1. Angelina Grimké, Appeal to the Christian Women of the South (New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1836), 28, 33.

2. The image of the "body politic" may indeed prove more fundamental to the concept of the state than even its constant presence in Western political thought would imply. The anthropological work of Victor Turner and, after him, of Mary Douglas in Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970) argues that the human body functions as a "natural symbol" for all other systems, including the state, and suggests a dialectical relation in which society conditions how the body is perceived while the body symbolizes the social order Such a dialectic is, obviously, inherent in my own work.

3. I am most specifically indebted to the work of Carole Pateman in The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988). Her critique of the ways in which the classical understandings of the social contract mask the sexual contract demonstrates how the assumption of disembodied and so sexless political actors serves to efface the fact of sexual subjugation and so protect patriarchal power. I find her argument important and persuasive but I also find it partial, as Pateman herself admits (221). In looking at both feminist and abolitionist arguments for the corporeality of identity, I wish to split the unitary "person" into a more disparate and unstable array of pieces than Pateman's gendered pair. For a discussion of contemporary case law that demonstrates how the assumption that the female body is just like the male body underlies legal theories of sexual equality, and consequently how female bodily "difference" serves to justify legal inequalities, see Zillah R. Eisenstein, The Female Body and the Law (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988).

4. In speaking of men as "created," Jefferson's phrasing already masks the bodiliness of identity. Rousseau's formulation that "men are born free" registers and then effaces sexual difference, making it even more evident that, as Anne Norton explains, ''the freedom of men at their birth is dependent . . . on a conventional construction

of sexuality: the subordination of all women to all men" ( Reflections on Political Identity [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988], 38). Freedom may not require sexual bodies, but birth surely does.

5. See Ronald G. Waiters's account of how Kelley made use of "this inadvertent wording" ( The AntiSlavery Appeal: American Abolitionism After 1830 [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976], 10). My point, of course, is that Kelley and the Garrisonian faction in general were quite advertently engaged in redefining the conventional political terminology of "personhood."

Walters's position is that neither the schism itself, nor the "woman question" that prompted it, should be understood as a significant ideological divide within antislavery thought. Aileen S. Kraditor ( Means and Ends in American Abolition: Garrison and His Critics on Strategy and Tactics, 1834-1850 [New York: Pantheon, 1968]), Ellen DuBois ("Women's Rights and Abolition: The Nature of the Connection," in Antislavery Reconsidered: New Perspectives on the Abolitionists , ed. Lewis Perry and Michael Fellman [Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979]), and Blanche Glassman Hersh ( The Slavery of Sex: Feminist-Abolitionists in America [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978]), all mark this moment as formative for the development of a separate feminist movement, though their assessments of precisely how it matters differ significantly.

6. For the complete text and a record of how these phrases have been interpreted, see The Constitution of the United States of America, Analysis and Interpretation: Annotations of Cases Decided by the Supreme Court of the United States to June 22 1964 , ed. Norman J. Small legislative reference service (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1964). For a discussion of antislavery women's reluctance to support the Fourteenth Amendment because of its gender bias, see Hersh, Slavery of Sex , 68. Ellen Dubois's chapter-length discussions of feminist stances on both amendments detail the risks to woman's suffrage of dependence on abolitionist Republicans, and therefore the need for an autonomous women's movement ( Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America, 1848-1869 [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978]). "Indians not taxed" do feature in constitutional discussions of taxation, the apportioning of representatives, and so on, but here concepts of national identity are used to mask the racial implications of this category.

7. Sharon Cameron argues that an insistence on the corporeality of identity should be understood as a more general characteristic of American literature, not one specifically located in these few decades ( The Corporeal Self: Allegories of the Body in Melville and Hawthorne [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981]). Her discussion of the corporeal grounding of American literature focuses, however, on Moby Dick and Hawthorne's tales, and the majority of

her additional examples (Poe, Thoreau, Emerson, Brockden Brown, Whitman, Dickinson) also belong to the period with which I am concerned. Indeed, her examples from twentieth-century American literature, The Sound and the Fury and Lolita , are striking precisely because the voices and bodies of Caddy and Lolita are so conspicuously absent from these texts. In short, her arguments for the corporeal understanding of identity as a central concern of American literature are historically specific. Her own speculations on the reasons for the bodily focus of American texts is developmental, comparing "a child's first discovery that his body is his own, excluding other bodies, and the discovery of men struggling to distinguish their own literary subject." But the terms in which she explains this process resonate with the historically specific challenges posed by slavery:

The mind works by analogies, deducing what it cannot see from what it can. The body is what one can see, is the thing (the only thing) that can be owned. Thus, given the particular concern with definition of one's own (national) space, with problems of territorial expansion, with a subject uniquely delineated, one's relation to one's own body (though far from being analogic), since it is the most palpable relationship we have, suggests analogies for these secondary problems of owned subject. (6-7)

I suggest that this developmental model of knowing the self first through the body was thrown into crisis in the middle of the nineteenth century because the agitation over slavery made it suddenly clear that one's own body could be owned by someone else.

