Haunted Property

Slavery and the Gothic

Sarah Gilbreath Ford

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781496829719
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Winner of a 2021 South Central Modern Language Association Book Prize At the heart of America's slave system was the legal definition of people as property. While property ownership is a cornerstone of the American dream, the status of enslaved people supplies a contrasting American nightmare. Sarah Gilbreath Ford considers how writers in works from nineteenth-century slave narratives to twenty-first-century poetry employ gothic tools, such as ghosts and haunted houses, to portray the horrors of this nightmare. Haunted Property: Slavery and the Gothic thus reimagines the southern gothic, which has too often been simply equated with the macabre or grotesque and then dismissed as regional. Although literary critics have argued that the American gothic is driven by the nation's history of racial injustice, what is missing in this critical conversation is the key role of property. Ford argues that out of all of slavery's perils, the definition of people as property is the central impetus for haunting because it allows the perpetration of all other terrors. Property becomes the engine for the white accumulation of wealth and power fueled by the destruction of black personhood. Specters often linger, however, to claim title, and Ford argues that haunting can be a bid for property ownership. Through examining works by Harriet Jacobs, Hannah Crafts, Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Sherley Anne Williams, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, and Natasha Trethewey, Ford reveals how writers can use the gothic to combat legal possession with spectral possession.

- CHAPTER ONE -

From Damsels to Specters in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative

The title Harriet Beecher Stowe chose for her 1852 novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, is nothing less than odd.¹ Early in the novel, Stowe depicts the slave cabin as charming, with a “neat garden patch” abounding in flowers, a kitchen smelling of “batter-cake,” and a portrait of George Washington overseeing the general contentment (27, 28). A few chapters later, however, Tom is sold to a slave trader, and the novel never returns to the “cabin” referred to in the title. Even when the narrator proposes in chapter 21 to “glance back, for a brief interval, at Uncle Tom’s Cabin, on the Kentucky farm, and see what has been transpiring among those whom he had left behind,” the chapter is set instead in the Shelbys’ parlor and the adjoining veranda (240). Although Tom fervently hopes to be reunited with his family, the plot moves him farther away from his Kentucky home, first to New Orleans and then to a rural Louisiana plantation. His wife, Chloe, also leaves the cabin behind when she moves to Louisville to try to earn enough money from her cooking skills to buy Tom. Mrs. Shelby vows to bring Tom back, and St. Clare promises Tom his freedom, but when Tom dies, his body is buried in Louisiana soil. As a setting, the cabin only occupies a sliver of the novel, one chapter of its forty-five.²

The title furthermore proves odd in the possession indicated by “Tom’s.” The charm radiating from the cabin certainly derives from Tom and Chloe’s homemaking, but the cabin is not his.³ Tom cannot own the property of the cabin because he himself is property, as Stowe underscores by opening the novel with Mr. Shelby and the slave trader negotiating his sale and by later titling the chapter of Tom’s departure “The Property Is Carried Off” (94). These deficiencies in the novel’s title reveal the harm in slavery’s reduction of people to property: as property, enslaved people not only lose all rights to their own bodies, including where they reside, but they also cannot own property and therefore lose the protection that a home provides its occupants along with the identity conferred by that “’s.” The identity the title gives Tom instead is “Uncle,” which also proves inaccurate, in that Tom does not appear to be anyone’s uncle in the text. Tom is an “Uncle” because this is the designation whites gave to those held in slavery to depict them as familial and nonthreatening.⁴ Tom, however, desperately wants to claim the identity of husband and father in the Kentucky cabin, but that cabin becomes the sliver of a setting further receding from him because as property, Tom cannot claim his home.

The disparity between the possession of property by Tom in Stowe’s title and the possession of Tom as property in Stowe’s narrative is what both Harriet Jacobs and Hannah Crafts target in their slave narratives. In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), Harriet Jacobs tells the story of being sexually harassed by her master, hiding for seven years in an attic, and finally fleeing to the North. The narrative tracks how her condition as property thwarts her ability to have a safe home. Even at the end of her narrative, when she is free in New York, she still longs to own the home that would signify her identity as a person. Hannah Crafts escaped from slavery in 1857, likely finishing her manuscript in 1858.⁵ The Bondwoman’s Narrative, which remained unpublished until 2002, chronicles how the condition of being property negates the agency of enslaved people, particularly women whose black blood, even if undetectable to the eye, makes them vulnerable prey. Like Jacobs, Crafts spends the entire narrative seeking a safe home. Unlike Jacobs, she finds it, but only after escaping slavery and settling in New Jersey. In detailing the “incidents” from their experiences in slavery, both women explore the problems of property implicit in Stowe’s problematic title.

