Race, Law and the Limits of Belonging in Paul Harding’s This Other Eden
Dr. Angeline Sorna,
Assistant Professor of English &
Dr. U. Anamica,
Assistant Professor of English,
Jayaraj
Annapackiam College for Women (Autonomous),
Periyakulam
Abstract
This paper examines Paul Harding’s This Other Eden through the
lens of Critical Race Theory, focusing on how race is socially constructed and
violently enforced through legal, medical and cultural discourses. Based on the
historical eviction of Malaga Island, Maine, the novel dramatizes the
displacement of a racially mixed community in 1912, whose hybridity and poverty
were recast as evidence of “degeneracy.” Drawing on Ian Haney López’s argument
that race is not a biological reality but a legal and social construction, the
study highlights how the Apple Islanders are defined out of existence not by
nature but by the juridical categories imposed upon them. Patricia Williams’s
critique of law as a mechanism that codifies racial hierarchy under the guise
of neutrality further illuminates the novel’s portrayal of state and medical
authorities presenting eviction as reform, masking racial violence in the
language of progress.
Harding resists the historical silencing of Malaga Island by granting
his characters interior lives, communal bonds and moral dignity, making the
novel into an act of counter-narration. Where official histories erased,
Harding reimagines, producing a counter-history that restores humanity to those
excluded from America’s so-called Eden. By situating This Other Eden within the
theoretical framework of López and Williams, this paper argues that Harding not
only revisits a neglected chapter of American history but also exposes the
structures of racial construction and institutional enforcement that continue
to shape the politics of belonging.
Keywords:
Critical Race Theory, Social Construction of Race, Racial Erasure,
Counter-History.
Paul Harding’s This Other Eden returns to a silenced episode in American history-the 1912
eviction of the racially mixed community of Malaga Island, Maine. Harding
fictionalizes the story through Apple Island, where Benjamin Honey, a freed
slave, had established a home in 1793. For more than a century, his descendants
and other mixed-race families created a modest, enduring community. Though
poor, they cultivated lives of labour, kinship, and belonging. The island
functioned as a refuge for those excluded from the mainland’s rigid racial and
social boundaries. Oral history preserved by Esther Honey, the family
matriarch, recalls both ordinary endurance and mythic events most vividly the
catastrophic flood in which Patience, flag aloft, signalled their survival.
This memory, half history and half legend, becomes the community’s origin
story, a reminder that they were a people who had weathered disaster before.
Generations later, Apple Island remained home to a small collection of
households who carried that spirit of resilience. Esther presides as the keeper
of memory, her son Eha and grandson Ethan continuing Benjamin’s tradition of
labour and artistry. Around them live others: Zachary Hand of God proverbs, the
Civil War refugee carving biblical scenes into oak; Iris and Violet McDermott,
unmarried sisters raising Penobscot orphans; and the Lark family, Candace and
Theophilus, raising children under whispered suspicions of incest. Together
they form a fragile but enduring society- poor, often eccentric, but bound by
ties of kinship and shared survival. Their lives, however, are never free from
the gaze of the mainland. Mr. Diamond, a sympathetic outsider who tries to help
the community, unintentionally brings unwanted attention to the island by
attracting officials and outsiders whose interference the people had long
avoided. Teachers, missionaries, photographers, and journalists intrude,
interpreting the islanders less as neighbours than as curiosities. By the early
twentieth century, officials armed with medical authority and the rhetoric of
reform arrive to declare the community “degenerate,” paving the way for its
erasure.
Even the eviction order and the physician’s certificate read as
half-baked, hastily drafted documents reflecting more a bureaucratic impulse to
remove the islanders than any genuine legal or medical judgment:
Physician’s Certificate of Feeblemindedness: We the undersigned,
graduates of a largely organised medical college, and having practiced three
years within the State, hereby certify that we have made due inquiry and
examination of Theophilus and Candace Lark, and the children thereof,
of the Squatter’s Settlement of Apple Island is said state, and find
that they is more than six years of age, that they is not a
proper subject for committees to an insane hospital and that they is a proper
subject for the State School for the Feebleminded. (161)
The orchard, once a symbol of belonging, becomes a bitter irony, for
Eden is denied to those who planted it. Doctors pronounce them unfit, reformers
call for their removal, and the state decrees their eviction in the name of
progress. Families are uprooted, homes dismantled, and some residents committed
to institutions. The island is cleared, and the community erased. Harding’s
novel turns this act of historical silencing into an act of remembrance,
reimagining the islanders as fully human: men, women, and children who love,
grieve, and endure.
