A Rather Sentimental Novel about Race in America

The question of sentiment presents itself immediately to any reader of Marie, faced with Beaumont's unlikely decision to write his study of American customs as a sentimental novel. Beaumont was, after all, a young magistrate like Tocqueville, with political rather than literary ambitions, making the treatise form of Democracy in America a more obvious choice. To contend with this oddity, scholars have noted the doubleness of Marie—half sentimental novel, half sociological treatise—and placed the weight of Beaumont's intellectual project squarely on the latter. Marie's value has been understood to stand apart from its novelistic form, as when Aurelian Craiutu insists that it “is much more than a mere novel. It is, in fact, an extended literary and political essay on America.”Footnote ¹¹ The book's sentimentality has likewise been seen as a liability that can at best be offset by other assets, as in the Online Library of Liberty's observation that “the first part is in the form of a novel, rather sentimental at times but full of social, political, and economic insights.”Footnote ¹² Indeed, in the only modern English edition of Marie (first published in 1958, unsurprisingly during the civil rights movement), the presumption that sentiment has no bearing on Beaumont's analysis is made directly manifest in the text where, as the publisher notes, the book's status “as a commentary on American society in the age of Jackson” has been clarified by making “slight” abridgments of “passages of overly florid or sentimental description which have no particular bearing on the theme.”Footnote ¹³

This dismissal of sentiment as incidental to Beaumont's intellectual project fails to address the question of the novel's form, and in so doing obscures key aspects of his thought. Beaumont uses narrative form to elaborate the concepts that drive his analysis, as Jennifer Greiman has demonstrated in her work on the links between his use of the rhetorical modes of theater and fiction and his understanding of the performative fictionality of race in America.Footnote ¹⁴ I build here on Greiman's insight into the links between form and content to consider Marie's sentimental form. Sentimentality is especially worthy of consideration because it is more than a rhetorical mode; it is the basis of a set of generic conventions that Beaumont uses to structure his account of racial inequality in America. Sentiment is also the point of articulation between Marie's narrative form and the philosophical concepts that underpin Beaumont's analysis, which are drawn from the moral sentimentalist tradition. Sentiment is, perhaps surprisingly, the link between the two halves of the book: between the novel and the analysis.

In his foreword, Beaumont notes that the book is made up of two elements, which might attract two distinct readerships: a “frivolous reader, attracted by its appearance of light fiction” and “the serious portion of the public” who will be interested in the appendices and notes with their “material treated seriously, not only in matter but also in manner.”Footnote ¹⁵ However, it would be a mistake to presume that this second group is the book's intended audience.Footnote ¹⁶ Instead, Beaumont indicates that his goal in writing a novel is to attract a third readership, neither the serious-minded reader nor the frivolous one, but rather “that portion of the public which seeks in a book ideas for the intellect and emotions for the heart.”Footnote ¹⁷ In my reading, Beaumont's critique of America is shown to be a critique of merely “serious-minded” people who refuse to let their thought be influenced by things of the heart. Through his sentimental narrative Beaumont diagnoses American national character with a fatal flaw: an incapacity for sentiment that makes racial inequality in the United States an irresolvable contradiction.

The Politics of the Sentimental Novel

The story Beaumont tells is one of disillusionment with the great promise of the United States. Marie's narrator, Ludovic, is a young Frenchman who set out for America in the late 1820s, disappointed by the stifling climate of the Bourbon Restoration and in search of a country more suitable to his lofty ambitions.Footnote ¹⁸ The novel opens on a scene set just a few years later, in which Ludovic—now withdrawn from society in the Michigan wilderness—retroactively recounts his American experience to another French traveler much like himself, a young man fleeing the disappointments of the Revolution of 1830. Ludovic tells the hopeful traveler a cautionary tale about how he set his sights on what Staël described as “this new world, which has established itself without the prejudices of the old,”Footnote ¹⁹ only to find instead a stark contradiction between the principle of equality espoused by Americans and the reality of racial inequality, even in the states where slavery had already been abolished: “What worth has a legal principle when it is warped by custom? . . . Negroes equal to whites! A lie!”Footnote ²⁰ Ludovic's story is about a disappointment even greater than those of early nineteenth-century France: a society turned against itself, defined by its abolition of hereditary privilege, yet committed to white supremacy: “If [American] custom is not to admit the transmission of honors by blood, then why does it sanction inherited infamy? One is not born noble, but one is born ignominious! Now, you must admit that these are horrid prejudices!”Footnote ²¹

Despite its title, then, Marie or, Slavery in the United States is not about slavery, but the contradiction of American racial inequality more broadly.Footnote ²² Ludovic tells of falling in love with an apparently white woman (Marie) who, he later learns, has mixed-race ancestry, and of confronting the virulence of American racial prejudice that prevents their happy union. The tale ends tragically when their wedding provokes a violent race riot and they are chased into the wilderness, where Marie dies.Footnote ²³ The contradiction of American racial prejudice is inescapable, and those who seek to overcome it, doomed.

