Death Rights

Romantic Suicide, Race, and the Bounds of Liberalism

Deanna P. Koretsky

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781438482880, 9781438482897
• eBook ISBN: 9781438482903
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Death Rights presents an antiracist critique of British romanticism by deconstructing one of its organizing tropes—the suicidal creative "genius." Putting texts by Olaudah Equiano, Mary Shelley, John Keats, and others into critical conversation with African American literature, black studies, and feminist theory, Deanna P. Koretsky argues that romanticism is part and parcel of the legal and philosophical discourses underwriting liberal modernity's antiblack foundations. Read in this context, the trope of romantic suicide serves a distinct political function, indexing the limits of liberal subjectivity and (re)inscribing the rights and freedoms promised by liberalism as the exclusive province of white men. The first book-length study of suicide in British romanticism, Death Rights also points to the enduring legacy of romantic ideals in the academy and contemporary culture more broadly. Koretsky challenges scholars working in historically Eurocentric fields to rethink their identification with epistemes rooted in antiblackness. And, through discussions of recent cultural touchstones such as Kurt Cobain's resurgence in hip-hop and Victor LaValle's comic book sequel to Frankenstein, Koretsky provides all readers with a trenchant analysis of how eighteenth-century ideas about suicide continue to routinize antiblackness in the modern world. This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships Open Book Program—a limited competition designed to make outstanding humanities books available to a wide audience. Learn more at the Fellowships Open Book Program website at: https://www.neh.gov/grants/odh/FOBP, and access the book online at the SUNY Open Access Repository at http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12648/1712.

Chapter 1

Liberty and Death

Go pine in want and anguish and despair,

There is no mercy found in human-kind—

Go Widow to thy grave and rest thee there!

But may the God of Justice bid the wind

Whelm that curst bark beneath the mountain wave,

And bless with Liberty and Death the Slave!

—Robert Southey, from Poems Concerning the Slave Trade

Before Werther was Europe’s most fashionable ideal and Chatterton was immortalized as the romantic suicide par excellence, British society was captivated by another suicide—that of “a black [man] who shot himself on board a vessel in the river Thames,” the protagonist and speaker of Thomas Day and John Bicknell’s abolitionist poem, The Dying Negro.1 First published in 1773 and revised five times over the course of the next two decades, The Dying Negro was among England’s best-known abolitionist poems. According to the authors’ prefatory note, the poem was “occasioned by an article of news” that discussed an enslaved man who left his captors and was baptized in preparation for marrying a white woman. Before the wedding could take place, he was kidnapped and detained aboard a docked slave ship set to sail for the Americas. Refusing to be forced back into bondage, he “took an opportunity of shooting himself through the head.”2 This framing narrative closely recalls the circumstances that led to the 1772 trial of Somerset v. Stewart, a landmark case in the history of human rights law, which Day and Bicknell evoke with one key difference: James Somerset obtained freedom through legal maneuvering, while the speaker of The Dying Negro chose to die for it.

This chapter reads Day and Bicknell’s poem as a reassessment of the legal grounds on which the Somerset trial was decided—specifically, Somerset’s successful appeal for a writ of habeas corpus. Habeas corpus, an injunction that protects against illegal detainment, gained special status in the eighteenth century as a legislative tool central to protecting the rights and freedoms of liberal subjects. Perhaps more than any other legal construct, habeas corpus turns on the interdependence of liberal modernity’s pillars of personhood, property, and freedom: as Paul Halliday writes, “Ideas about liberties running through the writ of habeas corpus marked out an astonishingly vast subjecthood [such that] liberties came from subject status and thus from those parts of law that defined who were subjects.”3 By replacing the victory that granted Somerset some degree of legal standing with an act of self-destruction, Day and Bicknell introduce an important and far-reaching idea into eighteenth-century suicide debates, framing the choice to die not in terms of insanity or criminality but as a sign of one’s capacity to reason—and with it, one’s suitability for inclusion in liberal society. More specifically, Day and Bicknell present the speaker’s capacity to reason as evidence of African-identified people’s suitability for inclusion in liberal modernity’s covenant of personhood. But, crucially, they are only able to argue this by turning the ontological relation between blackness and death into an occasion for bolstering the social structures that compel that relation in the first place.