8. See Norton ( Reflections on Political Identity , especially chapter 3, "Representation: Presence and Absence") on the ways in which the same contradictions of absence and presence echo between political representation and semiotic representation.

9. The photograph of "Laura M. Towne, Dick, Maria, and 'seeker' Amoretta" is from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and is reproduced in Margaret Washington Creel, " A Peculiar People": Slave Religion and Community-Culture Among the Gullahs (New York: New York University Press, 1988), 306. In her letter Towne goes on to describe these students' differing levels of educational skill ( The Letters and Diary of Laura M. Towne: Written from the Sea Islands of South Carolina, 1862-1884 , ed. R. S. Holland [Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1912], 172). An 1866 photograph from the Hooper School, portraying teacher Lizzie Langford and two of her students in the same pose, is from the Rufus and S. Willard Saxton Papers, Yale University Library, and is reproduced in Robert C. Morris, Reading, 'Riting, and Reconstruction: The Education of Freedmen in the South, 1861-1870 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), fig. 2.

10. Towne's Letters and Diaries give a detailed account of life at the Penn School, balancing such assertions of collective and rial love (47) with scenes of genuine pleasure and affection: "Ellen and I took the little children into the creek to bathe, having dressed them in some of the 'theatricals' that came down here. There was more fun and mud than cleanliness" (83). For more general histories of freedmen's schools and the Northern women who largely staffed them see Jacqueline Jones, Soldiers of Light and Love: Northern Teachers and Georgia Blacks, 1865-1873 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), and Sandra E. Small, "The Yankee Schoolmarm in Freedmen's Schools: An Analysis of Attitudes," The Journal of Southern History 45 (August 1979). The complaint of Black ingratitude is quoted from James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 12. Jones points to the ironic similarities between the posture of Northern teachers and that of the antebellum slave mistress, 148-49. In light of this comparison it is worth noting that James Mellon inaccurately captions the Penn School photograph, identifying teacher Harriet Murray as a plantation mistress: "while most slave children were prohibited from learning to read or write, their owners did occasionally read them bible stories." See Bullwhip Days: The Slaves Remember , ed. James Mellon (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988), plate 17.

11. See especially Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison , trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979) and The History of Sexuality , vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1980). But see also Nancy Fraser on the philosophical and political limitations of Foucault's attempts to ground a new posthumanist social theory not on the humanist grounds of subjectivity and reciprocal rights, but rather on the body and its pleasures ("Foucault's Body Language: A Posthumanist Political Rhetoric?" in Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989]).

12. See Emily Martin, The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987) and Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). Two other participants in these debates have greatly influenced my work. In many of her essays (soon to be published in book form), Hortense Spillers has most specifically related the problematics of embodiment to the conditions of American slavery. Her oppositional terminology of "body" and "flesh" attempts to keep track of the difference between a socially and rhetorically constructed "body" and the real physical stuff of "flesh." I am suggesting, however, that the problem is precisely that such distinctions cannot be systematically maintained. The predicaments of flesh ground all conceptions of the body, while this rhetorically constructed body informs the experience of flesh.

Sharon Cameron's discussion of literal versus allegorical apprehensions of the body in The Corporeal Self suggests the significance of these concerns not only for understanding the body but also for understanding representation. Her account of how allegorical tropes cover up literal violence—marking the human dismemberments narrated as safely not real—reveals a doubleness in literary language akin to the doubleness of the body. As her work insists, the contradictory nature of a rhetoric of embodiment disables both the conventional distinction between body and soul or, I would add, between a natural and a socially constructed body, and that between the literal and allegorical dimensions of language. Following Cameron, my work addresses the ways in which the problems posed by the body become problems of representation.

13. As Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse remind us, representation is structured by dominance and suppression and so is inherently violent. This is as true of academic discourse as it is of political or literary texts. To describe the ways in which black and female bodies were put to use in antebellum writings requires recognizing the extent to which I too use this flesh to authorize my words. See "Introduction: Representing Violence or 'How the West was Won' "( The Violence of Representation: Literature and the History of Violence , ed. Armstrong and Tennenhouse [New York: Routledge, 1989]).