As noted in the previous section, recent scholarship has pointed to the romantic plot and sentimentality as reasons that Beaumont's novel has not aged well, and indeed, the book's narrative form is ill-suited to twenty-first-century tastes. The sentimental novel was, however, the best-selling genre of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century France: it originated with Jean-Jacques Rousseau's smash hit Julie or The New Eloise (1761) and reached its peak after the revolution, remaining popular into the 1830s.Footnote ²⁴ As such, it warrants our serious consideration; we must, as Margaret Cohen argues in her groundbreaking study of the French sentimental novel, “take forgotten literature on its own terms” in order to understand the original “ideological force” of an aesthetic that no longer resonates.Footnote ²⁵ By directing our attention to the functioning of the sentimental novelistic codes at work in Marie, I show in this section how Beaumont's novel structures its own interpretation in ways that would have been obvious to his contemporary readers, but have not been clear to modern scholars unfamiliar with those conventions.

The plot of a sentimental novel is structured around what Cohen calls a double bind, in which characters are caught “between two moral imperatives, each valid in its own right, but which meet in a situation of mutual contradiction.”Footnote ²⁶ This contradiction most often manifests itself in a woman's conflicted choice of erotic partner, but the apparent domesticity of these plots belies their fundamentally political stakes. Their central contradiction belongs to the problematics of French liberalism as they crystallized around the time of the French Revolution: “In opposing individual freedom to collective welfare, the sentimental novel addresses a fundamental tension fissuring French liberal political thought from its Enlightenment genesis,” that is, the conflict between negative and positive notions of rights.Footnote ²⁷ It is not surprising, then, that the genre should have been taken up by major liberal thinkers, including not only Rousseau, but also Benjamin Constant (Adolphe, 1816) and Staël (Delphine, 1802, and Corinne or Italy, 1807).Footnote ²⁸

In its traditional form, the sentimental novel stages a protagonist (usually female) who struggles to reconcile herself to the contradictory demands of individual freedom (romantic desire) and collective welfare (marriage), and in the end enacts the necessity of subjugating the negative rights of freedom to the positive rights of participation in the collective—but often dies following this unsatisfactory resolution. The contradiction at the heart of the sentimental novel plays out within the psyche of the protagonist but is entirely determined at a societal level rather than at the level of individual psychology: the irresolvable ethical contradiction originates in social structures and the protagonist is doomed to play out the impossibility of overcoming it.

Beaumont deploys this model of the liberal sentimental novel, using the structure of the ethical double bind to represent the position of the book's eponymous heroine within the American racial hierarchy. Marie finds herself torn between two valid claims: her love for Ludovic and a racist social order that prohibits their marriage. It is essential for Marie's storyline that she believes in the legitimacy of this racist social order; she is genuinely conflicted and prepared to sacrifice her own happiness to the racial hierarchy she sees as divinely ordained: “Yes! my birth condemned me to the contempt of men. Without doubt this decree of destiny is deserved. The decrees of God, though sometimes cruel, are always just.”Footnote ²⁹ Though Marie tries to imagine a world in which the claims upon her might be reconciled—in which she and Ludovic marry—the interruption of their wedding by a violent mob sends her to her inevitable demise, a vague sickness whose narrative significance is the impossibility of the dreamed-of resolution of her double bind. Using the liberal sentimental novel form, Beaumont thus depicts the workings of America's racialized society from the inside, elucidating its devastating effects on those who live within it and internalize its conflicting principles.Footnote ³⁰

Beaumont depicts Marie as the incarnation of a social contradiction. As noted above, the sentimental novel does not attribute its conflicts or their irresolvability to its characters’ individual psychology; Marie's painful internalization of the American racial order thus cannot be understood as a matter of personal character. It is anachronistic to read it, as Diana Schaub does, as Marie's failure to maintain a sense of self apart from the inferiority attributed to her by society.Footnote ³¹ Rather, as Greiman argues, Marie “expresses for Beaumont all the incongruities of the nation's false equality.”Footnote ³² The character of Marie belongs to the conventions of the sentimental novel, functioning as the site for a clash of social values whose structural contradiction cannot, by its very nature, be overcome by the individual in which it plays out.

