“Latent color” and “exaggerated snow”: whiteness and race in Harriet Prescott Spofford's “The Amber Gods”

Abstract

“We've some splendid old point-lace in our family, yellow and fragrant … all tags and tangles and fibrous and bewildering” (7). This is the way that Giorgione (Yone) Willoughby opens her tale, “The Amber Gods”; instead of “beginn[ing] at the beginning” (7) she offers a luxuriant description of a type of old lace, rich in sense impressions. Bewilderingly, like her point lace, her story's introductory proprieties are delayed until the second paragraph. Such improper sensuality disconcerted many of her Protestant New England readers when her story appeared in the Atlantic in 1860. Yet also, hypocritically, at this time, a rising bourgeoisie, secure in its socioeconomic position, was increasingly embracing a phase of conspicuous leisure and consumption. It is with this embrace, and its dark origins and dark legacies, that “The Amber Gods” engages.