Dark Lustre de Barnes, Geoffrey - 1932

Alfred H. King, 1932 Mint copy in near fine dust jacket with only a tiny chip at the top left front panel. First and only edition of this scarce novel. The story of a white woman who is simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by black men. This is an obscure but important title novel gets mention in Wintz's book 'Remembering The Harlem Renaissance' but has never been reprinted, with no copies for sale online and only 10 copies in OCLC. The female "tragic octoroon" was a stock character of abolitionist literature: a light-skinned woman, raised in her father's household as though she were white, until his bankruptcy or death has her reduced to a menial position and sold.[3] She may even be unaware of her status before being so reduced.[4] This character allowed abolitionists to draw attention to the sexual exploitation in slavery; and unlike the suffering of the field hands, did not allow slaveholders to retort that the sufferings of Northern mill hands were no easier, since the Northern mill owner would not sell his own children into slavery.[5] The "tragic mulatta" figure is a woman of biracial heritage who endures the hardships of African-Americans in the antebellum South, even though she may look white enough that her ethnicity is not immediately obvious. As the name implies, tragic mulattas almost always meet a bad end. Lydia Maria Child's 1842 short story "The Quadroons" is generally credited as the first work of literature to feature a tragic mulatta,[1] to garner support for emancipation and equal rights. Child followed up "The Quadroons" with the 1843 short story "Slavery's Pleasant Homes", which also features a tragic mulatta character.[1] Generally, the tragic mulatta archetype falls into one of three categories: A woman who can "pass" for white attempts to do so, is accepted as white by society and falls in love with a white man. Eventually, her status as a bi-racial person is revealed and the story ends in tragedy. A woman who appears to be white and thus passes as being so. It is believed that she is of Greek or Spanish descent. She has suffered little hardship in her life, but upon the revelation that she is mixed race, loses her social standing. A woman who has all the social graces that come along with being a middle-class or upper-class white woman is nonetheless subjected to slavery. A common objection to this character is that she allows readers to pity the plight of oppressed or enslaved races, but only through a veil of whiteness that is, instead of sympathizing with a true racial "other", one is sympathizing with a character who is made as much like one's own race as possible. The "tragic mulatta" often appeared in novels intended for women, and some of the character's appeal lay in the lurid fantasy of a person just like them suddenly cast into a lower social class after the discovery of a small amount of "black blood" that renders her unfit for proper marriage.[citation needed]. 1st Edition. Hardcover. Fine/Near Fine.