The Ambiguous Century: Passing, Cross-Dressing, and Transgressing in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

The Ambiguous Century: Passing, Cross-Dressing, and Transgressing in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

The paper explores the intersectional potential of racial passing by presenting a triad of“movements”that often appear in combination across literary texts and genres of nineteenth century American literature, where they magnify, dilute, or overpower each other: these are passing (the movement between whiteness and Blackness), cross-dressing (the movement between genders), and transgressing (the movement between legality and crime). Each of these movements, and perhaps combinations of two, has been studied extensively, but never as an intersectional triptych appearing in a state of intertwined reciprocity. This study also suggests that these parallel metamorphoses and the confusion they generate are expressed through an aesthetics of ambiguity. This article will contextualize the three movements in the history and culture of the nineteenth-century United States; it will locate their co-presence and interactions in various works of literature, both canonical and understudied, and then proceed with an in-depth analysis of the three movements and the ambiguity phenomena they unleash in William Craft’s Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860).