Beaumont, of course, does not accept the necessity of this structural contradiction the way that Marie does, and so supplements the liberal sentimental plot—which takes for granted the American racial hierarchy—with a different sentimental narrative structure that presents Ludovic's view of racial inequality as an intolerable injustice. Beaumont nests his traditional, liberal sentimental form within a more modern, more radical form that Cohen calls the sentimental social novel.Footnote ³³ This subgenre that emerged after 1830 draws its inspiration from earlier novels of social critique (including Staël's Delphine) to respond to the increasingly pressing political problem of inequality in France, “the flagrant discrepancy between the July Monarchy's symbolic legitimation in the ideals of the Revolution and its political structures, which institutionalized government by the privileged classes.”Footnote ³⁴ Where the liberal sentimental novel stages a protagonist caught in an ethical double bind, the sentimental social novel depicts a protagonist explicitly subjected to injustice. Instead of two valid imperatives, she is caught between freedom and oppression.Footnote ³⁵

The sentimental social narrative model for depicting social and political contradiction is well suited to the reality of America's racialized society as Beaumont depicts it. The contradiction between democratic principles and institutionalized inequality that inspired the emergence of the subgenre in France shares an obvious structural similarity to the contradiction between egalitarianism and white supremacy in the United States. The injustice of that contradiction is invisible to Marie because of her internalization of racial prejudice, but it is central to Ludovic's understanding of her story. As noted above, Ludovic is struck by the incoherence of America's principles and customs, and sees Marie's social exclusion as wholly unjust. He consistently critiques the prejudice he witnesses and argues with his racist host (Marie's father, Nelson), contrasting Marie's interpretation of her suffering with his own, such that the liberal sentimental narrative in which she is doomed to sacrifice herself to the racist social order appears as false consciousness, an attempt of that social order to disavow its own injustice. The sentimental social narrative that represents Ludovic's understanding of the racialization of American society, on the other hand, openly condemns the prejudice on which that society is based. The story's tragic ending is no less inexorable, but what dooms Marie to death and Ludovic to solitude is not ethical contradiction, but the injustice of racial inequality.

Beaumont thus uses the new subgenre of the sentimental social novel to call out the injustice of inequality in the United States, but he also innovates within it, shifting its terms to account for the particularity of American injustice, that is, the way race provides a basis for absolute social exclusion. Beaumont is true to the conventions of the sentimental novel, in which sexual politics function as a domestic microcosm of broader political issues, but reverses them to reflect the intersectionality of gender and race. The sentimental social novel stages the oppressive force of marriage to which women must succumb to be integrated into society, such that adultery appears as an act of self-definition, a moment of liberation and resistance to the unjust demands of the collective. In Marie, however, race is shown to trouble this structure, redefining the stakes of marriage and of extramarital liaisons.

Women of color are excluded from marriage within the European American society Beaumont represents, and are instead understood to be sexually available outside of marriage. To represent the injustice of Marie's social position, then, Beaumont must reverse the values of marriage and adultery commonly associated with the sentimental social novel in the stories of Marie and her mother, the late Theresa Nelson. Theresa, like Marie, was apparently white, unaware that she had Black ancestry. It was only when she refused an extramarital proposition, opting instead to marry Nelson, that her would-be lover (Fernando d'Almanza) publicly revealed her racial identity—revealing, that is, that she was refusing to occupy the sexual position assigned to women of color as a concubine, and opting instead for the protections of marriage to which she was not socially entitled. This revelation of Theresa's (accidental) transgression of the barriers of racialized social exclusion killed her, and sent Nelson and his children into exile from New Orleans to Baltimore—though they cannot escape d'Almanza and the specter of social exclusion.

Marie's love story is a rewriting of her mother's, casting marriage as the moment of equality and freedom against the unjust social expectation of sexual availability. Marie and Ludovic want to marry, but are discouraged because of the inevitable social reaction. Ludovic refuses to observe the prohibition and convinces Marie to marry him in what is supposed to be a private religious ceremony in New York, but the wedding becomes the scene of a violent race riot (based on the 1834 antiabolitionist riots). Forced to abruptly discontinue the ceremony, Ludovic and Marie flee to the wilderness where they find themselves alone for the first time. In a moment of weakness, Ludovic feels a desire to consummate his passion for Marie—but Beaumont brings him quickly back from this precipice: “I shuddered to think that I had been about to stain that white flower, to rob it of its innocent sweetness, to pollute with vice and bitterness the pure well of delight!”Footnote ³⁶ Ludovic's shame at the very thought of an extramarital sexual relationship goes beyond conventional protection of the virginal beloved. Through its resonances with Theresa's story, this moment underscores the racialized dimension of how passion is exercised: to consummate his love for Marie outside of marriage would be tantamount to accepting that she is not entitled to the respect and protection afforded to white women (“that white flower”), a premise that Ludovic adamantly refuses. Even in the wilderness, then, far from society, marriage remains the fullest expression of Ludovic and Marie's love because it represents her full social integration, and the only way to overcome the contradiction of racial inequality.

