An Imperative Duty

This engaging short work by a great American novelist addresses the then-controversial topic of interracial marriage. ""An Imperative Duty"" tells the story of Rhoda Aldgate, a young woman on the verge of marriage who has been raised by her aunt to assume that she is white but who is in fact the descendant of an African-American grandmother. The novel traces the struggles of Rhoda, her aunt, and Edward Olney, the aunt's physician and Rhoda's eventual suitor, to come to terms with the implications of Rhoda's ethnic heritage. Howells employs this stock situation to explore newly urgent questions of identity, morality, and social policy raised by 'miscegenation' in the new, post-Reconstruction situation to which he writes. The novel imagines interracial marriage sympathetically at a time when racist sentiment was on the rise, and does this is one of Howells' most aesthetically economical performances in the short novel form. The novel's appeal is increased by the primary source documents on nineteenth-century scientific race theory, contemporary attitudes toward race and miscegenation, and contemporary responses to the novel included in the appendices to this edition.