Jasper was seated at the piano as they came into his drawing-room, and was accompanying Miss Rosebud while she sang. The passage I’m about to read from Chapter 7 does not focus on race, but it reveals through a performance the complex power dynamic among those assembled to hear Rosa sing, exposing a struggle for domination amid hierarchies of race, gender, pedagogy, performance, and sexual attraction. Neville is repeatedly portrayed as a stereotype: for example, in Chapter 8, he is hot-tempered with “something of the tiger in his dark blood.” Yet, as we’ll see, Dickens creates his heroine in Helena and in Neville, many adaptors have found the novel’s hero. Scholars such as Hyungji Park and Patrick Bratlinger have already examined race in this novel, and the Orientalism in this passage is clear. When first introduced in Chapter 6, the narrator describes them asĪn unusually handsome lithe young fellow, and an unusually handsome lithe girl much alike both very dark, and very rich in colour she of almost the gipsy type something untamed about them both a certain air upon them of hunter and huntress yet withal a certain air of being the objects of the chase, rather than the followers. While the rest of the main characters are white, Neville and Helena appear to be of mixed race. Ned begins to compete with Neville, who is jealous of Ned’s air of casual proprietorship over Rosa. Although he lives with his mother, who resembles a delicate pastel porcelain figurine, he is smitten by the beautiful and valiant Helena. The Reverend Crisparkle welcomes the newcomers and combats the town’s xenophobia. She prefers the handsome, headstrong Neville Landless, just arrived from Ceylon (modern-day Sri Lanka) with his twin sister Helena. An opium addict, Jasper is secretly, passionately obsessed with Rosa, who takes voice lessons from him. Now old enough to choose for themselves, Rosa and Ned have pretty much decided against the match. Rosa is about to graduate from Miss Twinkleton’s seminary for young ladies. Now, to set up the passage, a quick recap of the novel: The callow youth Edwin Drood (“Ned”) and pretty ingénue Rosa Bud (whom he calls “Pussy”) have been promised in marriage to each other by their long-dead fathers. Some of my remarks come from a chapter in my new book, Victorians on Broadway, that grew out of a lecture on Drood I first gave at the Dickens Universe in 2013. Besides the novel, I’ll talk about how considering adaptations can help push us to toward this goal. I’ve chosen this text because it speaks to our current national conversation about race, addressing some issues that our Dickens Project colleagues Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Alicia Mireles Christoff, and Amy Wong raise in their recent article in the Los Angeles Review of Books, which calls for scholars to pay more attention to race. Dickens was exactly half-way through writing it when he died of a stroke on June 9, 1870. The passage I’ll be reading and discussing today comes from Dickens’s final, unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. I’m delighted to participate in Dickens-to-Go. I’m Sharon Aronofsky Weltman, speaking to you from my home in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. "Bud" Davis Alumni Professor of English at Louisiana State University, uses the occasion of a performance to describe the complex power dynamics where "hierarchies of race, gender, pedagogy, performance, and sexual attraction" are at play in The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
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