That they choose to speak the truth about property through fictional gothic devices, though, may seem puzzling. Both writers were possibly influenced by Stowe’s use of the gothic to heighten her novel’s sentimental appeal, and Crafts borrows heavily from Charles Dickens’s gothic novel Bleak House.⁶ Yet, in contrast to these fiction writers, Jacobs and Crafts had to shape their narratives for audiences who expected a more rigid attachment to bare facts from formerly enslaved people advocating for abolition. Ann Fabian explains that these readers were looking for fugitives “who possessed the moral capacity to tell the truth, give their word, keep their promises, and ultimately become free laborers” (Unvarnished 85). Jacobs and Crafts register their awareness of these expectations in the very first sentences of their prefaces: Crafts offers a “record of plain unvarnished facts,” while Jacobs announces, “Reader, be assured this narrative is no fiction” (3, 5).⁷ Assuring the reader of Jacobs’s Incidents and Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative 31 the truth of a subsequently fictional narrative was typical in prefaces of early American novels, as authors tried to evade the general suspicion of fiction as dangerous.⁸ Formerly enslaved people then borrow this rhetorical move as part of their strategy to, in William L. Andrews’s words, “endow their stories with the appearance of authenticity” (To Tell 2). Andrews explains that the “reception of [a formerly enslaved person’s] narrative as truth depended on the degree to which his artfulness could hide his art” (To Tell 2). Truth therefore is crucial as both declaration and construction.

Jacobs and Crafts, however, do not hide their highly fictionalized gothic trappings. Instead, they depict the personas of “Linda” and “Hannah” as gothic damsels in distress, who encounter ghosts, haunted spaces, and monstrous villains. Jacobs and Crafts thereby seemingly flaunt their authorial shaping of their life stories, even though it is the truth of those lived lives that give their depictions of slavery the significant force of candid revelation.⁹ Teresa Goddu explores this tension, acknowledging that “the slave narrative’s generic conventions seem to be in direct opposition to the gothic’s: [the slave narrative’s] documentary form and adherence to veracity announce a refusal of any imaginative rendering” (Gothic 136).¹⁰ Her answer to this tension is that “the Gothic becomes the mode through which to speak what often remains unspeakable within the American national narrative—the crime of slavery” (“American” 63). In Goddu’s analysis of Jacobs, she finds that “Jacobs at once narratively constructs the gothic event as actual and insists that it exceeds such representation” (Gothic 146).¹¹ Thus slavery as an “unspeakable fact” uses the power of the gothic to express reality and to assert that needed authenticity (Gothic 144).¹²

However, what I find in paying attention to the central problem of property in these texts is the power in the gothic’s fictionality. Jacobs and Crafts employ the gothic as a malleable medium that allows them to shape their stories. They recast Linda and Hannah as haunted damsels instead of hunted property, leading readers to identify them as heroines threatened by slaveholders and traders, who are cast as monstrous villains. By employing these gothic constructions, the writers teach readers to fear a legal system that defines people as property. Legal possession in these narratives, however, must confront spectral possession. Linda and Hannah find refuge in spaces deemed haunted, such as a hidden attic, an abandoned cabin, or a prison, because they too are haunted property. Hence they become powerful specters haunting to seek title, and their gothic artfulness amplifies their power.

Moreover, in using fictional devices to recast their stories, Jacobs and Crafts claim a spectral possession of their lives, subverting the legal claim Jacobs’s Incidents and Crafts’s The 32 Bondwoman’s Narrative on their persons. Jacobs gives her narrative the subtitle “Written by Herself,” clearly asserting her ownership, while Crafts’s title identifies the narrative as the “Bondwoman’s,” a claim that becomes sharper considering that Hannah Crafts’s real name was Hannah Bond.¹³ Though they may be enslaved in the narratives they write, they now own these narratives. The logic of law must face the force of fiction. While scholars have certainly explored the gothic in both Jacobs’s and Crafts’s narratives, considering them together will reveal how their explorations of property confront the problem encapsulated in Tom’s dispossession of his cabin and his person.¹⁴ Jacobs and Crafts shape their stories to repossess and claim the property of their own lives, thereby creating their own “cabins.”