This marriage plot, which might initially appear to be quite apart from Beaumont's arguments about racial prejudice in the United States, takes on its full significance in the context of the codes of the sentimental novel through which it expresses the deep conflicts at the heart of American society. Beaumont uses this tragic love story, as well as the characters’ differing interpretations of it, to dramatize the intolerable contradiction of racial hierarchy in a supposedly egalitarian society. The sentimental novel might seem a strangely indirect means of staging the problem of American racial inequality, a perverse passage through the frivolous on the way to something very serious. However, as the following section shows, the affective dimension that the sentimental novel brings to the political problem of Marie is central to Beaumont's project.

Sentimental Aesthetics and Moral Sentimentalism

As I have shown, Marie's plot is only fully legible with reference to the narrative conventions of the sentimental novel that structure the way the book makes meaning. Likewise, the high emotionalism of its style must be understood in its proper context, that is, in its connection to the tradition of moral sentimentalism. Beaumont makes robust use of the rhetorical flourishes characteristic of the sentimental novel, writing in inflated, moralizing language full of exclamations, rhetorical questions, and hyperbole.Footnote ³⁷ These flourishes may be off-putting to the modern reader—and thus were the primary target of the abridgments in the English translation—but were of great importance in Beaumont's time, not only aesthetically but also politically.

The literary expressions of intense and righteous emotion (most often love or suffering) that were popular in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries promoted identification between readers and characters, and elicited feelings of empathy or pity that could be turned to a range of social and political ends. Lynn Hunt argues, for example, that the experience of empathy cultivated by sentimental fiction (and particularly epistolary novels like Rousseau's Julie) played an important role in training people to recognize the universality of human rights.Footnote ³⁸ The political potential of readerly pity was also exploited by French abolitionists, including Staël, who used highly emotional, fictionalized depictions of the suffering of innocent enslaved people to awaken a European public to the humanity of the enslaved and therefore an active opposition to slavery and the slave trade.Footnote ³⁹

Beaumont's deployment of sentimental style situates Marie in this current of literature as a form of moral education, strongly linked to the moral sentimentalism of Rousseau and Staël. In the moral sentimentalist tradition, the proper constitution of both individuals and society requires a balanced interaction between reason, passion, and an affective moral instinct.Footnote ⁴⁰ That moral instinct most often takes the form of pity and the acknowledgment of the humanity of others, but also implies something broader: sensibility, understood as both a heightened sensitivity to one's own emotions and experience, and the capacity for empathy.Footnote ⁴¹ This sensibility—a fundamentally social and moral source of affect—is distinguished from the more extreme, potentially destructive passions. Though the terminology is far from systematic across the tradition (where all emotions can be referred to as passions, and there is tremendous slippage between sensibility, sympathy, and sentiment), both Rousseau and Staël clearly distinguish between the functioning of these two kinds of affective faculties; for the sake of clarity, I distinguish between (moral) “sentiment” and (destructive) “passion.”

In A Treatise on the Influence of the Passions upon the Happiness of Individuals and of Nations (1796), Staël takes up the Rousseauian conception of pity as a necessary social counterbalance to the destructive, passionate force of egotism, reinterpreting pity as a properly moral, rather than physiological, experience. In her conception of democracy, citizens can only act together when the forces of reason, passion, and sentiment are in balance; the French Revolution is negative evidence of this rule, its disequilibrium leading to its excesses.Footnote ⁴² Staël attributes a twofold role to sentiment, moderating the potentially dangerous forces of both unrestrained passion and absolute reason, creating free sociability where excess of feeling and principle threaten to produce agonistic relations like those of the Revolutionary period. A people disconnected from its instinctual moral sentiments is unable to actualize its political potential, to act on its freedom. This, according to Staël's Reflections on the Trial of the Queen, by a Woman (1793), was the plight of the French when they ignored the demands of pity and sought vengeance against Marie Antoinette: “Woe to a nation that having heard cries of despair repressed its natural feelings: liberty is not promised to such a nation, and other nations, who had held high hopes for France's future after this enormous effort would no longer be able to imagine a promising future nor any redeeming event that could restore that devastated generation.”Footnote ⁴³

Though Staël is far from associating this critique with America, its echoes can be heard in Beaumont's appraisal of the United States. As I demonstrate in the next section, his account of the enduring contradiction at the heart of American society is based on a critique of the United States as fundamentally plagued by an improper balance of the faculties not unlike the one Staël attributes to the Revolution: an utter lack of sentiment. Herein lies one of the central ironies of Marie: the balanced heart and mind of Beaumont's intended reader is also what characterizes a properly constituted democratic subject, such that the novel rehearses the moral mechanism that should be at the heart of society. But the European American is not that subject (nor that reader), and the moral mechanism the book performs is not at work within the American society it depicts.

