In his 1884 Origin of the Family, Friedrich Engels traces the “family” – that familiar “compound of sentimentality and domestic strife” – as not merely the legacy of the heterosexual couple.Footnote ¹ Rather, it is historically linked to the Roman notion of the familia, or the number of domestic slaves. Family, that is, not only etymologically derives from famulus or “servant,” but is socially, economically, and legally entangled throughout Western culture with slavery. For Engels, this leads to the continued exploitation of women under nineteenth-century capitalism and necessitates the abolishment of the family-marriage system. Jeffory A. Clymer, in his meticulously researched Family Money: Property, Race, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century, could be said to do for the American family what Engels has done for its contemporary European bourgeois counterpart. For Clymer, the “peculiar construction of the family” emerges as a complex and often contradictory assemblage of law and emotion, intimacy and sexual violence, personhood and commodification, inheritance and dispossession, and physical appearance and imaginary blood composition that nonetheless serves the single end of maintaining white hegemony, before and after “emancipation.” He examines through a variety of nineteenth-century legal cases, novels, and social practices how the family functioned as a contested site of the movement of wealth and property that both enforced the color line and rendered permeable its claims to determinate racial difference. Key to this is how “inheritance” (both biological and financial) reveals racial difference not just as a politics of identity, but ineluctably entangled with the economic, legal, and affective.

Clymer situates his study with the recent example of the mixed-race daughter of late US Senator Strom Thurmond, Essie Mae Washington-Williams. What is important for Clymer, however, is not Thurmond's Jeffersonian hypocrisy, but that Washington-Williams's decision not to pursue an inheritance claim demonstrates how the “micropolitics and history of race and wealth” in the US are revealed in such moments of “fallout” from interracial sexuality. This sets up his close readings of nineteenth-century legal and literary texts in which interracial intimacy is imbricated with contested claims to wealth and property. Clymer begins with the uncommon practice of white owners attempting to transfer property across the color line in court cases like Mitchell v. Wells (1858) and novels like Frank Webb's The Garies and Their Friends and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Dred: A Tale of the Dismal Swamp. If in the Wells decision a manumitted woman is not only barred from her father's inheritance by a manipulative southern judiciary, but also erased from its court transcripts, both Webb and Stowe sensitively dramatize the psychological trauma of being invisible before the law and provide fictional alternatives to such disenfranchising judicial verdicts. Even if, for Clymer, Stowe hesitates before realizing Dred's full revolutionary potential, she nonetheless imagines how slaves might transform themselves from commodities to economic agents. Chapter 2 again groups legal cases and antebellum novels, but here investigates the legal figure of partus sequitur ventrem (i.e. that a child's status is determined by the mother, thus allowing slave-owners to sexually exploit women slaves without economic consequences) and the transfer of legal title. In Clymer's deft reading of Old Hepsy, he argues that Mary Andrews Denison subverts the ironies of partus and the ideological aggregate of blood, property, skin color, and racial identity on which it depended. He then juxtaposes Old Hepsy to Hawthorne's House of Seven Gables, a novel not typically on the list of interracial property melodramas, but one that recent critics have shown to be suffused with the politics of race. Clymer extends these critics to take Hawthorne's family drama as an exploration of the inextricability of legal title from the crisis of racial difference and an ironic commentary on the obsessive – and ultimately vexed – quest in white antebellum culture to root out black blood.

Chapter 3 engages plantation heiress fiction to discern how southern white women's property rights at once appropriate and disavow slavery's “effects and logic.” Clymer does this in reference to the writing of E. D. E. N. Southworth, which, he holds, “reimagine[s] the economic structure of familial rights, but it does so at the price of considering the enslaved as more than a strategically compressed narrative tool to be used for chiselling out a new economics of white marriage” (93). As in The House of Seven Gables, Clymer shows how slavery's economic effects go past southern boundaries to find “cognates” in white property exchanges in the North. (Indeed, the complicity of the North in slavery is a compelling subtext in Clymer's study. Not only does he cite the affinities between the romance and the slave narrative as in Melville's Pierre, he also points to the systemic reliance of the northern economy on southern slavery. In one memorable example, Clymer reminds us that New York City's wealth was so deeply dependent on slavery that its mayor publicly proposed siding with secessionist South Carolina in 1861.) Clymer then moves to the post-bellum era to explore how Lydia Maria Child's A Romance of the Republic symbolically redistributes white wealth to black Americans in her depictions of interracial marriage and, at the same time, suggests a means of “reconstructing” the black family as a viable economical unit. His final chapter and coda further pursue this line to show how Pauline Hopkins and Charles Chesnutt “imagine the law as both a site of pain and possibility for black Americans' efforts to couple intimate bonds with economic rights” in the post-slavery era, as the “problem of the color line” remains “equally a problem of wealth and ownership” (124, 147).

Family Money thus joins a number of important recent studies of race in nineteenth-century America that analyse the family in its legal, economic, and biopolitical valences, such as Peggy Pascoe's What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (2009) or Holly Jackson's American Blood: The Ends of the Family in American Literature, 1850–1900 (2013). Through close attention to his examples, Clymer emphasizes how writers used fiction to supplement, if not to “heal,” the law's blindness to the manifold psychological, emotional, and material implications of interracial intimacy. At risk of sounding pedantic, Clymer does overuse the verb “imagines” to describe how his writers posit such alternatives to legal decisions. And, along these same lines, he might have further theorized what was at stake in these imaginative acts of literature. There certainly is more to be said here concerning how literature imagines the boundaries of the law or plays out its unrealized possibilities; how literary and legal narratives are mutually productive of social meanings and identities, but also remain disciplinarily and methodologically noncoincident; and, perhaps, how literary works do not just supplement or extend the law, but can render it illegible. All this said, Clymer's book raises the bar for the study of racial difference in nineteenth-century American literature. His insistence that race is a complex and deeply paradoxical assemblage of the economic, emotional, and legal disallows any simple identity politics of race and sets the tone for subsequent studies. If, as Engels writes, citing Marx, that “the modern family contains in germ not only slavery (servitus) … [but also] in miniature all the contradictions which later extend throughout society and its state,”Footnote ² Clymer locates how these contradictions played out in nineteenth-century America in striking detail and prompts us to think how “family money” remains a volatile and contingent coupling across persistent racial divisions today.