DAMSELS AND MONSTERS

In writing the narratives of Linda and Hannah, Harriet Jacobs and Hannah Crafts portray their textual stand-ins as characters their audiences can readily identify and champion: damsels in distress. (Throughout I will be referring to Jacobs and Crafts as the authors and to Linda and Hannah as the characters in the text to highlight the shaping the writers do in telling their stories.) As a young girl, Linda realizes the difficulty of remaining unmolested among predatory owners; she exclaims, “The war of my life had begun; and though one of God’s most powerless creatures, I resolved never to be conquered. Alas, for me!” (19). Alas, indeed, as she attempts to retain her selfhood without the protection of parents. After detailing the “fortunate circumstances” of her early childhood, Linda reveals that her mother died when she was six years old. Without a mother to guide her, her life story tracks the typical gothic damsel, whose orphan status leaves her subject to being harassed and haunted.¹⁵ Linda is at least left with a brother, an aunt, and a forceful grandmother. Hannah is totally bereft of family. At the beginning of her narrative, she announces, “Of my relations, I knew nothing” (5). This lack of knowledge is nonetheless coupled with the unwanted knowledge of the effects of her parentage: “the African blood in my veins would forever exclude me from the higher walks of life. That toil unremitted unpaid toil must be my lot and portion, without even the hope or expectation of any thing better” (6).¹⁶ As circumstances force Hannah to escape, and she finds herself first in an abandoned cabin complete with suspicious blood stains and later in a prison cell with rats, she voices her “alas” through prayers. In invoking biblical passages, Hannah echoes Mary Rowlandson, the Puritan captured by Native Americans whose narrative was an early American best-seller. Also a captive, Hannah likewise seeks divine protection yet repeatedly finds herself in harm’s way.

As distressed damsels, Hannah and Linda sound a familiar note in the gothic.¹⁷ Jerrold E. Hogle explains that even in the first gothic novel, Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764), “it is Otranto’s Isabella who first finds herself in what has since become the classic Gothic circumstance: caught in ‘a labyrinth of darkness’ full of ‘cloisters’ underground and anxiously hesitant about what course to take there, fearing the pursuit of a domineering and lascivious patriarch” (9). The damsel character then crossed the Atlantic to appear in the first American gothic novel, Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798). With the requisite orphan status, Clara Wieland confronts a villain hiding in her closet and a crazed murderous brother. Damsels act as the fuel for the gothic, and that it is almost always women that act as the conduit for the terror may be more than simply convention. Ruth Bienstock Anolik explains how in English novels the female characters are threatened by the central issue of dispossession: gothic plots of “imprisoned and endangered” women parallel the “civil death” that accompanied marriage, as the laws of coverture meant that women lost all rights to possess property (“Horrors” 678).¹⁸ Though coverture is not a factor in these American works, the situation Linda and Hannah are in is likewise fraught with the legal issue of property. Jacobs and Crafts are in fact able to recast so easily and so powerfully their textual selves as gothic damsels, even without the trappings of castles or dragons, because Linda’s and Hannah’s distress derives from a lack of control over property, in their cases the property of their persons. Their tales of imprisonment and flight to counter this lack of control then fit the typical gothic narrative arc.

By employing the familiar character type, Jacobs and Crafts can thus appeal even to audiences far removed from slavery. Both writers amplify their depictions of suffering females for their readers by using second-person direct address.¹⁹ Hannah Crafts uses the second person early in the narrative to make the reader feel that he or she is enduring the gothic space of a “dreary and solemn” house along with Hannah (15). Although this “you” aligns the reader with Hannah, an instance of second person late in the narrative pushes the reader even further to consider the dire consequences of race and property. Hannah is describing the horrible condition of the slave huts on the Wheeler plantation when she stops to ask, “What do you think of it?” (206). She then proceeds to align the reader with those enslaved, “to be made to feel that you have no business here, there, or anywhere except just to work—work—work” until “you really are assimilated to the brutes, that the horses, dogs and cattle have quite as many priveledges” (206). A reader invested in Crafts’s narrative must understand what it is like to be property. Harriet Jacobs proves more persistent in her appeals to the reader, as Linda addresses “you” at least a dozen times. Many of these occurrences, as Robin R. Warhol points out, highlight the differences between the reader and the enslaved person, such as when Linda exclaims, “O, you happy free women, contrast your New Year’s day with that of the poor bond-woman!” (17). The enslaved people who fear the January 1st sale of family members may be distant from the reader’s world, but Jacobs and Crafts can borrow the damsel character with her pleas of “alas” from gothic fiction to teach the reader what to fear.