Sentiment and American National Character

Beaumont depicts Ludovic's disillusionment with the United States not only through the story of his doomed romance with Marie, but also through the observations he shares with the French traveler. These come primarily from the six-month exploratory voyage on which Nelson sends Ludovic as a condition of his engagement to Marie, a “trial” designed to acquaint Ludovic with America's racial hierarchy. From this trial, Ludovic (who seems to speak for Beaumont) derives a robust theory of American national character that allows him to situate his understanding of the contradiction of American racial prejudice within a broader conception of the flaws of European American society.

Ludovic's theory draws heavily on the conception of national character that enters the French tradition with Montesquieu and on which Staël builds in Germany (1813), a deeply historical conception that places character and institutions in a dialectical relationship.Footnote ⁴⁴ Ludovic refers America's contradictions to the character of European Americans that has produced and in turn been produced by the egalitarian, free-market institutions of the United States. Beaumont thus displaces the essentializing theories of racial and national character that underwrote the violence perpetrated in North America against both Native Americans and enslaved Africans: he attributes racial prejudice to a flaw in European American society rather than in the people it oppresses, and insists that inequality is the product of history. Though the novel gives voice to racialist theories through Nelson, they are quickly critiqued by Ludovic; when Nelson claims, for example, that enslaved Africans suffer from an essential weakness of character that would render them unable to make use of liberty if it were afforded to them, Ludovic insists that any deformation of character Nelson might observe in the enslaved was created by the institution of slavery itself: “Like a man whose legs have been bound from childhood, who is told suddenly to walk, he staggers at every step. . . . But should one conclude that slavery, once established, should be respected? Of course not.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Ludovic rejects the logic of his European American host, whose essentializing conceptions of racial difference justify hierarchization in a supposedly egalitarian society, and asserts instead that the United States has produced that inequality through its institutions and customs, creating for itself the contradiction that plagues it.

Beaumont's frame of reference for interpreting American racial inequality is thus not racial difference per se, but a Staëlian theory of European American national character. Indeed, as scholars have noted, the three faculties of reason, passion, and sentiment appear throughout Marie, sometimes referred to explicitly, sometimes via associated terms (particularly the metonyms of heart and head that register sentiment and reason respectively, and the subcategories of poetry and self-interest).Footnote ⁴⁶ I argue that Ludovic deploys these terms within a moral sentimentalist framework to diagnose the United States as a nation alienated from its own liberty by its incapacity for sentiment; without sentiment's moderating force, the United States suffers from untempered reason, which I address in this section, and unchecked passion, which is the subject of the following section. I argue further that Beaumont identifies this flaw in European American character, and not any inherent features of race or democracy, as the cause of American racial prejudice.

Ludovic's moral sentimentalist analysis is most fully developed in his deeply ambivalent account of America as the final stage of civilizational progress. Here, the variable balance of human faculties is understood as a historical phenomenon, each configuration of the human experience corresponding to a stage in the development of Western civilization: pagan antiquity, ruled by the senses; Christianity, ruled by the soul; and modernity, ruled by the intelligence. For Ludovic, this last age represents a disenchanted enlightenment, wholly material and utilitarian. The triumph of rationality is understood as the triumph of commerce, and the era of pure reason is thus also an era of naked self-interest. Lost are the faculties of the Christian era, that “wholly moral world, a mix of religion and philosophy, of ideas and sentiments. . . . This spirituality of life has withdrawn from the hearts of men: now their existence is entirely external. Their bodies are in constant motion in pursuit of material things; time is spent in useful labors, and, for fear that thought might trouble the hand in its works, the soul has become inert and sterile.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Instead of the mix of reason and sentiment that characterized the Christian age and that still holds some influence in the Old World, the United States epitomizes a purely utilitarian modernity.

Ludovic's account of the United States foregrounds the areas of life that might be expected to counterbalance this commercialistic rationalism but fail to do so. His account of women, for example, explains the profound differences of character he has observed in France and America.Footnote ⁴⁸ Though women are often seen to provide a sentimental counterweight to masculine rationalism through the separation of spheres, Ludovic insists that American institutions of courtship and marriage encourage in European American women the cultivation of reason over sentiment: they “generally have well-informed minds but little imagination, and more reason than sensibility.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Unlike French women, whose sheltered, innocent girlhood fosters sentiment and imagination, European American women have great autonomy in courtship and marriage, and so grow into prudent, self-interested women: “Within this pragmatic society, where everyone is engaged in business, American girls have theirs, too: that of finding a husband.”Footnote ⁵⁰ They may be seductive, but their “excessive flirtatiousness” does not come from the dreamy sentimentalism that inspires French women; it is rather purely strategic and dries up entirely once they have signed their marriage contract. Sentimentalism is thus not to be found in the feminine sphere.

