reveals interracial sexuality to be a volatile mixture of emotion, economics, and law that had dramatic, long-term financial consequences.


Author: Jeffory A. Clymer
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 12/01/2014
Pages: 216
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.74lbs
Size: 9.21h x 6.14w x 0.49d
ISBN: 9780190223878

About the Author

Jeffory A. Clymer is Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Kentucky.

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