The politics of hyperliteralizing black death—of responding to it only at the level of individual events rather than as a structure—has been undertheorized in studies of British abolitionist literatures. Part of the reason for this stems from the liberal grounding of scholarly pursuits, especially as undertaken in this and other historically white fields. As Frank Wilderson suggests, “If the Black is death personified, the White is the personification of … life itself … White academics’ disavowal of Black death as modernity’s condition of possibility [bespeaks] their inability to imagine their productive subjectivity as an effect of the Negro.”4 This chapter situates Day and Bicknell’s intervention in the habeas corpus debates of the late eighteenth century within critical frameworks that center blackness, namely Alexander Weheliye’s concept of habeas viscus. Weheliye invents the term habeas viscus to disarticulate liberal politico-ontological categories from both the specific problem of establishing black social legibility within restrictive notions of “social life” in western modernity and the much more expansive project of acknowledging and accommodating all forms of human being.

The sections that follow establish the historical relation between habeas corpus and liberal subjectivity and then turn to how Day and Bicknell engage suicide to draw attention to paradoxes at the core of liberalism, which are traced here to John Locke’s inability to reconcile slavery with suicide in his Second Treatise of Government. Through this reading of Locke, coupled with an analysis of Day and Bicknell’s formal innovation of the suicide note in verse, this chapter argues that The Dying Negro is not finally committed to the freedom or personhood of African-identified people but to defining and maintaining white Britons’ freedoms. Ultimately, then, The Dying Negro is an exemplar of how emancipatory arguments rooted in liberal notions of integration tacitly reproduce exclusionary logics. This book’s larger argument concerning the relation of literary romanticism to racialized representations of suicide begins with The Dying Negro for two reasons. While it was not the first text to depict a black person dying by suicide, its immense popularity at the inception of a range of revolutionary eruptions in Europe (Britain’s abolitionist movement chief among them) established a distinctively racialized dimension to popular discourses about rights, personhood, and voluntary death against which the trope of romantic suicide would subsequently develop.5 Emerging as it does from this uniquely charged moment, The Dying Negro is thus also a paradigmatic example of how racialization often escapes scrutiny in well-intentioned texts and movements grounded in liberal epistemologies.

As defined by Weheliye, “racialization” refers here “not [to] a biological or cultural descriptor but [to] a conglomerate of sociopolitical relations that discipline humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans.”6 In liberal modernity, this process has been underwritten by a vexed relation to property as a prerequisite for personhood. The legal framework of personhood adjudicates which humans are free based on evidence of self-ownership, usually expressed through rationality and self-consciousness. Because legal personhood is strongly predicated on an ontological relation to the body, the protection against unlawful detainment granted by the writ of habeas corpus has been central to establishing personhood by authorizing a claim of ownership of one’s own body. But personhood is not necessarily restricted to people, which is to say, to human beings—corporations were granted personhood long before people of color and white women; and legal arguments for the personhood of nonhuman animals also gained traction in the nineteenth century.7 Personhood grants those rights that liberal societies reserve for free individuals, but it does not speak to the more fundamental question of who or what is seen as worthy of those rights. The liberal logics of The Dying Negro appeal to and operate within the rule of law, seeking to redress wrongs done to enslaved Africans by demonstrating the speaker’s capacity to be recognized as a person. But if personhood is not tantamount to humanity, then appealing to the former will only ever modify (without really confronting or moving to eradicate) those social logics that keep human beings defined against each other through largely nonsensical relations to property. A truly universal project of liberation would begin with the abolition of notions of self-definition through property—with the abolition, that is, of the construct of “Man.” Though it draws attention to cracks in that construct’s foundations, The Dying Negro ultimately does little to challenge them.

John Locke, Property, and Self-Destruction

Less than a year before The Dying Negro was published, the Somerset ruling declared illegal precisely the kind of scenario the poem opens with: the detainment of a person of African descent on a ship set to sail for the Americas. That the poem is based on an actual event demonstrates that the Somerset ruling, widely considered to have been a monumental step toward abolition, was in fact less effective than many believed. As Brycchan Carey has suggested, for Day and Bicknell, two London lawyers, to write a poem about “the extent to which the law could be flouted” indicates that the poem “must therefore be seen first as a commentary on the ineffectiveness of the law.”8 Indeed, The Dying Negro lays bare fundamental problems not only with the laws as they stood but also with their philosophical foundations.