Ludovic similarly sees religion as failing to offer any real respite from the materialism of European American society. Attending a Presbyterian service to please his hosts, he is struck by the austerity of the church and the democratic structure of the worship that put man directly in relation to God. For a profound admirer of American egalitarianism, there is something appealing in this spiritual experience so well suited to a free and equal society. However, Ludovic ultimately finds the worship lacking, precisely because it speaks only to a purely reasonable subject rather than a sentimental one: “I felt my soul troubled and tumultuous passions rose up in my breast. Nelson questioned me, I told him, ‘Your religion seems to me worthy of an intelligent and free being, however man is also a sensitive being who needs to love, and this worship did not touch my heart.’”Footnote ⁵¹ Even religious practice does not provide a space in which the European American can be more than reasonable. For Ludovic, this cold, rational quality of Protestantism is at the heart of the national character of the United States. While Catholic nations like France and Italy find in religion a source of inspiration, enthusiasm, and poetry, America finds only seriousness. The European American turns to religion “as an ordering principle, not as a source of sweet emotion.”Footnote ⁵² Even in devotion to the divine, European Americans are literal and practical.

The third domain Ludovic explores to illustrate the European American lack of sensibility is literature and the arts, where, in other societies, sentimental experience finds expression. Ludovic insists that, given their character, it cannot be surprising that European Americans are indifferent, “as though the fine arts, poetry, matters of morality had any power over a practical, commercial, industrial people!”Footnote ⁵³ Raised on Chateaubriand's Native American fictions, Ludovic arrives in the United States with a false impression of the country's poetic character, but comes to understand that this does not apply to European America. While Native Americans have a close relationship to nature and rich cultural traditions, European Americans are indifferent to the arts and view nature only as a resource to be exploited. Neither do the United States’ literary exports give an accurate idea of the nation, for, as Ludovic finds out, the great American writers hailed as geniuses abroad (Benjamin Franklin, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper) are met with indifference by their “antipoetic” countrymen.Footnote ⁵⁴

This indifference to literature has particularly high stakes in the context of Staëlian moral sentimentalism, where literature is an important force of moral education. In On Literature Considered in its Relationship to Social Institutions (1800), Staël argues that literature plays a privileged role in shaping public opinion.Footnote ⁵⁵ It serves as a mechanism for the social expression of moral sentiments, a way of calling society to its best instincts and tempering the destructive forces of excessive passion and unbridled self-interest. However, literature's role in educating the sentiments necessary for democratic sociability is foreclosed in Marie by European Americans’ unwillingness to engage in such noninstrumental behavior. All European American cultural life is indelibly shaped by the rationalism of American institutions, which is in turn compounded by the antisentimentality of that cultural life. The dynamic, dialectical circuits between literature, character, and institutions that are at the heart of Staël's vision of democratic sociability collapse; a nation indifferent to literature cannot hope to educate itself, it has cut off its access to the dynamism of moral progress.

This theory of national character is, as the next section demonstrates, the basis of Ludovic's analysis of American racial prejudice. But it is also the backdrop against which Marie emerges as the book's heroine: she is not subject to this faulty character. Even before Ludovic is aware of her racial difference, he is convinced of her moral singularity among European Americans: she is uniquely empathetic, capable of kindness and generosity untainted by self-interest. What attracts Ludovic to Marie is precisely her un-Americanness, the feeling and imagination that coexist with her reason. By the time her mixed-race ancestry is revealed, Marie has already been identified by Ludovic as Other vis à vis her fellow Americans—but in a wholly positive regard. His view contradicts Marie's internalized racism, in which her difference is a liability: according to Marie, “American women are superior to women of color; they are able to love with their reason; I know how to love only with my heart”—but this is in fact the basis of Ludovic's preference for her.Footnote ⁵⁶ Thus, against the prevailing American interpretation of Marie's racial difference as a problem, Ludovic sees her as the solution: “I came to America seeking the cure for an insatiable need of violent emotions and noble aspirations, and a sentiment full of gentleness brought peace to my troubled soul, calming the erratic impulses of my heart. I came to observe the development of a great nation, its institutions, its customs, its marvelous prosperity, and a woman became the sole object worthy of my wonder and admiration.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Marie stands as the doomed bulwark against disillusionment, for reasons that become clear when Ludovic applies his moral sentimentalist theory of European American national character to the problem of racial inequality.

