Asian Masculinity, Eurasian Identity, and Whiteness in Cassandra Clare’s Infernal Devices Trilogy

Abstract

The Infernal Devices trilogy— Clockwork Angel (2010), Clockwork Prince (2011) and Clockwork Princess (2013)—form a prequel to Clare’s wildly popular The Mortal Instruments (2007–2014) series. In 1878, seventeen-year-old orphan Tessa Gray leaves her home in New York, after the death of her aunt, to join her brother Nate in London. Upon arrival, the repulsive Dark sisters intercept Tessa and imprison her in their Limehouse home where she is forced to endure torturous training to manifest her talent as a shapeshifter. A mysterious man known only as “the Magister” sponsors her training and, she soon learns, also wants her as his bride (Clare Angel, 31). On the day of her supposed wedding, Tessa is rescued by Shadowhunters, Nephilim warriors, drawn to Limehouse by a surge in the number of strange deaths and supernatural energy. Tessa becomes immediately attracted to the handsome and dashing Will Herondale, who helps her fight her way out of the Dark house guarded by its automaton servants, the prototypes of the clockwork army of “Infernal Devices” that the Magister will command to destroy the global Shadowhunter hegemony known as the Clave (Clare Princess, 50). As Tessa forms the only link to identifying and capturing the Magister, she takes refuge at the Institute, the headquarters of the London branch of the Clave. There, Tessa meets Jem Carstairs, Will’s partner or parabatai, a Eurasian boy from Shanghai with a devastating illness that requires the constant but deadly ingestion of the demon drug yin fen. Banded together, the trio embarks on a quest to hunt down the Magister, prevent his Infernal Devices from destroying the Nephilim, and discover the origins of Tessa’s extraordinary powers as a shapeshifting immortal. Together, the inhabitants of the Victorian Institute—the Fairchilds, Herondales, Carstairs, and Grays—are the Victorian ancestors of the twenty-first-century protagonists of The Mortal Instruments.