14. Jean Fagan Yellin's Women and Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989) was published after I had largely completed this manuscript. She too works to trace feminist-abolitionist rhetoric into the sphere of high culture—specifically through Hiram Power's Greek Slave , Nathaniel Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter , and Henry James's The Bostonians . Her examples of such cultural osmosis bolster the claims I wish to make here. I want to stress, however, the differences between our analyses of the patterns of appropriation inherent in such cultural intersections. Yellin describes the ease with which symbols of resistance can be absorbed and deformed by the dominant ideology; she records the process by which oppositional discourse is silenced. Thus antislavery feminists' fundamentally positive figurations of the supplicant slave woman are appropriated by the cultural elite and made to serve decidedly unliberating purposes. In contrast, I find traces of oppression and appropriation within the abolitionist's symbols of social protest and, along with the political erasures, traces of political resistance—intentional or not—embedded in the aesthetic concerns of lyric poetry. I doubt, however, that the more ambivalent relation I am suggesting is any better If such a reading does not allow cultural absorption completely to silence oppositional discourse, it also unmasks the political purity of the oppositional register

15. For discussions of how slavery figures in white, canonical literature of the period, see the essays by Eric J. Sundquist and Walter

Benn Michaels in The American Renaissance Reconsidered: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1982-83 , ed. Walter Benn Michaels and Donald E. Pease (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985); Carolyn L. Karcher, Shadow Over the Promised Land: Slavery, Race, and Violence in Melville's America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980); and most recently Yellin's Women and Sisters .

Scholars of African-American literature have been concerned with the impact of slavery for much longer and in importantly different terms. Hazel Carby and Deborah McDowell discuss some of the paradoxes of the ties between slavery and the African-American novel in their contributions to Slavery and the Literary Imagination: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1987 , ed. Deborah E. McDowell and Arnold Rampersand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). For various examples of how the slave narrative and a ''racial" history of slavery can be used to ground discussions of African-American literary traditions, see the other essays in this volume as well as The Slave's Narrative , ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Charles Davis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Valerie Smith, Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987); Houston A. Baker Jr., Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984) and William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, I760-1865 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986).

16. For useful compendiums of essays about new historicism see The New Historicism , ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York: Routledge, 1989); Marjorie Levinson et al., Rethinking Historicism: Critical Readings in Romantic History (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989); and The New Cultural History , ed. Lynn Hunt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). That such arguments are of more than academic interest—though their influence in the reshaping of academic curricula would be their foremost consequence—is ironically evinced by the fervor with which they have been debated, not just within universities but from pulpits, in government offices, and in the popular press.

1. Lydia Maria Child, Anti-Slavery. Catechism (Newburyport:Charles Whipple, 1836), 17.

2. Ibid., 16.

3. That the husband's confidence in her racial purity is expressed in terms of white lineage "since the flood" ridicules the most frequently deployed Biblical defense of slavery, which dated

the divine sanctioning of racial subjugation from the curse Noah pronounced on Ham's son Canaan (Genesis 9:25). Ham's fault, coincidentally, was the disrespect of looking upon the body of his drunken and naked father. For a discussion of the antebellum debate over the significance of this passage, see Ron Bartour, " 'Cursed be Canaan, a Servant of Servants shall he be unto his Brethren': American Views on 'Biblical Slavery,' 1835-1865, a Comparative Study," Slavery and Abolition 4 (May 1983).

4. On the simple level of events, the intersections are legion: the Grimké sisters, antislavery lecturers of the 1830s, were the first women to give public lectures before "mixed" or "promiscuous" audiences, and Angelina Grimké was the first American woman to speak before a legislative body (censured for such unfeminine activity, the Grimké's increasingly addressed the issue of woman's rights within their antislavery discourse); in the 1830s and 1840s, Susan B. Anthony and Lucy Stone worked as paid agents of the American Anti-Slavery Society, lecturing on both abolition and woman's rights; Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott first met at the World's Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840, where the female delegates were refused seats; and legend has it that the idea of a woman's rights convention—not realized until 1848—was first discussed in the London hotel rooms of these excluded women.

5. Andrew Sinclair, "Woman or Slave," in The Better Half: the Emancipation of the American Woman (New York: Harper and Row,1965).

6. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "Beauty, the Beast and the Militant Woman," in Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); and Barbara J. Berg, The Remembered Gate: Origins of American Feminism: the Woman and the City, 1800-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).

7. DuBois, "Women's Rights and Abolition."

8. Hersh, Slavery of Sex .

9. Smith-Rosenberg, "Puberty to Menopause: the Cycle of Femininity in Nineteenth Century America," in Disorderly Conduct .