Passionate Prejudice

Ludovic presents European America to the French traveler as a wholly materialistic society, indifferent to matters of morality and the heart—but plagued, nonetheless, by an excess of certain passions. Without the wisdom of the heart to mediate between cold reason and the heat of passion, America is at the mercy of its most irrational feelings. In an analysis that echoes Staël's account of Jacobin rationalism in The Influence of the Passions, Ludovic observes how absolute reason pushes principles to the point of irrationality, such that the most reasonable (and antisentimental) aspects of American national character become compulsions not subject to reason. So, for example, does rational self-interest, left unchecked by sentiment, develop into the all-consuming passion of greed: “The passion for money is born in Americans along with their intelligence, bringing in its wake cold calculations and dry digits; it grows and develops, taking root in their souls, and its unceasing torment, like a burning fever, excites and devours the sickly body it takes over.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Despite America's rational appearance, the nation finds itself eaten away by passions it cannot resist. Because European Americans do not cultivate feelings of the heart, they are without the emotional resources to moderate their passions and are driven by forces they are powerless to control.

First among these passions is violent racial prejudice. Ludovic's theory of American national character allows him to account for the reality of the United States that distant onlookers like Staël had not foreseen: the virulent anti-Blackness that endured beyond the abolition of slavery. Marie is not an abolitionist novel, representing the spectacle of slavery's cruelty, but a novel that takes for granted the inevitability of abolition while identifying an intractable problem that abolition will not solve. Though Ludovic insists that racial inequality is not grounded in essential racial difference, he nonetheless argues that abolition will fail to produce equality because of the customary racial prejudice that will outlive its legal basis.

Beaumont explores the enduring force of racial prejudice in the United States in part through Nelson, the quintessential European American. Nelson epitomizes the nation's simultaneously unfeeling and passionate character: he is cold and self-interested, but with “a few strong emotions under whose influence his reserve would thaw.”Footnote ⁵⁹ As Schaub observes, “Nelson personifies the deficiency of the American heart.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Christine Dunn Henderson notes that one of Nelson's “strong emotions” is his racial prejudice, which is impervious to both the reason of Ludovic's arguments in favor of racial equality and his own “background personal history” as the husband of a mixed-race woman and father of two mixed-race children.Footnote ⁶¹ In the context of my argument, this second point—Nelson's indifference to his family—can be read as a failure of sentiment: the core affective bonds that ought to move him to recognize the full humanity of Black people are not strong enough to overcome his racial prejudice.

Nelson thus plays an important role in elucidating Beaumont's understanding of American racial prejudice, insofar as he is an embodiment of the flawed national character to which Beaumont attributes that prejudice. Though Nelson articulates several justifications for racial inequality, they come in for criticism from Ludovic, and their association with Nelson's irrational anti-Blackness implicitly discredits them. Nelson's beliefs about race appear as a moment of white supremacy's false consciousness (like Marie's internalized racism), rather than as viable explanations. We saw an example of this in the previous section, where Ludovic debunked Nelson's view of racial inequality as justified by an essential difference of character. More surprisingly, Beaumont also uses Nelson to distance himself from the idea that racial inequality can be attributed to real physical difference. He attributes to Nelson the idea that American racial prejudice is a response to Blackness as the visible trace of slavery, that “the black race is despised in America because it is a race of slaves.”Footnote ⁶² Both Henderson and Schaub note that we find this idea in Democracy in America's account of how racialized slavery renders Blackness ignominious in ways that outlive abolition, and they thus read this as a point of commonality between Beaumont and Tocqueville.Footnote ⁶³ However, given Nelson's association with the worst of America, it seems more likely that Beaumont aims to go beyond Tocqueville's explanation for American racial inequality. Indeed, the way he tells the story of race in America radically shifts the focus from the visibility of racial caste that interests Tocqueville toward the apparent groundlessness of America's passionate prejudice.Footnote ⁶⁴

Marie is not a conventional novel of passing, in which the riddle of racial difference must be solved. Beaumont does not make race an epistemological problem, or the mixed-race person a cipher to be read, instead downplaying the question of race as an axis of real physical difference.Footnote ⁶⁵ Mixed-race characters (Marie, her brother George, and her mother Theresa) are not visibly nonwhite. On the contrary, Ludovic insists repeatedly on the “dazzling whiteness” of the women, creating what Greiman describes as “characters who are socially but not visibly black.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Though this foregrounding of mixed-race characters may be read as a form of anti-Blackness—a narrative preference for light-skinned characters that occludes the experiences of dark-skinned people—it also challenges the Tocquevillian view of racial hierarchy based on the visibility of race.Footnote ⁶⁷ Anti-Blackness appears not as a trace of racial slavery, but as a feature of the society that facilitated racial slavery and will outlive it. The virulent racial prejudice Ludovic observes is generated by a social fact, not a physical one. Via Ludovic, Beaumont thus espouses a very modern idea of race, one that Henderson describes as “postmodern . . . for he depicts race as a socially constructed identity, defined almost entirely by the majority's opinion.”Footnote ⁶⁸

