Looking at Stephen Crane’s Maggie and William Faulkner’s Light in August, this chapter suggests that racial in-betweenness may be one of the driving forces of American literature. At the turn of the twentieth century, the distinction between whiteness and blackness plagued not only literary authors, but also legal institutions. In a series of court cases, judges had to decide which immigrant groups counted as white and could hence be naturalized. This chapter proposes that at this juncture, law and literature are closely interconnected. At a time when the judiciary struggled to make sense of petitioners who were racially in-between, literary texts zoom in on figures who are either mixed race or racially indeterminate. Crane’s novella presents the idea that in the late nineteenth century, the Irish were seen as “whites on probation.” Faulkner’s novel focuses on a protagonist who is rumored to be a “mulatto”, but turns out to be half Mexican. Focusing on the “off-whiteness” of Irish and Mexican characters in American literature, this chapter argues that whiteness is ultimately a fiction, and that it is in the pages of literature that the construction of whiteness can best be observed.

Just like racial difference, whiteness is a social construct. The paradox of race and of whiteness is that white or nonwhite skin color means nothing in itself; rather, what matters is the social meaning that is ascribed to these differences in color. This essay examines the way whiteness has historically been constructed in both law and literature. Exploring the parallel between legal and literary histories, it refers to the literature of naturalism – Frank Norris’s The Octopus and Stephen Crane’s Maggie – as well as to the racial prerequisite cases, in which immigrants had to prove they were white and hence eligible for naturalization. In law as much as in literature, whiteness is far from homogenous, but instead seems to be eclipsed into infinite shades of whiteness. At the same time, in both literature and law, whiteness is not only linked to skin color, but to culture as well. In Crane’s novella, the cultural compatibility of the Irish is seen as dubious at best. Similarly, the Chinese cook in Norris’s novel is portrayed as culturally alien and hence as unassimilable. This essay proposes that the potential whiteness of immigrant groups is being contested in both the court of law and that of literature.