10. Included in Aileen S. Kraditor, Up from the Pedestal: Selected Writings in the History of American Feminism (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1968), 190-91. This fantasy was published as an editorial in the Herald , thus providing the very news copy it gleefully imagines.

11. The diagnosis is that of Dr. Samuel A. Cartwright in "Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race," De Bow's Review (1851), excerpted in Advice among Masters: the Ideal in Slave Management in the Old South , ed. James O. Breeden (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980), 173. Breeden identifies Cartwright as among the "leading scientific spokesmen" of "the campaign to defend the South's sectional interests and to promote southern nationalism," and thus a consciously biased interpreter of anatomy.

12. Lydia Maria Child included these quotations, along with many similar items gleaned from the Southern press, in The Patriarchal Institution as Described by Members of Its Own Family (New York: The American Anti-Slavery Society, 1860). She added the italics as a form of commentary. The first quote mentioned here is cited by Child from an advertisement for the runaway slave of Anthony M. Minter (A.M.) in the Free Press , Alabama, September 18, 1846 (13). She takes the second from an advertisement posted by John A. Rowland, jailer, to publicize his capture of a presumed runaway, in the Fayetteville, North Carolina, Observer , June 20, 1838 (11).

13. Angelina Grimké, An Appeal to the Women of the Nominally Free States: Issued by an Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women Held by Adjournment from the 9th to the 12th of May 1837 (New York: W. S. Doss, 1837).

14. For a more general analysis of how the idealization of freedom that characterizes Western thought relies upon the historical and factual presence of slavery, see Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982).

15. See Hersh, Slavery of Sex , chapters 1, 2, and 6, for a summary of the analogies drawn by feminist abolitionists. Examples of the first two follow. A more frivolous example of the analogy can be found in Amelia Bloomer's defense of the short skirts and pantaloons that carry her name: "I suppose in this respect we are more mannish, for we know that in dress as in all things else, we have been and are slaves, while man in dress and all things else is free."

16. Sarah Grimké, Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women. Addressed to Mary S. Parker, President of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society (Boston: Isaac Knapp, 1838), 13, 75.

17. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, letter to the National Woman's Rights Convention, Cooper Institute, dated Seneca Falls, November 24. 1856; included in the appendixes of The History of Woman Suffrage , ed. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage (New York: Fowler and Wells, 1881), 1:860.

18. See Barbara Welter, "The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820-1860," American Quarterly 18 (Summer 1966) and Berg, "Towards the Woman-Belle Ideal," in The Remembered Gate , for compendiums of all the virtues a "True Woman" was expected to possess. One of the charges consistently brought against the Grimké sisters' antislavery lectures was that of indelicacy. In their Pastoral Letter of 1837, directed at the Grimkés, the Massachusetts Congregationalist clergy "especially deplore the intimate acquaintance and promiscuous conversation of females with regard to things 'which ought not to be mentioned.' '' The unmentionables, of course, were the rape and concubinage of slave women and the nullity of slave marriage. See Kraditor, Up from the Pedestal , 51-52, and Sarah Grimké's response to the pastoral letter in her third Letter on the Equality of the Sexes .

19. Margaret Fuller, "Woman in the Nineteenth Century" (1844) in The Writings of Margaret Fuller , ed. Mason Wade (New York: Viking Press, 1941), 123.

20. The most famous instance of this turn is Sojourner Truth's refrain "a'n't I a woman" at the Akron Woman's Rights Convention on May 29, 1851.

"Dat man ober dar say dat womin needs to be helped into carriages, and lifted ober ditches, and to hab de best place everywhar. Nobody eber helps me into carriages, or ober mud-puddles, or gibs me any best place!" And raising herself to her full height, and her voice to a pitch like rolling thunder, she asked, "And a'n't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! (and she bared her right arm to the shoulder, showing her tremendous muscular power) . . ."

For this audience her body makes her argument. "Reminiscences of Frances D. Gage: Sojourner Truth," in Stanton, Anthony, and Gage, History of Woman Suffrage , 1:116.

21. For a fascinating account of the cultural uses and meanings of this emblem, see Yellin, Women and Sisters .

22. The Liberator , January 7, 1832, quoted in Hersh, Slavery of Sex , 10-11.

23. Whether Garrison knew it or not, there is no etymological slippage at all. Cattle refers not only to the bovine, but more generally to "movable property or wealth," that is, to chattel; both forms derive from capitale . Capital is accumulated currency, "stock in trade," and the classification of slaves as livestock recognizes that their status as things (however vital) implies exchangeability. The evolving connotations of these words encapsulate centuries of economic history, which my discussion collapses and necessarily simplifies. See the OED , s.v. "cattle.''