Specifically, they point to the monster. If damsels are the fuel of the gothic, the monstrous villains are its engine. Jacobs and Crafts can call evil by its name by clearly depicting slaveholders and slave traders as predators. Jacobs launches into an expose of Dr. Flint early in the narrative. After living in his house only a few weeks, Linda witnesses the brutal beating of an enslaved person who had “accused his master of being the father of [his wife’s] child” (15). Linda then watches the sale of this man’s wife because “she had forgotten that it was a crime for a slave to tell who was the father of her child” (16). Only twelve years old at the time, Linda already perceives Dr. Flint’s evil nature. When at fifteen she is harassed by Dr. Flint, Jacobs uses gothic language to portray him as a villain: he is a “crafty man,” who “[whispers] foul words,” has “stormy terrific ways,” and is in every way a “vile monster” (26). His “dark shadow” follows Linda everywhere (26). Crafts borrows the same gothic language for the central monster of her narrative, the lawyer and slave trader Trappe.²⁰ Trappe consistently appears to Hannah as a dark “shadow,” and his black clothes seem less a marker of his position as a gentleman than a sign of his vile character. Trappe blackmails Hannah’s mistress, Mrs. Vincent, over her supposed black blood, but the mistress explains that even before he revealed this secret, she felt “an indefinable presentiment of evil in his presence” (46). In separate analyses of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and The Bondwoman’s Narrative, Goddu argues that both Jacobs and Crafts locate “blackness” in the characters of Dr. Flint and Trappe, so that Jacobs “reverses the gothic’s usual demonization: the master, not the black slave, is the source of horror and dread” and Crafts likewise “[demonizes] a wealthy white man rather than a black slave” (Gothic 147, “American” 67). Even though the gothic coding is reversed, the gothic tropes prove crucial in allowing Jacobs and Crafts to shape their readers’ perceptions of these men as monsters.

Jacobs and Crafts also employ the characteristic gothic rendering of the villains’ threat to the damsels as essentially sexual. Kari J. Winter identifies this threat as the key commonality of slave narratives and gothic fiction: “both genres focus on the sexual politics at the heart of patriarchal culture, and both represent the terrifying aspects of life for women in a patriarchal culture” (13). For women held in slavery, however, the threat of being at the mercy of a sexual predator arises because of the women’s status as property. Unlike a typical gothic damsel, enslaved women are not in a precarious position that can be altered if they are saved; their very identity puts them at unending risk. Sex becomes a means for monsters to assert utter ownership. That Dr. Flint is asserting power is evident in his methods. He does not resort to raping Linda. Instead, he wants her to acknowledge her complete lack of agency by submitting to him: “My master met me at every turn, reminding me that I belonged to him, and swearing by heaven and earth that he would compel me to submit to him” (27). Trappe likewise does not force himself on Hannah or Mrs. Vincent, so he may appear to be something less than a villain. Hollis Robbins in fact argues, “Trappe is certainly not a good character—he is an extortionist and a slave speculator, but he is not a monster to Hannah. He feeds and clothes her … and he sells her to a man who is rather kind to her, under the circumstances” (79). While Trappe may not threaten Hannah’s life, when he sells her to a slave trader headed to the New Orleans market, where women are notoriously marketed as sex slaves, he indeed acts as a gothic monster because he reduces her to mere property. Hannah understands that Trappe wanted “to make me realize that in both soul and body I was indeed a slave” (112). If she is property, her body is not her own.

For gothic damsels, the possibility of rape proves even worse than death. In Wieland, Clara contemplates how she could end her life with a penknife to preempt being raped by the villain (111). Jacobs seems to share Clara’s hierarchy. She portrays Dr. Flint several times threatening to kill Linda. When he asks her, “Do you know that I have a right to do as I like with you,—that I can kill you, if I please?” she responds, “You have tried to kill me, and I wish you had, but you have no right to do as you like with me” (35). Death is preferable. Unlike Clara, though, who seems to be projecting the idea that rape would cause her to be ruined or impure, Linda and Hannah see the monsters’ threat as a question over the ownership of their very bodies, ergo a question of legal possession.

RACE AND LEGAL POSSESSION

While Jacobs and Crafts use the gothic construction of damsel and monster to help their readers to understand who the victims and villains are, to identify the key issue of sexual threat, and to perceive the underlying problem of property, unlike their gothic sisters, Linda and Hannah, do not lose control over property through marriage, inheritance, or foul play. They are property because of their race and are haunted by their owners’ legal possession. Though the law haunts and traps the damsels, Jacobs and Crafts reveal the weakness of a system of property based on constructed racial categories that can easily dissolve.

Dr. Flint’s legal possession of Linda is complicated, because she is actually owned by his minor daughter, a fact he raises only as deflection when asked if he is willing to sell Linda. Dr. Flint still pretends legal possession in pursuing her. For Linda, as for all the enslaved people in this study, the key catalyst for haunting is this conflation with property. When Jacobs uses those gothic tropes to construct Dr. Flint as monster, the devastating conclusion to Linda is “I was his property” (26). Linda bemoans that for the enslaved girl, “there is no shadow of law to protect her” (26). The master is both gothic shadow and the very law that denies personhood. In his 1853 book, The American Slave Code, Wi...