Sites Unseen

Architecture, Race, and American Literature

William A. Gleason

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780814732489
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Sites Unseen examines the complex intertwining of race and architecture in nineteenth and early-twentieth century American culture, the period not only in which American architecture came of age professionally in the U.S. but also in which ideas about architecture became a prominent part of broader conversations about American culture, history, politics, and—although we have not yet understood this clearly—race relations. This rich and copiously illustrated interdisciplinary study explores the ways that American writing between roughly 1850 and 1930 concerned itself, often intensely, with the racial implications of architectural space primarily, but not exclusively, through domestic architecture.

In addition to identifying an archive of provocative primary materials, Sites Unseen draws significantly on important recent scholarship in multiple fields ranging from literature, history, and material culture to architecture, cultural geography, and urban planning. Together the chapters interrogate a variety of expressive American vernacular forms, including the dialect tale, the novel of empire, letters, and pulp stories, along with the plantation cabin, the West Indian cottage, the Latin American plaza, and the “Oriental” parlor. These are some of the overlooked plots and structures that can and should inform a more comprehensive consideration of the literary and cultural meanings of American architecture. Making sense of the relations between architecture, race, and American writing of the long nineteenth century—in their regional, national, and hemispheric contexts— Sites Unseen provides a clearer view not only of this catalytic era but also more broadly of what architectural historian Dell Upton has aptly termed the social experience of the built environment.

1
Cottage Desire

The Bondwoman’s Narrative and the Politics of Antebellum Space

I learned to see freedom as always and intimately linked to the issue of transforming space.

—bell hooks, “House, 20 June 1994”

Near the end of Hannah Crafts’s novel The Bondwoman’s Narrative, on the run from the North Carolina plantation of her final owners, the escaped slave narrator Hannah seeks a night’s rest in the deep woods. For two weeks she has moved slowly north, seeking shelter and sustenance where she can find it, always anxious she will be discovered and reenslaved: “In every shadow I beheld, as in every voice I heard a pursuer.” Although she has spent some of her fugitive nights in the houses of “kind and hospitable” people touched by her cover story—dressed as a young man, she is passing as a destitute orphan seeking relatives in the North—on this particular night, having learned that a paper describing her “exact size and figure” (albeit in female apparel) is circulating the countryside, Hannah avoids “the habitations of men.” She finally “compose[s]” herself to sleep “in the friendly shelter of a small thicket,” feeling “almost happy in the consciousness of perfect security.” In the middle of the night, however, Hannah is awakened by the sound of voices. Peering through a gap in the thicket, she sees two other people—also fugitive slaves—making beds of dry leaves not far from her own temporary shelter. They, too, have sought security in the woods. “We will rest here,” says one; “I think we can do so in perfect safety.” What had been a private shelter, it would seem, is now a fugitive neighborhood. The distinction the novel makes between habitations that threaten and those that protect is heightened by an uncanny dream Hannah has later that night. Having watched the newcomers prepare themselves for sleep, Hannah herself begins to drowse. “Presently my thoughts became confused, with that pleasing bewilderment which precedes slumber,” she relates. But bewilderment quickly turns to hallucination: “I began to lose consciousness of my identity, and the recollection of where I was. Now it seemed that Lindendale rose before me, then it was the jail, and anon the white towers of Washington, and—but the scene all faded; for I slept.”¹

