Auction goers or lynch mobs?: authority and representation in the quadroon and the octoroon

Abstract

This chapter explores the surprising conjunction in the 1850s’ imagination between the courtroom trial’s extralegal underside, the lynching, and state-sanctioned public auction sales. In much the same way that Southworth and Cooper diagnose the law’s performative underpinnings, Dion Boucicault’s drama The Octoroon and its novelistic predecessor Captain Mayne Reid’s The Quadroon use two famous quotidian practices of the slave economy and abolitionist tropes, the slave auction and the lynch mob, to explore the aesthetics of authority and the role of transcendence in liberal institutions from a transatlantic perspective. By examining minutely a slave auction and successive (attempted) lynchings, both Mayne Reid and Boucicault indict the groundlessness of authority in both institutions so central to Southern chattel slavery. While many critics read these texts as commentaries on race and its (de)construction, each text shows a more intense interest in the grounding and aesthetics of political and legal authority. For each author and in each case, legitimate authority is one that is capable of representing something outside of and beyond its performances—the quasi-divine majesty of law and commerce for Reid; Christian community norms for Boucicault. Both The Quadroon and The Octoroon ultimately insist that politics must account for the transcendent and that its rejection is what allows antebellum liberalism to countenance slavery.