Critical Race Theory offers a framework for reading Harding’s novel as a
study of how race is socially constructed and violently enforced through legal,
medical, and cultural discourses. Ian Haney López has shown that race is not a
biological fact but a juridical category, produced and maintained by law:
Races
are not biologically differentiated groupings but rather social constructions.
Race exists alongside a multitude of social identities that shape and are
themselves shaped by the way in which race is given meaning. We live race
through class, religion, nationality, gender, sexual identity, and so on.
Whether one is White therefore depends in part on other elements of
identity—for example, on whether one is wealthy or poor, Protestant or Muslim,
male or female—just as these aspects of identity are given shape and
significance by whether or not one is White. Moreover, like these other social categories, race is
highly contingent, specific to times, places, and situations. (11, White by
Law)
The islanders’ fate illustrates López’s claim that race is an invention.
Generations of families on Apple Island cannot be placed within the binary of
black or white, and so they are cast as “degenerate.” Their poverty is recoded
as racial pathology, their hybridity as contamination. The very ambiguity of
their identity becomes grounds for erasure. In this way, Harding dramatizes how
race is legally and socially manufactured: the islanders are not erased because
of what they are, but because institutions decide what they are not.
Patricia Williams has argued that law presents itself as neutral while,
in practice, codifying racial hierarchies and sanitizing racial violence into
the language of policy. These insights illuminate Harding’s narrative, where
Apple Island’s residents are defined out of existence not by nature, but by law
and institutional power. Williams’s insight into the complicity of law is
equally central. The eviction of Apple Island is presented not as persecution
but as reform, not as violence but as “public health”. The neutral language of
law disguises the brutality of uprooting families and dismantling homes.
Harding shows how legal and medical authorities cloak racial exclusion in the
rhetoric of benevolence, echoing Williams’s point that the law transforms injustice
into administrative procedure. The very institutions that claim to protect life
instead authorize its destruction:
Now,
Iris, please, Matthew Diamond said. I don’t like this any more than you, but
they are here on the state’s authority, and there’s nothing we can do right now
to change that.
One
of the doctors had brought a pair of metal calipers from his medical kit and
without having asked was fitting them on either side of Scotty’s head even as
the boy still held one end of the wet sheet. Violet dashed over and batted the
bizarre tool out of the doctor’s hands. Scotty dropped the sheet and tears
spilled from his eyes.
Get
that damned ice picker away from his head. Violet gathered Scotty close and
cradled his head against her bosom. (42)
Ethan Honey occupies a liminal position in This Other Eden that is best
illuminated by Critical Race Theory. His ability to pass as white embodies what
Ian Haney López calls the social construction of race: Ethan’s identity shifts depending on context, revealing
that racial categories are not natural but legally and socially imposed. On
Apple Island, his family knows him as one of their own; on the mainland, his
fair skin admits him into privileged spaces until disclosure of his ancestry
exposes the fragility of that admission. In this sense, Ethan’s exclusion
illustrates López’s observation that race is defined “not by science, but by
common knowledge, by what the law and society are willing to see as White” (7).
The moment Bridget discovers his lineage, Ethan’s conditional membership in
whiteness collapses.
Patricia Williams’s critique of law also resonates here. Williams argues
that law cloaks racial exclusion in neutrality, transforming exclusion into a
matter of policy. Ethan’s removal from the island is framed as opportunity- an
education, an escape from “degeneracy.” Yet beneath this apparent benevolence
lies the same logic that would later dismantle Apple Island: the belief that
his family and community are unfit for modernity. In Ethan’s narrative, law and
culture disguise exclusion as uplift, proving Williams’s point that racial
hierarchy is “alchemy,” turning lived needs into disqualifications.
The irony, however, is that Ethan’s trajectory circles back to the
island. Bridget’s eventual return to Apple Island to give birth to his child
suggests that race cannot be legislated out of existence, nor kinship erased by
policy. Ethan’s whiteness offers him only a brittle promise of belonging, while
his true legacy re-enters through the community that the law sought to destroy.