On one level Hannah’s hallucinatory tableau signals the tremendous anxiety that the presence of two strangers near her hideaway might produce. Even though the couple do not appear to pose an immediate threat—one is deliriously ill, the other preoccupied with making his companion comfortable—Hannah’s watchfulness suggests that the sense of “perfect security” engendered by her temporary abode has indeed been breached, until in her drowsy state she imagines she is no longer safe in her “friendly shelter” at all but in a succession of built spaces patrolled by whites. These decidedly unfriendly (and, for Hannah, unfree) spaces—plantation, prison, metropolis—rise before her like specters, ghostly architectural hauntings from her enslaved past. To be returned to one of them at this point in the narrative would likely mean reenslavement instead of freedom, which is why Hannah experiences her momentary dissolution of identity (who am I?) in spatial terms (where am I?). On another level, this tableau also signals the text’s deep interest in the shaping power of architectural form and epitomizes what one might call the broader architectural consciousness of the novel. The succession of spaces that rises in Hannah’s confused imagination recapitulates, in the order in which they appear, the locations anchoring three of the main stages of the text: the plantation from which she first escapes; the jail in which she is imprisoned after her recapture; and the cityscape to which she is removed by her final owner. Hannah’s hallucinatory tableau, that is, can be read not merely as a sign of one character’s anxiety but also as a partial map of the novel’s larger fascination with the uses and meanings of physical space under the system of chattel slavery.² For The Bondwoman’s Narrative, as this episode makes clear, is a text not only concerned with, but in many ways structured by, the architectural forms of both bondage and freedom.

An examination of the role of these forms in the novel will shed light on specific authorial tactics as well as more general mid-nineteenth-century cultural practices. It will be instructive to consider the text’s use of built forms not only in the context of midcentury architectural and landscape theory but also in relation to the ideological uses to which representations of architecture were frequently put in contemporary debates over slavery. For as we shall see, The Bondwoman’s Narrative is attentive not only to architecture as fact (to actual examples of and physical developments within American building practice) but to architecture as a powerful literary trope—and even, in the end, as a narrative mode. Of particular interest to me is this novel’s sophisticated awareness of the intricate relays between race and the built environment in antebellum America, relays often unarticulated by other prominent shapers of ideas about mid-nineteenth-century domestic space. I will propose a reading of The Bondwoman’s Narrative as an implicit engagement with—and transformation of—the architectural imaginations of such disparate writers as Andrew Jackson Downing and Charles Dickens, from whose works The Bondwoman’s Narrative liberally borrows (and, in Downing’s case, also sharply critiques). Following bell hooks, who has observed that “many [black] narratives of struggle and resistance, from the time of slavery to the present, share an obsession with the politics of space, particularly the need to construct and build houses,”³ I will trace in particular the persistence in Crafts’s text of what one might call “cottage desire”: a powerful yearning for independent black homeownership that is activated in the novel’s earliest scenes, reaffirmed in fleeting moments throughout the text (including the temporary abode Hannah builds for herself in the woods and the possibilities for “neighborhood” suggested by the arrival of the newcomers), but only finally realized in the closing pages. I will also note how Hannah’s gender, here deliberately masked by her cross-dressed disguise, also shapes her experience of the built environment within slavery. Whoever penned this text—“Hannah Crafts” herself, a different escaped slave, or yet another figure⁴ —The Bondwoman’s Narrative emerges today as a fresh and frank examination of the highly charged politics of space at once shaped and navigated by both black and white Americans in the decade preceding the Civil War.

Splendid Cottage, Lowly Mansion

The Bondwoman’s Narrative signals its interest in architectural space long before Hannah’s hallucination in the woods. Indeed, the novel’s opening chapter, in which Hannah describes her childhood in slavery, makes extensive use of architectural spaces and metaphors as Crafts sets the scene for the story to follow. After explaining that her labors as a slave are “about the house” (6) rather than in the field, Hannah frames the story of her early years between two starkly contrasting structures whose interiors dominate the opening chapter. The first of these is “the little cottage just around the foot of the hill” to which as a young girl Hannah is invited for clandestine reading lessons by Aunt Hetty, an elderly northern woman who has noticed Hannah “ponder[ing] over the pages of some old book” (7) while the other slave children are at play. Hannah has never been in a cottage home before. She reflects: “I was surprised at the smallness yet perfect neatness of her dwelling, at the quiet and orderly repose that reigned in through all its appointments; it was in such pleasing contrast to our great house with its bustle, confusion, and troops of servants of all ages and colors” (8). In time Hannah discovers that Aunt Hetty and her husband had once lived in a great house of their own before being reduced to narrower means. “Wealth had been theirs, with all the appliances of luxury, and they became poor through a series of misfortunes,” Hannah explains. “Yet as they had borne riches with virtuous moderation they conformed to poverty with subdued content, and readily exchanged the splendid mansion for the lowly cottage” (9).

The careful counterweighting in this last sentence, in which the sound pattern of “they had borne” is echoed in the partnered clause, “they conformed,” and the phrase “virtuous moderation” is balanced by the chiastically meritorious “subdued content,” heightens the ironic nobility of the house exchange described in the final line. For as the narrator suggests, the aged couple’s “lowly” cottage, enriched by simplicity, moral goodness, and the invitation to literacy, is a more truly “splendid” space than that of any mansion in the text—certainly more so than the plantation estate owned by Hannah’s master, the second principal structure framing the story of her childhood. Built in the colonial period by Sir Clifford De Vincent, the paternal ancestor of Hannah’s current master, the “ancient mansion of Lindendale” (13) has been expanded by subsequent generations until there are multiple wings in this grand estate. Despite the mansion’s size, Hannah and the other slaves “whispered though no one seemed to know” that Lindendale had become “impoverished” (13). This is not literally true, at least not in the material sense. As the slaves discover when preparing the house for the master’s new bride, those portions of the mansion previously off-limits to servants conceal considerable luxuries (“what a variety of beautiful rooms, all splendid yet so different,” marvels Hannah [14]). And yet in another sense Lindendale of course is impoverished, bankrupted morally by its successive masters’ ongoing abuses of power, epitomized, as Hannah will make clear in the next chapter, by the original Sir Clifford’s brutal punishment of the elderly slave Rose and her dog, whom he suspends without food or water from the branches of a giant linden tree until they die gruesomely from exposure.

Hannah considers this legacy of abuse—and has a presentiment of its present incarnation—in a lengthy interior scene that closes the first chapter. Asked by the housekeeper to shut some windows in a distant apartment of the mansion the night before the new bride’s arrival, Hannah (now several years older than at the beginning of the chapter) “thread[s] the long galleries” of the house on her way to the “southern turret,” which formerly housed the De Vincents’ drawing room.⁵ In a tradition begun by Sir Clifford, this room is “adorned with a long succession of family portraits ranged against the walls in due order of age and ancestral dignity” (15). Every Lindendale master since Sir Clifford has hung paired paintings of himself and his wife in this gallery, with the sole exception of Hannah’s bachelor owner, who in defiance of his ancestor’s wishes has displayed, prematurely, only his own portrait. Hannah interrupts her housekeeping duties to examine this pictorial mausoleum:

Memories of the dead give at any time a haunting air to a silent room. How much more this becomes the case when standing face to face with their pictured resemblances and looking into the stony eyes motionless and void of expression as those of an exhumed corpse. But even as I gazed the golden light of sunset penetrating through the open windows in an oblique direction set each rigid feature in a glow. Movements like those of life came over the line of stolid faces as the shadows of a linden played there. (16)

To Hannah’s surprise, in their lifelike movements the faces in the portraits assume expressions they “never wore in life” (16), appearing kind, gracious, relaxed. All, that is, except Hannah’s master, who undergoes a contradictory transformation. In place of his “usually kind and placid expression,” Mr. Vincent’s face becomes wrathful and gloomy, “the calm brow… wrinkled with passion, the lips turgid with malevolence” (17). This puzzling change reinforces the splendid/lowly architectural inversion at the heart of the chapter: just at the moment Hannah is most impressed by her owner’s material prestige (“we thought our master must be a very great man to have so much wealth at his command” [14]), he is flashed forth as a gilded criminal. “It never occurred to us to inquire whose sweat and blood and unpaid labor had contributed to produce [this splendor],” Hannah had pointedly observed at the beginning of the scene (14). The disturbing intimation of her master’s hidden malevolence at scene’s end betokens Hannah’s rising awareness of the base corruptions that underwrite mansion glory.

