Whiteness in Victorian Literature

Victorian ideas of whiteness are inseparable from the expansion of British settler colonialism and the concomitant rise of racial science in the nineteenth century. In the century prior, descriptions of white skin to denote European origin had not been unusual; however, during this earlier period, racial categorization was also mapped along lines of religious difference and socioeconomic status, which largely fell away by the Victorian period. In the nineteenth century, deeply embodied and “scientific” understandings of racial difference proliferated, and race became understood as a more fixed biological category. Race was indeed “everything,” as racial theorist Robert Knox stated. It became a recognizable anatomical classification, not equivalent to other social categories like religion or class. While there has been much scholarship on the essential role of Blackness in the construction of Victorian racial categories, understandings of whiteness were equally instrumental in the creation of racialized hierarchies. Theories of whiteness are thus an integral—if critically overlooked—thread of the nineteenth century’s construction of racial ontologies. Victorian notions of whiteness were by no means coherent. Synchronic discussions of whiteness in the period were diverse and deeply contingent on spatial geographies, gender, social class, and labor production. At the same time, Victorian ideas of whiteness depended on diachronic, deeply historical understandings of white identity, an identity tied to an imagined and remote racial past. And competing and overlapping theories of Anglo-Saxonism and Celticism framed debates about the intra-ethnic origins of British racial identity. British race was thus imaged as being pure, but also hybridized, through internal European mixture. Notably, while scholarly domains such as sociology, Irish studies, and African American studies have employed critical whiteness scholarship for decades, such engagement has been relatively recent in Victorian studies. The field has newly come to reckon with its own implication with white supremacy as have other scholarly fields in recent years, such as classical studies, medieval studies, and early modern studies. In Victorian studies, scholars often cite the work of Toni Morrison, Sara Ahmed, Dwayne Dyer, Sylvia Wynter, and David Lloyd when interrogating the construction of whiteness as the invisible default subject position—both within 19th-century literature, and the profession, itself. For instance, Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Alicia Mireles Christoff, and Amy R. Wong argue for a thorough reckoning with the whiteness that underpins the praxes of Victorian studies. And others have called for more inclusive pedagogies and practices within the classroom where, as Carolyn Betensky argues, the offhanded racism of the Victorian text—taught by an overwhelmingly white professoriate—is seldom theorized sufficiently.