Ludovic stages the social nature of race and the purely social basis of racial prejudice in the scenes of public crisis where racial boundaries are seen to have been transgressed. As Greiman has explored, these scenes are distinctly theatrical and yet what is supposedly revealed in them remains adamantly invisible.Footnote ⁶⁹ Beaumont provides the real-life model for these theatrical scenes in his foreword, where he recounts an experience in a segregated American theater. He noticed an apparently white woman seated in the Black section, an anomaly his companion explained thus: “‘She is colored . . .; local tradition has established her ancestry, and everyone knows that she had a mulatto among her forebears.’ He pronounced these words without further explanation, as one who states a fact which needs only to be voiced to be understood.”Footnote ⁷⁰

At first glance, Beaumont's surprise might appear as it does to Nell Irvin Painter, as a lack of familiarity with a conception of race as blood rather than color: the woman appears to be white but is Black because of her “ancestry.”Footnote ⁷¹ However, Beaumont's fascination is not with the one-drop rule, but with its customary application. Establishment of the woman's race is a matter of “tradition,” of what “everyone knows” in the absence of “further explanation.” At stake in this archetypal scene is not simply a different physical basis for racialization, as Painter suggests; it is instead a radically different epistemology of race based on opinion and custom. Beaumont returns to this paradoxical epistemology of opinion, when Ludovic warns the traveler that “there is but one crime from which the guilty can nowhere escape punishment and infamy: it is that of belonging to a family reputed to be colored.”Footnote ⁷² In Beaumont's America, a socially accepted rumor suffices to establish a racial fact.

Racialization in Marie is thus inseparable from racial prejudice; the “fact” of racial identity has no existence separate from the public opinion that also drives racial prejudice. The social fact of race is entirely bound up with the social fact of racial prejudice. In Ludovic's account, racial prejudice floats free of any physical reality—of the body or of slavery—and is attributable instead to the workings of American society. The Tocquevillian conception of public opinion thus appears here in a distinctly Beaumontian modulation, contextualized by Ludovic's analysis of American national character. For Ludovic racial prejudice is one of America's unmoderated passions, such that the question of race is entirely reduced to the question of racial hatred: “Public opinion, all-powerful in the United States, desires the oppression of a detested race, and nothing can thwart its hatred. . . . Thus, the people with its passions, is the ruler; in America, the black race submits to the sovereignty of hatred and scorn.”Footnote ⁷³ The tyranny of the mass is here a passionate one unique to the European American character, and the language of unconstrained affect looms large.

Beaumont accentuates the passionate, social nature of American racial prejudice when he rewrites the theater scene of the foreword within the fictional narrative. When Ludovic drags George to the theater, the accusation of Blackness takes hold quickly and baselessly. In this scene of theatrical racial crisis, the assembled public is not called upon to consider any visible evidence, but is merely incited as a mob. A moment of aesthetic pleasure turns to racial conflict within the space of a single clause; as Ludovic recounts, “At last I felt happiness enter my heart, but my ears were struck by noisy shouts arising from the audience; I looked about me and saw a thousand insulting fingers pointed toward the seats that George and I occupied.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Most striking in this scene is how the rumors arise seemingly from nowhere and circulate without any support external to themselves (though the reader recognizes d'Almanza behind the scenes, egging on the crowd): “The shouting died away at times, but soon recommenced louder than before; the crowd was alternately calmed and aroused, as though what vexed them was sometimes in doubt, sometimes a certainty.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Ludovic depicts passionate racial prejudice here as unstable, rising but also falling as the crowd recalls its uncertain basis, with the paradoxical strength and weakness of its lack of grounding in anything outside itself. This prejudice does not have the support of evidence, but it also need not answer to reason, ignoring the arguments of Ludovic and other less fanatical audience members.

Paradoxically, as Greiman observes, “Whiteness and blackness both emerge in this scene as rooted in fictions that are invented, imposed, and then performed according to social codes, but their performative status makes them no more fluid or changeable as categories.”Footnote ⁷⁶ The inescapable rigidity of racial hierarchy is not lessened by its groundlessness. By casting racial prejudice as an American passion, Ludovic thus depicts its troubling workings as a self-generating, self-sustaining force that, once unleashed, intensifies to the threat—if not the realization—of violence. By interpreting racial inequality within the context of European America's deformed national character, Ludovic explains not only why it outlives slavery, but also why it is destined to endure as an impasse for the United States going forward.