American Literature Commons^™

The Christian Recorder, Broken Families And Educated Nations: Julia Collins' Civil War Novel The Curse Of Caste, P. Gabrielle Foreman

P. Gabrielle Foreman

This essay views Julia Collins’s The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride (1865) through the racialized lens of Civil War’s promise and trauma. At first glance, the author’s narrative choices—her antebellum frame, her principal character’s racial indeterminacy and domestic concerns, even the overtly racialized advice she dispenses in the essays she publishes in the important Black paper, the Christian Recorder—seem distractingly distanced from the immediacy of the unfolding national conflict. Yet, readers can plot Collins’s story on the temporal and activist axes that she so explicitly engages by publishing in the Recorder, a paper that printed editorials …