In 1769, James Somerset was brought to England by the enslaver Charles Stewart. Because the legality of slavery in England was never codified, Somerset remained with Stewart as a servant until 1771, when he decided to leave. Though there was precedent for this, Stewart retaliated by having Somerset captured and held on board the Ann and Mary with the aim of reenslaving him once the ship set sail for Jamaica. With support from Granville Sharp, three abolitionists claiming to be Somerset’s godparents from his baptism in England brought the case to court by appealing for a writ of habeas corpus. The ship’s captain, John Knowles, was ordered to bring Somerset before the Court of King’s Bench, which would determine whether his imprisonment aboard the ship had been legal. After six months of proceedings, on June 22, 1772, William Murray, First Earl of Mansfield declared that the air in England was “too pure” to suffer the “odious” institution of slavery.9 With these strong words, Somerset was pronounced legally free.10

For over two centuries, Mansfield’s decision has been celebrated as a key precedent to the 1807 abolition of the trade in enslaved Africans and their 1834 emancipation in England’s colonies. By extension, it is also considered an important precedent for emancipation in the United States. The Somerset case continues to be cited in everything from international human rights law to debates on the rights of nonhuman animals.11 But despite Mansfield’s vehement antislavery language, Somerset v. Stewart was not technically about the institution of slavery. It was, instead, a strong defense of habeas corpus. As Mansfield reminds us no fewer than four times in the decision, the ruling is not about the legality, nor even the morality, of enslavement. In fact, it is precisely because the case was about his seizure and detainment on English soil that Somerset was freed at all. Nevertheless, the case continues to be extolled as everything from “a major weapon in the arsenal of abolitionism” to “co-equal with the Declaration of Independence” in establishing and maintaining individual freedoms.12

Beyond exaggerated claims of its bearing on the institutions of slavery in England and the United States, Somerset v. Stewart also opened the door for an important reassessment of habeas corpus. Indeed, the widespread notion that habeas corpus is a fundamental safeguard of personal liberty is an eighteenth-century invention. Emerging largely from public responses to the Somerset trial, this reassessment gained traction again in response to Pitt’s suspension of habeas corpus during the Treason Trials of 1794, and reemerged overseas during the uproar over Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus in 1861.13 In this sense, Mansfield’s ruling in 1772 inaugurated what we might call the “habeas corpus century,” wherein the relationship between the individual and the state grew increasingly embattled, even as that relationship became central to a range of policies and theoretical debates about the liberal subject. I emphasize that this particular shift occurred during the eighteenth century, although the idea of habeas corpus is ancient, traceable at least as far back as the Norman Conquest; some scholars have located its roots in ancient Greece.14 All agree, however, that it was codified in its modern form in Britain on the eve of “enlightenment.”

In 1679, Parliament passed 31 Cha. 2 c. 2, better known as the Habeas Corpus Act. Although there had been an earlier Habeas Corpus Act in 1641 and others subsequently passed in 1803, 1804, 1816, and 1862, the Act of 1679 remains one of the most important events in modern legal history because of how substantially it limited the power of the state over the individual.15 Specifically, the act laid out for the first time explicit procedures and timelines for carrying out the writ: it mandated near-immediate issue and return within three days, and it enabled those detained to appeal for a writ of habeas corpus even when courts were not in session. The act also established penalties for delaying trials and introduced fines for judges who refused to grant the writ, thereby incentivizing its strict enforcement. Prior to 1679, habeas corpus had been widely abused by agents of the state. For example, it was not unusual for members of the Privy Council to move detainees to secret prisons without due process; and while a number of measures were introduced to limit these abuses, most went unenforced.16 The 1641 Habeas Corpus Act—the first explicitly named for the writ—stripped the Privy Council of its jurisdiction over civil matters and abolished the Star Chamber, which was “a notorious tribunal used by the Crown to circumvent judicial scrutiny over detainments.”17 When Charles I was dethroned, Parliament suspended habeas corpus for his supporters, and this fueled Charles II’s attacks on Parliament when the monarchy was restored in the 1660s. Exactly why it was revisited in 1679 remains unclear due to a lack of documentation on the matter.18 However, as summarized by nineteenth-centu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Liberty and Death
• Chapter 2 Chained to Life and Misery
• Chapter 3 Writ in Water
• Chapter 4 In Sympathy
• Chapter 5 Marvelous Boys
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover