1
Bodily Bonds
The Intersecting Rhetorics of Feminism and Abolition
As Lydia Maria Child tells it in 1836, the story of the woman and the story of the slave are the same story.
I have been told of a young physician who went into the far Southern states to settle, and there became in love with a very handsome and modest girl who lived in service. He married her; and about a year after the event a gentleman called at the house and announced himself as Mr. J. of Mobile. He said to Dr. W., "Sir, I have a trifling affair of business to settle with you. You have married a slave of mine." The young physician resented the language; for he had not entertained the slightest suspicion that the girl had any other than white ancestors since the flood. But Mr. J. furnished proofs of his claim . . .
Convinced, and under the threat of having his wife sold at public auction, the doctor bought her for eight hundred dollars. When he informed her of the purchase, "the poor woman burst into tears and said, 'That as Mr. J. was her own father , she had hoped that when he heard she had found an honorable protector he would have left her in peace.' "[1] The horror of the story lies in the perversion of an almost fairytale courtship—complete with a suitor who has traveled far, a modest girl, and love—into an economic transaction, and the perversion of the bonds of paternity into the profits of bondage. It is the collapse of the assumed difference between family and slavery that makes this anecdote so disturbing: the institutions of marriage and slavery are not merely analogous, they are coextensive and indistinguishable. The passages of the woman from father to husband and of the slave from one
master to another are conflated. The new husband and the new master are one man, needing only one name, for bourgeois idealizations of marriage and Southern apologies for slavery both consider him an honorable protector.
This merger of slavery and marriage redefines love and protection as terms of ownership, thereby identifying the modest girl, object of this love and honorable protection, as an object of transaction. Significantly, Child places her story within a section of her Anti-Slavery Catechism that asserts the difficulty of distinguishing the bodies of slaves from the bodies of free people. Indeed the story concludes a catalogue of bodily features ("nose prominent," "tibia of the leg straight") that do not protect one from enslavement.[2] In this story the composite of bodily traits that identify a girl as marriageable proves misleading, putting into question the presumption that the body can provide reliable information about the institutional and racial status of the whole person. What matters about the girl for Child's purposes is that a doctor intimately acquainted with her flesh perceives no hint of blackness.[3] If the body is an inescapable sign of identity, it is also an insecure and often illegible sign.
In Child's story the conflation of woman and slave, and of marriage and bondage, results from difficulties in interpreting the human body. The problems of having, representing, or interpreting a body structure both feminist and abolitionist discourses; indeed the rhetorics of the two reforms meet upon the recognition that for both women and blacks their physical difference from the cultural norms of white masculinity obstructs their claim to personhood. Thus the social and political goals of feminism and abolition depend upon an act of representation, the inscription of black and female bodies into the discourse of personhood. Despite this similarity of aims, the alliance attempted by feminist-abolitionist texts is never particularly easy or equitable. Although the identifications of woman and slave, marriage and slavery that characterize these texts may occasionally prove mutually empowering, such pairings generally tend toward asymmetry and exploitation. This chapter interrogates the intersection of
antebellum feminist and abolitionist discourses by examining the attitudes toward black and female bodies revealed there, how these two types of bodies are equated, and the inevitable costs of such equations. The composite term that names this intersection, feminist-abolitionist , has come into currency with the writings of twentieth-century historians. Women involved in the abolitionist and woman's rights movements also tended to advocate temperance, to oppose prostitution, and to reform schools, prisons, and diets; they referred to themselves as "universal reformers." My use of the term feminist-abolitionist is thus an anachronistic convenience: the hyphen neatly articulates the very connections and distinctions that I intend to explore. In this chapter I focus on writings in which the rhetorical crossings of women and slaves predominate: the political speeches and pamphlets that equate the figure of the woman and the figure of the slave; the sentimental novels and giftbook stories in which antislavery women attempt to represent the slave and more obliquely depict their own fears and desires, so that the racial and the sexual come to displace one another; and the more conservative Sunday-school primers that, in trying to domesticate slavery, recast its oppressions in familial terms, demonstrating the complicity of the two institutions and hence the degree to which domestic and sentimental antislavery writings are implicated in the very oppressions they seek to reform.
The intersection of antebellum feminist and abolitionist projects, organizations, and rhetoric has been frequently interrogated, though the historical implications of the connections remain controversial.[4] In particular, accounts of the beginnings of American feminism have debated the nature of this intersection, arguing over the extent to which the male abolitionist tradition can be credited for the development of feminist political activism and ideology. Did women's consciousness of their own oppression derive from the analogies between the position of women and that of slaves revealed by abolitionist analysis?[5] Or did the "protofeminist" sensibilities of those female benevolence and reform organizations that
predate the radical activities of abolitionist women provide a sufficient source for a feminist ideology?[6] Did the abolitionist movement simply offer an education in political strategies and analysis to women who were already well aware of their inferior status?[7] Or did the antagonism that met and attempted to silence female antislavery agents prove the final outrage, catalyzing the feminist movement?[8] Identifying origins and tracing influences, the questions raised by historians have treated the overlapping concerns of feminists and abolitionists merely as signs and symptoms of these causal relations. The questions I ask in this chapter focus not on the causal links between these two movements, but on the nature of their coincidence, since it is within the space where feminism and abolition overlap that they most directly confront the bodily grounds of the period's disparate threats to personhood. This space is not, of course, simply a scene of concord. In replacing a causal inquiry with a study of conceptual and rhetorical intersections, I demonstrate that the issues of appropriation (who owes what to whom) at stake in the historians' debates were first manifested in the feminist-abolitionists' often conflicting attitudes toward black and female bodies.
Feminists and abolitionists were acutely aware of the dependence of personhood on the condition of the human body, since the political and legal subordination of both women and slaves was predicated upon biology. Medical treatises of the period consistently assert that a woman's psyche and intellect are determined by her reproductive organs.[9] Indeed, to the political satirist, the leaders of the woman's rights movement are nothing but wombs in constant danger of parturition:
How funny it would sound in the newspapers, that Lucy Stone, pleading a cause, took suddenly ill in the pains of parturition, and perhaps gave birth to a fine bouncing boy in court; or that Rev. Antonia Brown was arrested in the middle of her sermon in the pulpit from the same cause, and presented a "pledge" to her husband and the congregation. . . . A similar event might happen on the floor of Congress, in a
storm at sea, or in the raging tempest of battle, and then what is to become of the woman legislator?[10]
In this lampoon the reproductive function interrupts and replaces women's attempts to speak; their public delivery of arguments, sermons, and service is superseded by the delivery of children. The joke betrays male fear of female fertility while fashioning the woman's womb and its relentless fecundity into a silencing gag.
The body of the black was similarly thought to define his or her role as servant and laborer. Subservience, one Southern doctor explained, was built into the very structure of African bones. The black was made "submissive knee-bender" by the decree of the Almighty, for "in the anatomical conformation of his knees, we see 'genu flexit' written in his physical structure, being more flexed or bent than any other kind of man."[11] As God writes "subservience" upon the body of the black, in Latin, of course, the doctor reads it; or, more crudely, as the master inscribes his name with hot irons ("he is branded on the forehead with the letters A.M. and on each cheek with the letters J.G."), or the fact of slavery with scars ("his back shows lasting impressions of the whip , and leaves no doubt of his being a slave "), the body of the slave attains the status of a text.[12] Thus the bodies of women and slaves were read against them, so that for both the human body functions as the foundation not only of a general subjection but also of a specific exclusion from political discourse. For women and slaves the ability to speak was predicated upon the reinterpretation of their flesh. They share a strategy of liberation: to invert patriarchal readings and so reclaim the body. Transformed from a silent site of oppression into a symbol of that oppression, the body becomes within feminist-abolitionist discourse a means of gaining rhetorical force.
Though the female body, and particularly female sexual desires, are at least covertly inscribed within feminist-abolitionist texts, the paradigmatic body reclaimed in these writings is that of the slave. The slave, so explicitly an object to be sold, provides feminism, as well as abolition, with its most graphic example of the extent to which the human body
may designate identity. "The denial of our duty to act [against slavery] is a denial of our right to act," wrote Angelina Grimké in 1837, "and if we have no right to act then may we well be termed the 'white slaves of the North' for like our brethren in bonds, we must seal our lips in silence and despair."[13] As I have already suggested, the alliance between black bodies and female bodies achieved by the rhetorical crossing of feminist-abolitionist texts was not necessarily equitable. Grimké grounds her right to act and speak on her identification with the muteness of the slave. Yet in so claiming this right she differentiates herself from her "brethren" in bonds. The bound and silent figure of the slave represents the woman's oppression and so grants the white woman access to political discourse denied the slave, exemplifying the way in which slave labor produces—both literally and metaphorically—even the most basic of freedom's privileges.[14]
In feminist writings the metaphoric linking of women and slaves proves ubiquitous: marriage and property laws, the conventional adoption of a husband's name, or even the length of fashionable skirts are explained and decried by reference to women's "slavery."[15] This strategy emphasizes the restrictions of woman's sphere, and, despite luxuries and social civilities, classes the bourgeois woman among the oppressed. Sarah Grimké, beginning her survey of the condition of women with ancient history, notes that "the cupidity of man soon led him to regard woman as property, and hence we find them sold to those who wished to marry them," while within marriage, as defined by nineteenth-century laws of coverture, "the very being of a woman, like that of a slave, is absorbed in her master."[16] "A woman," Elizabeth Cady Stanton explains to the Woman's Rights Convention of 1856, "has no name! She is Mrs. John or James, Peter or Paul, just as she changes masters; like the Southern slave, she takes the name of her owner."[17]
The image of the slave evoked not simply the loss of "liberty," but the loss of all claims to self-possession, including the possession of one's body. At stake in the feminists' likening of women to slaves is the recognition that personhood
can be annihilated and a person owned, absorbed, and unnamed. The irony inherent in such comparisons is that the enlightening and empowering motions of identification that connect feminism and abolition come inextricably bound to a process of absorption not unlike the one that they expose. Though the metaphoric linking of women and slaves uses their shared position as bodies to be bought, owned, and designated as a grounds of resistance, it nevertheless obliterates the particularity of black and female experience, making their distinct exploitations appear identical. The difficulty of preventing moments of identification from becoming acts of appropriation constitutes the essential dilemma of feminist-abolitionist rhetoric.
The body of the woman and the body of the slave need not, of course, merge only through metaphor, and it is hardly surprising that the figure of the female slave features prominently in both discourses. Yet even in the case of the literally enslaved woman, the combining of feminist and abolitionist concerns supports both reciprocal and appropriative strategies. The difference between the stereotypic cultural conceptions of black and female bodies was such that, in the crossing of feminist and abolitionist rhetoric, the status of the slave and the status of the woman could each be improved by an alliance with the body of the other. Their two sorts of bodies were prisons in different ways, and for each the prison of the other was liberating. So for the female slave, the frail body of the bourgeois lady promised not weakness but the modesty and virtue of a delicacy supposed at once physical and moral. Concern for the roughness and impropriety with which slave women were treated redefined their suffering as feminine and hence endowed with all the moral value generally attributed to nineteenth-century American womanhood.[18] Conversely for the nineteenth-century free woman there were certain assets to be claimed from the body of the slave. "Those who think the physical circumstances of women would make a part in the affairs of national government unsuitable," Margaret Fuller argues, "are by no means those who think it impossible for Negresses to endure field work
even during pregnancy."[19] The strength to plant, and hoe, and pick, and endure is available to the urban middle class woman insofar as she can be equated with the laboring slave woman, and that equation suggests the possibility of reshaping physical circumstances. Fuller's words provide a perfect example of the chiasmic alignment of abolition and woman's rights, for, though embedded within a discussion devoted to feminist concerns, this passage achieves a double efficacy, simultaneously declaring the physical strength of the woman and implying the need to protect the exploited slave.[20]
Just as the figure of the female slave served feminist rhetorical purposes, she also proved useful in abolitionist campaigns and was frequently employed to attract women to abolitionist work. William Lloyd Garrison, for example, headed the "Ladies Department" of The Liberator with the picture of a black woman on her knees and in chains; beneath it ran the plea, "Am I not a woman and a sister?"[21] Such tactics did not attempt to identify woman's status with that of the slave but relied upon the ties of sisterly sympathy, presuming that one woman would be particularly sensitive to the sufferings of another. Indeed such a strategy emphasized the difference between the free woman's condition and the bondage of the slave, since it was this difference that enabled the free woman to work for her sister's emancipation.
The particular horror and appeal of the slave woman lay in the magnitude of her sexual vulnerability, and the Ladies Department admonished its female readers to work for the immediate emancipation of their one million enslaved sisters "exposed to all the violence of lust and passion—and treated with more indelicacy and cruelty than cattle."[22] The sexual exploitation of female slaves served abolitionists as a proof that slave owners laid claim not merely to the slave's time, labor, and obedience—assets purchased, after all, with the wages paid by the Northern industrialist—but to their flesh. The abolitionist comparison of slave and cattle, like the feminist analogy between woman and slave, marks the slip from person to chattel.[23] More startling than the comparison of the slave to a cow, however, is the Ladies Department's equation
of indelicacy with cruelty, for set beside the menace of brandings, whippings, beatings, and starvation, rudeness seems an insignificant care. This concern with indelicacy becomes explicable, however, in terms of the overlap of feminist and abolitionist discourse. To the male abolitionist the application of those notions of modesty and purity that governed the world of nineteenth-century ladies to the extremely different situation of the slave must have seemed a useful strategy for gaining female support on an economic, political, and hence unfeminine issue. Viewed from this perspective the language of feminine modesty simply reinforces traditional female roles. Even here, however, the emphasis on sexual exploitation suggests that the abolitionist's easy differentiation between the free woman and the enslaved one may conceal grounds of identification. For in stressing the aspect of slavery that would seem most familiar to a female readership, the abolitionist press implicitly suggests that the Ladies Department's readers may be bound like the slaves they are urged to free.
As the Grimkés and Stanton demonstrate, feminist-abolitionists emphasize the similarities in the condition of women and slaves; nevertheless, their treatment of the figure of the sexually exploited female slave betrays an opposing desire to deny any share in this vulnerability. The same metaphoric structure that enables the identification of women and slaves can also preclude such identification. Thus in the writings of antislavery women the frequent emphasis on the specifically feminine trial of sexual abuse projects the white woman's sexual anxieties onto the sexualized body of the female slave. Concern over the slave woman's sexual victimization displaces the free woman's fear of confronting the sexual elements of her own bodily experience, either as a positive force or as a mechanism of oppression. The prevalence of such fear is illustrated by the caution with which even the most radical feminist thinkers avoid public discussion of "woman's rights in marriage"; only in their private correspondence do the leaders of the woman's rights movement allude to sexual rights. "It seems to me that we are not
ready" to bring this issue before the 1856 convention, Lucy Stone writes to Susan B. Anthony:
No two of us think alike about it, and yet it is clear to me that question underlies the whole movement, and all our little skirmishing for better laws and the right to vote, will yet be swallowed up in the real question viz.: Has woman a right to herself? It is very little to me to have the right to vote, to own property, etc., if I may not keep my body, and its uses, in my absolute right. Not one wife in a thousand can do that now.[24]
The figure of the slave woman, whose inability to keep her body and its uses under her own control is widely and openly recognized, becomes a perfect conduit for the largely unarticulated and unacknowledged failure of the free woman to own her own body in marriage. In one sense, then, it is the very indelicacy of the slave woman's position that makes her a useful proxy in such indelicate matters.
Garrison's Ladies Department attests to the importance of women to the antislavery movement. In 1833 the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society was founded as an "auxiliary" to the all-male New England Anti-Slavery Society. By 1838 there were forty-one female auxiliary societies in Massachusetts alone.[25] The function of these auxiliaries was to provide support—mostly in the form of fund-raising—for the work of the male organizations. Thus the auxiliaries behaved much like other female philanthropic or benevolence societies, and most of the women who worked in them gave no public speeches, wrote no political pamphlets, and did not see their antislavery activities as challenging the traditions of male authority and female domesticity. Nevertheless, in their work against slavery these female societies transformed conventional womanly activities into tools of political persuasion, "presenting," as Angelina Grimké explained, the slave's "kneeling image constantly before the public eye." Toward this end they stitched the pathetic figure of the manacled
slave onto bags, pincushions, and pen-wipers ("Even the children of the north are inscribing on their handiwork, 'May the points of our needles prick the slaveholders' conscience' "), and wrote virtually all of the sentimental tales that describe the slaves' sufferings.[26]
In many ways, then, the antislavery stories that abolitionist women wrote for Sunday school primers, juvenile miscellanies, antislavery newspapers, and giftbooks need to be assessed as a variety of female handiwork, refashioned for political, didactic, and pecuniary purposes. The genre is fundamentally feminine: not only were these stories—like virtually all the domestic and sentimental fiction of the period—penned primarily by women, but women also largely controlled their production, editing the giftbooks and miscellanies that contained them and publishing many of these volumes under the auspices of Female Anti-Slavery Societies.[27] The most substantial and longest-lived abolitionist publishing endeavor of this type, the Liberty Bell giftbook produced by the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, provides the most obvious illustration of these practices and one that subsequent antislavery collections sought to imitate.[28] In their efforts to raise funds, the Boston auxiliary organized an Anti-Slavery Fair, and it was for the sixth fair, as a further educational and fund-raising gesture, that the Liberty Bell was published. Under Maria Weston Chapman's skillful editorial direction it appeared at virtually every Fair from 1839 to 1858, to be sold alongside the quilts and jams.[29] The minutes of the committee for the tenth Anti-Slavery Fair claimed that the Liberty Bell "always doubles the money invested in it." Since the cost of producing the volume was three to four hundred dollars (covered by donations drawn largely from among the contributors), the committee's claim would assess the Liberty Bell at slightly less than a fifth of the fair's average proceeds of four thousand dollars a year.[30]
One important feature of the tales published in the Liberty Bell was that they were considered salable. The depiction of the slave was thought to have its own market value. The reasons the volumes sold, moreover, appear paradoxically at
odds both with each other and with abolitionist beliefs. On the one hand, the horrific events narrated in these tales attract precisely to the extent that the buyers of these representations of slavery are fascinated by the abuses they ostensibly oppose. For, despite their clear abolitionist stance, such stories are fueled by the allure of bondage, an appeal that suggests that the valuation of depictions of slavery may rest upon the same psychic ground as slaveholding itself. On the other hand, the acceptability of these tales depends upon their adherence to a feminine and domestic demeanor that softens the cruelty they describe and makes their political goals more palatable to a less politicized readership. Explaining the success of the Liberty Bell , Chapman admits as much, suggestively presenting her giftbook as a mother who treats the public "like children, to whom a medicine is made as pleasant as its nature permits. A childish mind receives a small measure of truth in gilt edges where it would reject it in 'whity-brown.' "[31] Though it was plain by giftbook standards, the embossed leather and gilded edges of the Liberty Bell permitted it to fit without apparent incongruity into any household library. Despite their subject matter, the antislavery stories it contained attempt a similar and uneasy compliance with the conventions that governed nineteenth-century domestic fiction. The contradictory nature of antislavery fiction's appeal thus raises more general questions about what it means to depict slavery and hence about the politics and power of representation.
Critics have frequently argued that sentimental fiction is an inappropriate vehicle for educating the public to slavery's real terrors.[32] This criticism, however, simply echoes the authors' own anxieties about the realism of the stories they tell. Almost every antislavery story begins by citing its source: a meeting with the hero or heroine, an account of the events in the newspaper, or most often and simply, just having been told.[33] "The truth of incidents" claimed in Harriet Beecher Stowe's preface to Uncle Tom's Cabin is documented by her subsequently published Key to the novel—the genre's most sustained and impressive attempt to demonstrate its veracity.
But her very effort to prove that her novel is "a collection and arrangement of real incidents . . . a mosaic of facts," propounds the difference between her narrative and her key to it, since "slavery, in some of its workings, is too dreadful for the purposes of art. A work which should represent it strictly as it is, would be a work which could not be read."[34] The reading of these stories, and therefore both their marketability and their political efficacy, depends upon their success in rearranging the real. The decision to rearrange it into sentimental tales is highly appropriate, not only because of the dominance of the form during the period, nor simply because of its popular appeal and consequent market value, but also because sentimental fiction constitutes an intensely bodily genre. The concern with the human body as site and symbol of the self that links the struggles of feminists and abolitionists also informs the genre in which nineteenth-century women wrote their antislavery stories.
The tears of the reader are pledged in these sentimental stories as a means of rescuing the bodies of slaves. Emblematic of this process, Child's story "Mary French and Susan Easton" relates how the white Mary, kidnapped, stained black, and sold into slavery, is quite literally freed by weeping; her true identity is revealed because "where the tears had run down her cheeks, there was a streak whiter than the rest of her face."[35] Her weeping seems to dissolve racial barriers and make Mary recognizably white. Mary's tears idealize the power of sentiment to change the condition of the human body, or at least, read symbolically, to alter how that condition is perceived.
The ability of sentimental fiction to liberate the bodies of slaves is, moreover, intimately connected to the bodily nature of the genre itself. Sentiment and feeling refer at once to emotion and to physical sensation, and in sentimental fiction these two versions of sentire blend as the eyes of readers take in the printed word and blur it with tears. Reading sentimental fiction is thus a bodily act, and the success of a story is gauged, in part, by its ability to translate words into heartbeats and sobs. This physicality of the reading
experience radically contracts the distance between narrated events and the moment of their reading, as the feelings in the story are made tangibly present in the flesh of the reader. In particular, tears designate a border realm between the story and its reading, since the tears shed by characters initiate an answering moistness in the reader's eye.[36] The assurance in this fiction that emotion can be attested and measured by physical response makes this conflation possible; the palpability of the character's emotional experience is precisely what allows it to be shared. In sentimental fiction bodily signs are adamantly and repeatedly presented as the preferred and most potent mechanisms both for communicating meaning and for marking the fact of its transmission.[37]
Sentimental narrative functions through stereotypes, so that upon first encountering a character there is no difficulty in ascertaining his or her moral worth. In sentimental writing the self is externally displayed, and the body provides a reliable sign of who one is. Nina Gordon, the heroine of Dred (Stowe's other antislavery novel), develops an instinctive goodness more potent than her lover Edward Clayton's principled virtue. In her instantaneous and unproblematic discrimination of good from evil, Nina provides a paradigm for reading the novel that contains her.
Looking back almost fiercely, a moment, she turned and said to Clayton:
"I hate that man!"
"Who is it?" said Clayton.
"I don't know!" said Nina. "I never saw him before. But I hate him! He is a bad man! I'd as soon have a serpent come near me as that man!"
"Well, the poor fellow's face isn't prepossessing," said Clayton. "But I should not be prepared for such an anathema. . . . How can you be so positive about a person you've only seen once!" . . .
"Oh," said Nina, resuming her usual gay tones, "don't you know that girls and dogs, and other inferior creatures, have the gift of seeing what's in people? It doesn't belong to highly cultivated folks like you, but to us poor creatures, who have to trust to our instincts. So, beware!"[38]
Skill in reading the body of the stranger does not belong to the highly cultivated man who talks of what is prepossessing and what an anathema but to girls who hate and will call a man bad. To Nina Mr. Jekyl's face is "very repulsive," and in feeling herself repelled, pushed away by his visage, she weighs the evidence of his character in the reaction of her body to his body. Jokingly shared with dogs, the girl's capacity to read signs by instinct is as physical as the traits it correctly interprets. The succeeding chapters prove the accuracy of Nina's reaction to Mr. Jekyl, and so endorse her and the sentimental novel's mechanisms of assessment.[39]
Nina Gordon is the ideal reader of all sentimental fiction, not simply of antislavery tales, but her ability to read bodies correctly is more important for antislavery fiction, in which the physical vocabulary has been suddenly enlarged to include very different-looking bodies that make the interpretive task more difficult. The problem, for the antislavery writer, lies in depicting a black body that can be instantly recognized not only as a loyal or a rebellious servant, but also as a hero or a heroine. Stowe introduces Dred:
He was a tall black man, of magnificent stature and proportions. His skin was intensely black, and polished like marble. A loose shirt of red flannel, which opened very wide at the breast, gave a display of a neck and chest of herculean strength. The sleeves of the shirt, rolled up nearly to the shoulders, showed the muscles of a gladiator. The head, which rose with an imperial air from the broad shoulders, was large and massive, and developed with equal force both in the reflective and perceptive department. The perceptive organs jutted like dark ridges over the eyes, while that part of the head which phrenologists attribute to moral and intellectual sentiments rose like an ample dome above them.[40]
A magnificent, herculean, and imperial gladiator—with these words Stowe arrays Dred in the vocabulary of classical heroism. That gladiators were often slaves only strengthens the claims Stowe desires to make for this slave. The density of such terms, however, equally evinces her sense of the difficulty of granting and sustaining Dred's heroic status. She therefore supplements her attempt to fashion Dred into a pol-
ished black marble icon of classical heroism with the pseudo-scientific language of phrenology. The phrenologist, like the reader of sentimental fiction, reads internal characteristics from the external signs offered by the body. By enlisting the phrenologist in her descriptive task, Stowe garners the authority of study for what she has previously presented as instinctual knowledge. Her need for these multiple buttresses attests to the frailty of this structure. The precariousness of Dred's heroic stature is all the more telling because in Stowe's description the heroic and the phrenological have combined to present him less as a man than as a monument. A structure of magnificent proportions crowned by an ample dome, this massive figure of polished marble achieves a truly architectural splendor. Stowe has not so much described Dred as built his body.
Stowe's difficulty in creating a slave-hero is best demonstrated, however, not by the body she constructs him in but by the features she silently omits. For though Stowe describes Dred as having eyes of that "unfathomable blackness and darkness which is often a striking characteristic of the African eye," she avoids detailing the rest of his visage. In "The Slave-Wife" Frances Green, less sensitive to the racism that underlies this dilemma, gives her hero, Laco Ray, a face that exemplifies Stowe's problem:
Tall, muscular, and every way well-proportioned, he had the large expansion of chest and shoulders that are seen in the best representations of Hercules. He was quite black, the skin soft and glossy; but the features had none of the revolting characteristics which are supposed by some to be inseparable from the African visage. On the contrary they were remarkably fine—the nose aquiline—the mouth even handsome—the forehead singularly high and broad.[41]
Green's Laco Ray inhabits in 1845 virtually the same body Stowe gives to Dred in 1856, confirming the genre's reliance on stereotypes: every hero, even a black one, is simply another in a familiar series of "best representations of Hercules." In making her black Hercules, however, Green registers her need to reject "the revolting characteristics" of nose,
mouth, and brow that she criticizes others for supposing "inseparable from the African visage." Her desire to separate them is, obviously, as suspect as the assumption of their inseparability. Her own insecurity about attaining such a separation betrays itself in adverbs as she constantly modifies her description to emphasize its unexpectedness: remarkably fine, even handsome, singularly high and broad; what she finds most exceptional about Laco Ray's features is that they belong to him. Making a black hero involves not only dyeing the traditional figure of the hero to a darker hue, but also separating blackness from the configuration of traits that in the bodily grammar of sentimental fiction signals revulsion. In replacing or omitting revolting features, both Green and Stowe remake the black body to mold the slave into a hero. These features revolt, moreover, not only because they fail to conform to white criteria for beauty but, more interestingly, because they threaten to overturn sentimental fiction's stable matrix of bodily signs.
The project of depicting the body of the sympathetic black thus becomes a project of racial amalgamation. Child's story of Mary French's transition, from white to black and back to white again, begins with an idyllic scene in which Mary and her free-black playmate Susan frolic with a white and black spotted rabbit. In its alternating patches of color, the rabbit presents an ideal of amalgamation that would not blur racial distinctions into mulatto indifferentiation but rather preserve the clarity of difference without the hierarchies of valuation imposed by prejudice. The problem in Child's story, as in those of Stowe and Green, is that this sort of equality in difference becomes impossible to maintain. Susan, kidnapped with Mary, cannot prove her right to freedom by her bodily traits; her father (afraid of being kidnapped himself) cannot search for her; and Mary's father does nothing to pursue this search once he has redeemed his own daughter. Thus the tears produced by sentimental fiction offer a merely self-reflexive liberation: white tears may free Mary's white body, but they can do nothing for Susan's black one.
The racial prejudice implicit in Child's only half-happy ending is obviously one of her points. Nevertheless her concluding remarks instance just such racial hierarchy. "The only difference between Mary French and Susan Easton is," she explains, "that the black color could be rubbed off from Mary's skin, while from Susan's it could not."[42] Despite her clear desire for a different answer, the only solution to racial prejudice Child's story can offer is rubbing off blackness, and, though she does not say this, it is impossible to imagine what one could produce by such a purging except whiteness.[43] If Mary's liberating tears offer, as I have argued, a perfect emblem for sentimental fiction's power to emancipate, that emblem includes the recognition that the freedom it offers depends upon the black being washed white.[44] The problem of antislavery fiction is that the very effort to depict goodness in black involves the obliteration of blackness.[45]
Child's story challenges the prevalent bodily vocabulary that interprets dark skin as an unvarying sign of slavery: for Susan, being black and being a slave are not the same thing. Yet whatever Susan's "right to be free," even under antebellum law, the blackness of her body is itself described as a form of enslavement, and one that no act of emancipation can rub off. The painful longing for such an emancipation from one's own skin is explored in Eliza Lee Follen's story "A Melancholy Boy." Throughout most of this story Follen relates a series of anecdotes about the good but inexplicably unhappy Harry, without in any way describing his physical appearance, though the publication of this piece in the Liberty Bell would prompt readers to expect that some abolitionist issue is at stake. In the last paragraph of her tale, Follen "discover[s] the cause of Harry's melancholy":
I was returning from a walk, and saw him at a little brook that ran behind my house, washing his face and hands vehemently, and rubbing them very hard. I then remembered that I had often seen him there doing the same thing. "It seems to me, Harry," I said, "that your face and hands are clean now; and why do you rub your face so violently?" "I am trying," he said, "to wash away this color; I can never be happy till I get rid of this color. . . ."[46]
Harry does not name his color, though he does distinguish himself from the other boys: "they are all white." Follen too refrains from naming "this color," so that the story centers upon the absence of the word black . Both Harry and Follen attempt to escape his blackness, not only by violent scrubbings but also by suppressing the word that names it. In Harry's hopeless efforts to attain personhood through the denial of his body, antislavery fiction locates the problems of representation established by the encounter between sentimental narration and abolitionist ideals within the psyche of the very entity it wishes to represent.
With its reliance on the body as the privileged structure for communicating meaning, sentimental fiction thus constantly reinscribes the troubling relation between personhood and corporeality that underlies the projects of both abolition and feminism. The issues I have been exploring are not peripheral to feminist concerns, for by responding to the representational problems posed by the black body with a rhetoric of racial amalgamation, the women who wrote these antislavery stories encode the racial problematic within a sexual one. The "rubbing off" of blackness that characterizes antislavery fiction emulates the whitening produced by miscegenation. Moreover, miscegenation provides an essential motif of virtually all antislavery fiction, for even in those stories in which escape, slave rebellion, or the separation of families dominate the plot, its multiple challenges suffuse the text. My identification of the human body as the site at which feminist and abolitionist discourses intersect can be further particularized in the images of the black woman's rape by the white man; or their unsanctioned, unprotected, and unequal love; or the always suppressed possibility of the white woman's desire for the black man; or the black man's never sufficiently castrated attraction to the white woman; or, most of all, in the ubiquitous light-skinned slave whose body attests to the sexual mingling of black and white. Though it
marks the intersection of abolitionist and feminist discourses, the body of the light-skinned slave means differently for each of them: the less easily race can be read from this flesh, the more clearly the white man's repeated penetrations of the black body are imprinted there. The quadroon's one-fourth blackness represents two generations of miscegenating intercourse, the octoroon's three—their numerical names attesting to society's desire to keep track of an ever less visible black ancestry even at the cost of counting the generations of institutionalized sexual exploitation.
Critical discussions of the mulattoes, quadroons, and octoroons who figure in these texts have dealt almost exclusively with the obvious racist allegiances that make a light-skinned hero or heroine more attractive to a white audience, and that presume that the feelings of identification so essential for sentimental fiction cannot cross race lines.[47] I am not interested in defending either authors or audiences from this charge. My discussion of the rhetoric of amalgamation already suggests that the light-skinned body is valued in this fiction precisely because of its ability to mask the alien African blackness that the fictional mulatto is nevertheless purported to represent. I would contend, however, that an acknowledgment of this racism ought to inaugurate, not foreclose, discussion of antislavery fiction's fascination with miscegenation. For at stake in this obsession with the fictionalized figure of the mulatto is the essential dilemma of both feminist and abolitionist projects: that the recognition of ownership of one's own body as essential to claiming personhood is matched by the fear of being imprisoned, silenced, deprived of personhood by that same body. The fictional mulatto combines this problematics of corporeality and identity for both discourses because miscegenation and the children it produces stand as a bodily challenge to the conventions of reading the body, thus simultaneously insisting that the body is a sign of identity and undermining the assurance with which that sign can be read. Moreover, stories of miscegenation inevitably link the racial and the sexual, demonstrating the asymmetry of abolitionist and feminist concerns—and the
now familiar ways in which, by identifying with her enslaved sister, the free woman comes to betray her.
In the American South miscegenation usually took the form of the rape and concubinage of slave women by their white masters. Caroline Healey Dall's "Amy," published in the Liberty Bell of 1849, tells this story, and records in its telling the interlocking structure of patriarchy's dual systems of racial oppression and sexual exploitation. The story begins with a marriage: "In Southern fashion, Edith was not quite 16 when she was wooed and won, and borne, a willing captive, to a patriarchal dwelling." Edith's ambiguous role as a willing captive within the patriarchal systems of marriage and slaveholding becomes more sinister and more evident as the story progresses and she eventually proves willing to prostitute her slave and half sister Amy. "The offspring of a lawless and unrequited affection," Amy, Dall explains, "had, nevertheless, unconsciously dedicated her whole being to vestal chastity. But nothing availed." The problem of Amy's ancestry is not, despite prevailing cultural expectations, that as the child of lawless sexuality she has inherited lascivious desires but rather that as the child of sexual exploitation she has inherited the role of being exploited. Her body displays not only a history of past miscegenation but also a promise of future mixings.
A friend of Edith's new husband sees Amy, reads both her desirability and her vulnerability on her "graceful form," and reenacts a parodic version (or is it?) of the wooing and winning with which the story begins. The woman Charles Hartley must woo in order to win Amy is, however, not Amy but her mistress, Edith. In this transaction Amy is prostituted as much by the white woman's reluctance to discuss sex as by the white man's desire to indulge in it. For as Charles keeps pressing Edith to procure Amy for him, Edith comes to see her slave's sexual modesty as a threat to her own delicacy:
Not only did the whole subject distress her, but to be so besought on such a subject, by one until lately a stranger, was a perpetual wound to her delicacy. She felt herself losing ground in her own self-respect. Her husband regarded it as a
desecration, and repeatedly asked whether her own life was to be worn out in defense of Amy.
In the end, concurring with her husband's insistence on the sanctity of her delicacy, Edith signs the "deed of transfer."
In Dall's story the pairing of feminist and abolitionist concerns proves double-edged: for if Edith's inability to prevent male desire, or refute male conceptions of feminine purity, allies her to her powerless slaves and names her a captive of patriarchy, she nevertheless complies fully in Amy's sexual victimization. The role of feminine delicacy which she accepts is paid for not just by her own loss of efficacy but by Amy's destruction. Dall's critique of female delicacy identifies it as an essential prop both for the subordination and demoralization of women and for the exploitation of slaves. The narrative voice in which Dall tells this story, however, conforms to the requirements of the delicacy it condemns. In describing Amy as "dedicated . . . to a vestal chastity," it is the narrator, not Edith's husband, who first equates female purity with the sacred, while in calling the lust that fathered Amy "affection" Dall mitigates the very evil her story was intended to expose. The problem is that traditional notions of female purity attach both to the body—in its vulnerability to rape or enforced concubinage—and to language. The conventions of chastity count speech as a sexual assault; hence Edith can describe Charles's propositions as a "perpetual wound." Dall fears that to name explicitly the obscene events that comprise her plot would be experienced by her readers as the infliction of wounds. The cultural critique that she voices is leveled at her own prose, for in respecting the sensibilities of her readers she adheres to the dictates of a linguistic delicacy that, she has demonstrated, simultaneously protects against and inflicts physical indecencies.[48]
The sacrifice of Amy's chastity serves not only to defend Edith's delicacy but also, paradoxically, to provide her with a variety of safely mediated sexual experiences. After all, it is to Edith that Charles brings his suit for sexual favors, and—after the requisite protestations of lost self-respect—it is Edith who yields. That she can yield Amy's body rather
than her own demonstrates the usefulness of the slave woman as a surrogate for the white woman's sexuality, and particularly the usefulness of the mulatta, who in being part white and part black (and in Amy's case, being more explicitly half sibling and half not) simultaneously embodies self and other. Thus, through the prostitution of Amy, Edith gains a degree of sexual license forbidden the proper bourgeois woman.
Edith's husband and her husband's friend, however, fill virtually interchangeable roles in this narrative, both equally involved in demanding Edith's compliance. Her husband's anger over her desecration is directed at her initial defense of Amy's chastity, not at Charles's presumption in bringing the matter up. Consequently, even Edith's passive and unconscious circumvention of sexual prohibitions ultimately demonstrates that the white woman, like her slave, remains a sexual possession of the white man. In these terms fictional depictions of the slave woman's sexual vulnerability may themselves constitute an act of betrayal not unlike Edith's own, for in such stories antislavery rhetoric disguises, and so permits, the white woman's unacknowledgeable feelings of sexual victimization and desire. The insights and emotions granted to the white woman by such conflations of the racial and the sexual remain divorced from her body. If, as Lucy Stone insisted, the ability to control the "uses" of one's own body constitutes the most basic condition of freedom, then for the white woman the strongest proof that she is not owned by the white man lies in the inadmissible possibility of using her body elsewhere—a possibility only granted her, within antislavery fiction, through a vicarious reading of the body of the slave.[49]
In antislavery fiction the story of the white woman's desire for the black man is not told, and his desire for her is constantly reduced to the safer dimensions of a loyal slave's nominally asexual adoration of his good and kind mistress.[50] Child comes closest to voicing these desires not in her fiction but in her first abolitionist tract, An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans . While this book established her as
an abolitionist leader, it cost her both her popular readership (so many subscriptions to the Juvenile Miscellany were canceled by horrified parents that the series was forced to fold), and, with her expulsion from the Athenaeum, her position in Boston literary society.
Perhaps chief among the Appeal 's many challenges to societal norms was Child's call for the repeal of anti-miscegenation laws.[51] Although her attack on these discriminatory statutes explicitly distinguishes between society's refusal to sanction interracial marriage and its willingness to condone such liaisons out of wedlock, she implies that what is at stake in these contradictory attitudes is not miscegenation per se but rather the patriarchal melding of sexual and racial oppression that assures the supremacy of the white man, granting only to him the freedom to choose his sexual partners.
An unjust law exists in this Commonwealth, by which marriages between persons of different color is pronounced illegal. I am perfectly aware of the gross ridicule to which I may subject myself by alluding to this particular; but I have lived too long, and observed too much, to be disturbed by the world's mockery. . . . Under existing circumstances, none but those whose condition in life is too low to be much affected by public opinion, will form such alliances; and they, when they choose to do so, will make such marriages in spite of the law. I know two or three instances where women of the laboring class have been united to reputable, industrious colored men. These husbands regularly bring home their wages, and are kind to their families. If by some odd chances, which not unfrequently occur in the world, their wives should become heirs to any property, the children may be wronged out of it, because the law pronounces them illegitimate. And while this injustice exists with regard to honest , industrious individuals, who are merely guilty of differing from us in a matter of taste, neither the legislation nor customs of slaveholding States exert their influence against immoral connexions.
In the next paragraph she discusses the "temporary connexions" made by "White gentlemen of the first-rank" and New Orleans quadroons.[52] Her examples of illegal miscegenating marriages pointedly make the woman white and the
man black, while the case of the quadroon concubine pairs race and sex differently. Child's care in this passage to discriminate her own desires from those she discusses indicates the strength of the taboo against which she writes. For even as she disclaims any concern for the "world's mockery," Child admits the impossibility, at least under the prevailing social conditions, of any but the very low so utterly discounting public opinion as to enter into such a union. Child risks a defense of this most subversive version of miscegenation only when she has placed the sturdy barrier of class between herself and the women who enact it. By asserting that the female laborers who choose black mates are "merely guilty of differing from us in a matter of taste," Child insists on the disstinction between tastes and morals, and on the comparative insignificance of the former. But by using this moment to forge an identification with her readers based on a shared set of tastes, she backs away from her argument, suggesting the power of social sanctions to delimit desires. Thus even here, in perhaps the most daring argument in her most daring text, Child refrains from denouncing society's distaste for a form of miscegenation that would threaten and exclude the white man. Instead, as she names herself part of the social "us," her persuasive strategy of identification collapses into a defensive one.
In light of Child's caveats it is hardly surprising that, at least so far as I am aware, no antislavery fiction admits to the possibility of a white woman loving or wedding a black man.[53] Yet I suggest that this forbidden desire constitutes a repressed but never completely obliterated narrative within even the most conventional of these stories. Recalling Stowe's and Green's portraits of their black heroes, it is now evident that one of the tasks implicit in the amalgamating strategies that constructed these Herculeses is the creation of a black man who can be easily assimilated to the white woman's sexual tastes. Once again it is the figure of the mulatta who permits this desire to be inscribed. The light skin of the mulatta names her white, yet her black ancestry keeps her union with the black hero from being labeled miscegena-
tion. Through this figure the love of a white-skinned woman and a black-skinned man can be designated, and even endorsed, without being scandalous. The polysemous body of the fictional mulatta simultaneously expresses the white woman's desires and protects her from them by marking them safely alien.
Clearly not intended to articulate a feminist position, Frances Green's "The Slave-Wife" tells the familiar abolitionist story of a slave woman's sexual exploitation by her master, despite her—legally null—marriage. But because of her complexion this story encloses another narrative, the tale of a white woman's preference for a black lover. Even hidden under the mask of the mulatta, this story of the inadmissible union of a white woman and a black man is so threatening that it must be dismantled at the very moment it is made, so that the story becomes a sequence of alternating disavowals and contradictions.
Laco Ray's description of his wife proffers a double reading of her race: "She was white. At least no one would suspect that she had any African blood in her veins." The modifications that follow cannot erase the clarity of that first adamant assertion of her whiteness. Laco's wife is named Clusy; it is a slave name, unfit for a free-born woman, so that Clusy's name and her body sustain the tension already noted between her African blood and white flesh. Just as Clusy's flesh, ancestry, and name offer conflicting signs to her identity, the story's plot consists of a series of displacements in which Laco Ray and his master alternately claim the trophy that is Clusy. Their competition, like Clusy's ambiguous race, serves to contain the white woman's scandalous desire for the black man; for as master and husband each attempt to claim exclusive sexual rights, the question of the woman's choice and desire is made moot. Laco Ray's narration of this rivalry makes it clear that he sees the price of loss as the distinctly patriarchal threat of castration:
She was beautiful. She was in her master's power. She was in the power of every white man that chose to possess her, she was no longer mine. She was not my wife.
The question of "The Slave-Wife" is whether or not a black man can possess a woman—particularly a white woman—and from its very title, which simultaneously makes Clusy a wife and yet fetters that role with the apparently contradictory one of slave, the answer remains ambiguous.
Despite Laco's sense of dispossession, the white man's power never quite controls Clusy. Finally, as Laco reports it, Clusy, continuing to reject the master's "wishes," "was bound to the stake; and while cruel and vulgar men mocked her agony, THERE our babe was born !" The torture that attempts to make Clusy the white man's sexual property only succeeds in eliciting proof of her sexual intimacy with a black man. Yet once again the message is double, for the child who marks Laco's potency in the face of the master's power is stillborn. Weak from childbirth and beatings, Clusy escapes with Laco Ray only to die before reaching Canada. The story ends here with a stalemate. The inconclusiveness of both Laco's and his master's attempts to claim Clusy reflects Green's own incapacity to give the white woman to the black man, even as it attests to her desire to do so.
Laco's final request that his auditor "publish it abroad" recasts the story not as one of male possession, whether white or black, but as one of female desires and female virtue:
for if any woman can hear [this story] without a wish, a determination to labor with all her might to abolish THE SLAVERY OF WOMAN, I impeach her virtue—she is not TRUE—she is NOT PURE.[54]
The passage asserts that sexual virtue consists not of a delicacy that eschews sexual topics but of a purity that opposes sexual exploitation. This definition of sexual virtue makes abolition a question of woman's rights. Laco's phrase "the slavery of woman" carries two meanings, and Clusy's story illustrates the impossibility of separating them.
What interests me about this merger of feminist and abolitionist arguments is that unlike many of the instances discussed above, Green's narrative appears to be oblivious to the connections it nonetheless makes. The rhetoric of "The
Slave-Wife" stresses the contradictions inherent in Clusy's double role as chattel and spouse; it disregards the ways in which the two terms might be identical and Green's title a tautology. Thus the story defines slavery as a woman's issue at the same time that it writes woman's desire out of woman's rights, denying and hiding the sexual body of the white woman. Yet by depicting Laco Ray and his master as rival claimants for the possession of Clusy, her positions as wife and slave are implicitly made analogous: in both cases she is male property, and in neither case are her desires, including her subversive preference for her black husband, permitted autonomous expression. From a feminist perspective these implications discredit Laco Ray's desire to have Clusy as his own, and hence to own her, and they therefore undermine his sympathetic position in Green's abolitionist argument. That the links between sexual and racial oppression strategically forged by feminist-abolitionists hold, even within narratives whose logic is jeopardized by this coupling, suggests that these links have become so normative as to be unavoidable. Thus the antislavery stories written by women who appear to have no intention of questioning marital or familial relations constantly employ rhetoric or depict scenarios that jar against their benign assumptions about woman's proper domestic place.
Antislavery fiction's focus on miscegenation evades the difficulties of representing blackness by casting the racial problematics of slavery into the terms of sexual oppression. In defining the question of ownership of one's body as a sexual question, the ideal of liberty and the commercial concept of ownership attain not only an intimately corporeal but also an explicitly marital or domestic dimension. This presentation of slavery as sexual, marital, and domestic abuse thematizes the structure of the genre as a whole, since antislavery stories attempt to describe slave experience within the feminine forms of domestic fiction. Sentimental
antislavery stories are constructed on the foundation of a presumed alliance between abolitionist goals and domestic values, an alliance fraught with asymmetries and contradictions. The domestic realm of women and children occupies, after all, a paradoxical place in feminist and abolitionist arguments. For feminists, it constitutes not only the source of woman's power, but also, antithetically, the sphere in which she finds herself incarcerated. For abolitionists, the domestic values that ostensibly offer a positive alternative to the mores of plantation society simultaneously mask slavery's exploitations behind domesticity's gentle features.
Situated outside the specifically abolitionist forums provided by antislavery societies, even further detached from the woman's rights movement, and aimed at the most sentimental figure of the domestic scene—the good child—the antislavery stories written for Sunday school primers baldly exemplify the narrative disjunctions inherent in attempts to domesticate slavery. Julia Coleman and Matilda Thompson's collection of such stories, The Child's Anti-Slavery Book , first published by the evangelical American Tract Society in 1859 and then twice reprinted in the "Books for Sunday School" series of a New York publisher, provides a characteristic and fairly popular sample of the genre. The collection constantly inscribes its own domesticity.
The introduction, "A Few Words about American Slave Children," begins by describing the loving, happy homes of the American free children who constitute its readership. Such homes are then replicated within the stories themselves. Thus "Aunt Judy's Story" narrates the life of this elderly ex-slave through a frame in which Mrs. Ford tells her children the tale of their impoverished neighbor, with daughter Cornelia "leaning her little curly head against her mother's knee," while they discuss the likelihood of Judy's children having been torn away from her maternal knee. The virtue of the Ford home marks every exchange. If Cornelia is "getting a little impatient," the narrator turns to remind the child reader, who might mistakenly see this moment as condoning such behavior, that it was "only a
little, for Cornelia was remarkable for her sweet and placid disposition." Bountiful meals are consumed in every chapter, and neither parent ever passes up an opportunity for a moral lesson; nor does Mrs. Ford ever fail to revel in "every act of kindness to the poor and needy performed by her children." In these Sunday-school stories, lessons in patience and generosity—the everyday virtues of domestic life—inextricably mingle with the teaching of antislavery. The Fords treat Aunt Judy as a site for the moral education of their children, while the promised story of her life serves as a didactic and desirable form of entertainment: "Dear papa, tells us a story with a poor slave in it, won't you?" Cornelia implores.[55]
The subordination of the poor slave to the family who tells her story bespeaks the dominance inherent in the act of representation: the Ford children "profit" from Aunt Judy in a manner more moralistic than, but not sufficiently distinct from, the material profits reaped by the slaveowners her story teaches them to condemn. On the other hand, the family these children inhabit, and the lessons of patience and selflessness they are taught, reproduce under the benign guise of domesticity a hierarchy structurally quite similar to that of slavery itself.[56] The sentimental and domestic values engaged in the critique of slavery are compromised by the connection and implicated in the very patterns they are employed to expose. The values of the loving family embodied in the doting mother and the dutiful child look, despite all disclaimers, and despite all differences, much like the values of the plantation. But because the domesticity of women and children is glorified in these stories, the fact of subjugation and the disavowal of freedom implicit in domestic values remain masked.
Coleman and Thompson's defensive insistence on the differences between slavery and family suggests that even the most emphatically domestic writers were aware of the danger that their stories might collapse the very distinctions they were designed to uphold. For example, when in "A Few Words about American Slave Children" they attempt to
differentiate between the experiences of slave and free children, the similarities between the two haunt their arguments.
Though born beneath the same sun and on the same soil, with the same natural right to freedom as yourselves, they are nevertheless SLAVES. Alas for them! Their parents cannot train them as they will, for they too have MASTERS.
"They too have masters," the passage explains, and, whatever is learned about the powerlessness of slave parents, the notion that all children have masters is equally clear—for who, except the child, stands on the other side of that "too"? This conception of all children as unfree slips between the emphatic insistence (so emphatic because so precarious?) that "Children, you are free and happy. . . . You are free children! " Yet the very description of this freedom reveals it to be, at best, deferred.
When you become men and women you will have full liberty to earn your living, to go, to come, to seek pleasure or profit in any way that you may choose, so long as you do not meddle with the rights of other people.[57]
In short, the liberty described is projected into the future, not attainable for the child within the family structure. The male bias of even this deferred freedom is made obvious by a nearly identical passage from another antislavery book for children from the period. The Child's Book on Slavery, or Slavery Made Plain was published as part of a series "for Sabbath Schools" in Cincinnati.
When the Child grows to be a man or woman he can go and do for himself, is his own ruler, and can act just as he pleases, if he only does right. He can go and come, he can buy and sell; if he has a wife and children, they cannot be taken away, and he is all his life free .[58]
The absurdity of the child grown to be a woman ever having a wife makes it clear that the passage's slide into the singular masculine pronoun, and everything logically attributable to him , is not only idiomatically conventional but poignantly symptomatic. Indeed, the ability to have "a wife and chil-
dren," like the ability to "go and come" or "buy and sell" defines freedom, so that the juxtaposition of these pairs categorizes women and children not as potential free persons, but rather as the signs and conditions of another's freedom. The freedom so defined in these antislavery books is available to neither child nor woman. The domestic ideology that informs the genre can no more accommodate an actual, corporeal, and present freedom than can the slave ideology itself.
The homological ideologies of the family and of slave society need not imply, antislavery writers insist, that both structures support the same meanings: thus the patriarchal pattern that would signal exploitation and power in the case of a plantation society could mean benevolent protection and love within a familial setting. "The relation between the child and the parent is first and chiefly for the child's good, but the relation between the slave and his master is for the master's pleasure," the anonymous author of The Child's Book on Slavery explains. In both cases the less powerful "must obey" the more powerful, but, the author asserts, the good garnered by such obedience accrues differently.[59] Leveled against proslavery assurances that bondage is beneficial to the weaker African race, this logic also defends against the specter of parental pleasure in the subservience of the child, and by extension, of patriarchal pleasure in the conventions of domestic hierarchy. The difference between slavery and domestic order is cast as a conflict between selfish hedonism and benevolence; in this Sunday-school primer, the critique of pecuniary motives is displaced by a discussion of moral considerations.[60] By situating antislavery discourse within an idealized domestic setting, these stories purport to offer moral and emotional standards by which to measure, and through which to correct, the evils of slavery. The problem is that these standards are implicated in the values and structures of authority and profit they seek to criticize. The contradictions inherent in the alliance of abolitionist thought and domestic ideals can be identified, in part, as the conflict between a structural or material and an emotional or moral conception of social reality. Failing to discover tangible and stable
grounds on which to distinguish idealized domestic values from the abhorred system of slavery, antislavery writers retreat to the realm of the intangible; once they do so their arguments for the difference between slavery and domesticity reconstruct this opposition in terms of the tension between physical and spiritual ontologies and epistemologies.
Feminist-abolitionist awareness of the need to recognize the links between one's identity and one's body, and of all the difficulties inherent in such a recognition, informs, as I have argued, the problems of representation that characterize antislavery fiction. The domestic and sentimental conventions of this fiction, however, also subscribe to a moral, emotional, and fundamentally spiritual code that devalues bodily constraints to focus on the soul. As employed in the service of patriarchal authority, the distinction between body and soul traditionally functioned to increase, not decrease, social control over the body. Historically this distinction had buttressed Christian apologies for slavery as it enabled the pious simultaneously to exploit bodies and save souls.[61] Similarly, an emphasis on the special and discrete nature of the spiritual realm permitted women's souls a power denied their bodies. It has been frequently demonstrated that in losing economic and political power with the rise of bourgeois society, the American woman increased her value as the moral and spiritual guardian of the nation; her gain in moral status bolstered her exclusion from the political and commercial arenas.[62]
The writers of antislavery fiction seem well aware of the oppressive consequences of locating personhood in the soul. The hypocritical minister who defends slavery as a means of converting the heathens of Africa, and levies docility with the threat of hellfire for those who do not follow the Biblical injunction "Servants obey your masters," serves as a stock villain of this fiction. Equally familiar is the ineffectual kind mistress, who, like Stowe's Mrs. Shelby, is prevented by her husband from participating in economic decisions but is expected to provide piety and benevolence for the whole family.[63] Despite these depictions of how evocations of a spir-
itual reality can be used as a placebo for women's and slaves' lack of social power, antislavery fiction nevertheless endorses the belief in an alternate spiritual realm where power and efficacy are distributed differently. From this perspective the powerlessness of women and slaves does not matter, because, whatever the condition of their bodies, their souls remain blessed and free.
The most famous instance of such recourse to the refuge provided by a separate spiritual reality is, of course, the victory of Tom's spiritual power over Simon Legree's physical brutality.
"Did n't I pay down twelve hundred dollars, cash, for all there is inside yer old cussed black shell? An't yer mine, now, body and soul?" he said, giving Tom a violent kick with his heavy boot; "tell me!"
In the very depth of physical suffering, bowed by brutal oppression, this question shot a gleam of joy and triumph through Tom's soul. . . .
"No! no! no! my soul an't yours, Mas'r! You have n't bought it,—ye can't buy it! It's been bought and paid for, by one that is able to keep it."[64]
In this passage Stowe insists on the oppressiveness of physical reality: the constraints of Tom's position can be weighed and measured; the boot is heavy. The triumph of Tom's soul is thus emphatically presented as rebutting material conceptions of personhood. In response to Legree's threats and abuses, Tom insists on the irrelevance of the condition of his body in identifying him as a man.[65] The primacy granted Tom's soul in constituting his identity is the culmination of a process evident throughout the novel. Although Stowe describes Tom's body explicitly and frequently in the same Herculean terms she later uses in her portrait of Dred, her emphasis on the childlike and feminine character of his soul supplants these physical descriptions so that in most readers' minds, and in George Cruikshank's 1852 illustrations, Tom appears effeminate and weak. Thus her celebration of Tom's soul serves to erase his flesh. Equally telling is Stowe's failure to imagine an America in which blacks could be recognized
as persons. Perhaps the most disturbing insight of her novel is that the utopian freedom she constructs is predicated upon the absence of black bodies: Tom's "victory" wins him the freedom of heaven; George, Eliza, and the rest find theirs only in Liberia.
The Christian and sentimental vision of noncorporeal freedom and personhood obfuscates the conception of the corporeality of the self with which I credit feminist-abolitionist discourse. Yet I would argue that antislavery fiction's recourse to the obliteration of black bodies as the only solution to the problem of slavery actually confirms the ways in which feminist-abolitionist projects of liberation forced a recognition of the bodiliness of personhood. Antislavery writers' tendency to do away with bodies stands as a testimony to their terrified sense that the body is inescapable. Thus, graphically extending the ways in which the freedom praised by domestic fiction excludes women and children, the freedom offered by antislavery fiction regularly depends upon killing off black bodies, defining death as a glorious emancipation from plantation slavery. "A Thought upon Emancipation" in the Liberty Chimes offers this vision of immediate abolition:
Even, now, the slave himself need no longer be a slave. Has he the heroism to prefer death to slavery and the system is at an end.
Let the terrible determination go forth through all Slavedom, that the slave will not work—will not eat—will not rise up or lie down at the bidding of an owner and will be free or die, and it is done. Tomorrow's sun beholds a notion of freedom indeed.[66]
What is done, terminated, in this fantasy is not only slavery but all slaves. The apocalyptic tone of the piece does provide the radical reinterpretation of freedom it promises. Antislavery writing responds to slavery's annihilation of personhood with its own act of annihilation.
The obliteration of the body thus stands as the pain-filled consequence of recognizing the extent to which the body designates identity. Indeed this glorification of death is but a more extreme example of processes already evident in the do-
mestic, amalgamating, and appropriative strategies that characterize the various attempts by feminist-abolitionist discourse to transform the body from a site of oppression into the grounds of resisting that oppression. The discovery that these efforts to liberate the body result in its repression and annihilation attests to the difficulties and resistance inherent in acknowledging the corporeality of personhood. The bodies feminists and abolitionists wish reclaimed, and the bodies they exploit, deny, or obliterate in the attempted rescue are the same.