SOURCE: Magowan, Kim. “Coming between the ‘Black Beast’ and the White Virgin: The Pressures of Liminality in Thomas Dixon.” Studies in American Fiction 27, no. 1 (spring 1999): 77-102.

In the following essay, Magowan explores the idea of miscegenation, concluding that both the white woman and the white man are supposedly subject to black sexual predators in several of Dixon's novels.

The girl uttered a cry, long, tremulous, heart-rending, piteous. A single tiger-spring, and the black claws of the beast sank into the soft white throat and she was still.

—Thomas Dixon, The Clansman

I have three daughters, but, so help me God, I would rather find either one of them killed by a tiger or a bear and gather up the bones and bury them, conscious that she died in the purity of her maidenhood, than to have her crawl to me and tell me the horrid story that she...