If this reinforcement of the splendid/lowly inversion were all that the portrait scene accomplished in the novel, one might be tempted to write it off as a kind of gothic trick, or simply an allusion to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s manipulations of the ancestral portrait of Colonel Pyncheon that hangs in his own architectural fiction, The House of the Seven Gables (1851). But Crafts further complicates the cottage/mansion dichotomy. Despite the looming presence of the ancient masters and the room’s presentiment of “tragedy” (17), the enslavers’ gallery helps Hannah feel oddly free, making this space unexpectedly consonant with the cottage home in which she had learned to read. Rather than flee the portrait hall, she lingers. “I was not a slave with these pictured memorials of the past,” she explains. “They could not enforce drudgery, or condemn me on account of my color to a life of servitude. As their companion I could think and speculate. In their presence my mind seemed to run riotous and exult in its freedom as a rational being, and one destined for something higher and better than this world can afford” (17). Such feelings recall Hannah’s awakening in the cottage: “I felt like a being to whom a new world with all its mysteries and marvels was opening” (8). Other unexpected similarities connect the plantation gallery to the cottage home. Both, for example, are figured as quiet retreats. Much as Hannah finds pleasure in escaping the “bustle” and “confusion” (8) of the big house when she steals away to the cottage, Mr. Vincent, she notes, withdraws to the southern turret when he is tired of the “noise and bustle and turmoil” (15) of the plantation estate. It is as though the drawing room, in its “retired situation” (15), is itself a kind of “cottage” space.

I will have more to say in the next section about the specific interest of The Bondwoman’s Narrative in mid-nineteenth-century cottage or “country house” architecture. But let me close here by describing one more example of Crafts’s pervasive use of architecture in the opening chapter, in this case a subtle counterpointing that centers on the misactivation of an architectural metaphor. Having discovered that other slaves, particularly children, trust and confide in her, Hannah wishes to instruct them as the aged couple has instructed her. Hannah expresses this desire in an apt, even routine, architectural metaphor: “How I longed to become their teacher and open the door of knowledge to their minds by instructing them to read” (12; my emphasis). Two paragraphs (if some few months) later, however, it is the literal yet undesired opening of a door that shatters this dream:

The door [to the cottage] suddenly opened without warning, and the overseer of my master’s estate walked into the house. My horror, and grief, and astonishment were indescribable. I felt Oh how much more than I tell. He addressed me rudely, and bade me begone home on the instant. I durst not disobey, but retreating through the doorway I glanced back at the calm sedate countenances of the aged couple, who were all unmoved by the torrent of threats and invectives he poured out against them. (12)

Her surreptitious studies exposed, Hannah must retreat through the very doorway whose sudden opening, ironically, brings to a close her halcyon days in the cottage. It is with much additional irony that the overseer bids Hannah “begone home,” when it is the cottage, not the mansion, that has become her true home.⁶ Indeed, after this expulsion from the cottage Hannah will spend much of the novel searching in vain for other authentic “cottage” spaces. Not until she has escaped slavery altogether will she rediscover the structure she yearns for, and with it—by starting “a school for colored children” (237)—reopen the door that the overseer had metaphorically slammed shut.

To Elevate and Purify

Before the middle of the nineteenth century, for any American, slave or free, to yearn for a cottage would have been decidedly perverse. The term itself scarcely registers in the American architectural vocabulary before 1800, particularly in the South, and when “cottage” was used it tended to designate substandard housing.⁷ By the 1850s, however, cottage structures were one of the most popular topics in American architectural treatises and pattern books. No longer chiefly suggestive of inadequate means, cottages had become respectable, even desirable, rural housing.

A motive force behind this radical reimagining of cottage space in the U.S.—for it was not so much the literal buildings that changed as the ideas behind them—was American landscape architect Andrew Jackson Downing. Strongly influenced by British models (in England, a similar transformation had occurred a generation earlier), Downing popularized for American audiences the new cottage ideal. After devoting his first book, A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening (1841), primarily to landscape design, Downing turned more fully in his 1842 volume, Cottage Residences, to domestic architecture. In the preface to Cottage Residences Downing objected that contemporary American dwellings were too often “carelessly and ill-contrived,” resulting in “clumsy” and “unpleasing” structures.⁸ His remedy for these ills was to nurture a more thorough appreciation for beauty in even the most humble of houses, particularly the rural cottage. “So closely are the Beautiful and the True allied,” he wrote, “that we shall find, if we become sincere lov...