In this way, Ethan’s story becomes a microcosm of Harding’s critique:
assimilation into whiteness may grant temporary access but ensures alienation,
while genuine belonging persists through memory, love, and continuity outside
the categories imposed by institutions.
The fate of the Lark family during the forced evacuation of Apple Island
encapsulates the brutality of institutional erasure. Candace and Theophilus
Lark, long whispered about for their unconventional kinship and marginalized by
poverty, endure the final violence of dispossession when their child, Rabbit,
is killed in the chaos of removal. State officials, ostensibly tasked with
enforcing policy, misfire and strike the girl, extinguishing a life already
burdened by stigma. In the same moment, Candace herself is beaten, her body
bearing the marks of a process cloaked in legality but enacted through sheer
force. The Larks’ suffering exposes the chasm between the rhetoric of “reform”
and the lived reality of violence: what was framed as an act of cleansing degeneracy
becomes, in truth, the destruction of family, home, and life. As Patricia
Williams argues in The Alchemy of Race and
Rights, law often disguises racialized
violence as neutrality; the Larks’ fate demonstrates how that alchemy works in
practice, transforming state-sanctioned brutality into the language of
progress.
The irony of Harding’s Edenic imagery sharpens this critique. America
often imagines itself as a new Eden, a land of equality and promise, yet in This Other Eden the gates of
paradise are closed to those who do not meet the requirements of whiteness.
Harding’s lush descriptions of the island, its trees, shoreline, gardens, and
homes, highlight the beauty of a community in harmony with its environment. Yet
this harmony is recast as degeneracy. Eden itself becomes a metaphor for
exclusion: it is not a paradise for all, but a property right reserved for
those who fit into racial categories the law approves.
What rescues the novel from despair is Harding’s act of
counter-narration. While history silenced Malaga Island, This Other Eden restores its people
to memory. Harding gives his characters interior depth, mothers carrying
memories, children imagining futures, elders telling stories and in so doing,
he disrupts the official account that dismissed them as unfit. This act of
storytelling aligns with Critical Race Theory’s insistence on counter-stories:
narratives that challenge dominant histories by foregrounding marginalized
voices. Where institutions erased, Harding remembers. Where law condemned,
Harding reimagines.
Even as Apple Island is dismantled and its families scattered, Harding’s
narrative does not conclude solely in despair. Amid the violence of eviction
and the humiliation of official decrees, the surviving inhabitants carry with
them fragments of memory, kinship, and resilience. Some leave by boat, others
on foot, bearing whatever possessions they can salvage, but all depart with the
hope of finding a safer haven beyond the island’s shores. Their exile becomes
both literal and symbolic: while the law has cast them out of Eden, their
endurance gestures toward the possibility of a different belonging, one not
conferred by institutions but sustained through memory, love, and the dream of
sanctuary elsewhere. In this final image, Harding suggests that even in erasure
there remains the stubborn persistence of life, the human refusal to be
entirely silenced.
The novel thus demonstrates how literature can both reveal and resist
the racial logic of exclusion. López’s analysis of race as a legal construction
explains why Apple Islanders were expelled: they did not meet the definitions
that granted citizenship and belonging. Williams’s critique of law’s neutrality
explains how their removal was justified: as progress, not violence. Harding’s
novel exposes these mechanisms of racial erasure while simultaneously creating
a counter-history that restores dignity to those expelled from Eden.
By weaving history, law, and imagination together, This Other Eden reminds us that the
violence of exclusion is not accidental but systemic, embedded in the very
categories that define who belongs. It also shows that literature has the power
to re-inscribe the erased into cultural memory. Apple Island’s residents may have
been cast out by the law, but in Harding’s novel, their humanity endures,
resisting silence. The story becomes a moral allegory for America itself: a
nation that calls itself Eden, yet withholds paradise from those it deems
unfit.
Works Cited
Harding,
Paul. This Other Eden. W. W. Norton & Company, 2023.
Haney López,
Ian F. White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race. 2nd ed., New
York University Press, 2006.
Williams,
Patricia J. The Alchemy of Race and Rights: A Diary of a Law Professor.
Harvard University Press, 1991.