24. Quoted in Hersh, Slavery of Sex , 66, from Stone's letter to Anthony dated September 11, 1856.

25. Hersh, Slavery of Sex , 16. Her figures are taken from the records of the Massachusetts society. Angelina Grimké asserted in 1856 that there were a total of sixty Female Anti-Slavery Societies in the Northern states, though I have found no other evidence to corroborate this figure ( Appeal to Christian Women , 23).

26. Grimké, Appeal to Christian Women , 23. This fairly conservative portrait of Female Anti-Slavery Societies, though accurate in its depiction of the majority of the women involved in antislavery work, does not necessarily characterize all of the authors whose stories I discuss here, just as it does not fit the Grimkés and other public lecturers and political organizers. In particular, Lydia Maria Child and Carolyn Wells Healey Dall saw their fiction-writing as a distinctly political, indeed revolutionary, form of action. Nevertheless, even the most overtly political women plied their needles for

the cause while urging this more conventional form of political activity on their female audiences, and less daring women constituted the major readership for all of these stories as well as the authors of many of them.

27. There has as yet been no systematic study of the history of antislavery stories. Carolyn Karcher postulates that Child's story "The St. Domingo Orphans," published in her Juvenile Miscellany for September of 1830, may well have initiated the genre. Though antislavery stories appeared in The Liberator from 1831 and in many other antislavery papers, the major forum for their publication was provided by giftbooks and collections of literature for children, since these permitted longer narratives than most newspapers could afford. The earliest antislavery giftbook of which I am aware— Oasis (1834)—was produced by Child; it held mostly her own stories, accompanying them with two articles by her husband, David Child, and a handful of disparate pieces by abolitionist friends.

Later antislavery giftbooks, and most notably the Liberty Bell (1839-1858), follow this model of female production and control. Even though men contributed a large percentage of the material in such collections, they supplied argumentative pieces and poetry but rarely stories. For example, while two-thirds of the more than two hundred contributors to the Liberty Bell were men, only two (Edmund Quincy and an anonymous "Southron," presumably male) wrote stories.

Karcher suggests, and my own findings support her contention, that the antislavery stories written by men generally differ from those by women in thematic terms: men's tend to focus more on slave rebellions than on sexual exploitation, while in women's, miscegenation, concubinage, rape and—I would add—the breakup of families predominate. The thematics of escape is shared in works by both sexes. There are, of course, individual instances that contradict these generalizations. See Carolyn L. Karcher, "Rape, Murder, and Revenge in 'Slavery's Pleasant Homes': Lydia Maria Child's Antislavery Fiction and the Limits of Genre," Women's Studies International Forum 9 (1986).

28. Most obvious among these followers is Liberty Chimes , published in 1845 by the Ladies Anti-Slavery Society of Providence, Rhode Island. But also see the somewhat more successful giftbook Autographs of Freedom , edited by Julia Griffith for the Rochester, New York, Ladies Auxiliary in 1853 and 1854; it is unique in containing a number of pieces by ex-slaves, including Frederick Douglass, and for the closing of each selection with a facsimile of the author's signature—hence the title. Antislavery giftbooks were also occasionally produced by men; for example, Richard Sutton Rost compiled Freedom's Gift (Hartford, Conn.: S. S. Cowels, 1840) predominantly

as a showcase for Garrison. Many of the poems and fictional pieces, however, were contributed by women.

29. Before 1846 they were known as the ''Massachusetts AntiSlavery Fair." From 1847 until their replacement by "soirées" in 1858, they were more grandly entitled the "National Anti-Slavery Bazaar." The first Liberty Bell was released on October 29th, 1839, but the fair and publication were subsequently moved to the more lucrative Christmas season, and later editions are all dated early December. The only missed years were 1840, 1850, 1854, 1855, and 1857, so a total of fifteen volumes were published. All except the last, which reprinted some earlier selections, consisted entirely of new material. See Ralph Thompson, '' The Liberty Bell and Other Anti-Slavery Gift-Books," New England Quarterly 7 (March 1934). The relation between the Bell and other sale items is nicely illustrated by "An English Child's Notion of the Inferiority of the Colored Population in America," in which a mother recounts her daughter's explanation of the words this five-year-old had stitched on a sampler she was making for the Boston fair The child sent her sampler, and the mother sent this anecdote—presumably accompanied by her own needlework ( Liberty Bell 8 [1847]: 49).

30. The average of the Fair's profits is taken from Jane H. Pease and William H. Pease, "The Boston Bluestocking, Maria Weston Chapman," Bound with Them in Chains: A Biographical History of the Anti-Slavery Movement (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972), 45; and the information on the finances of The Liberty Bell comes from Thompson, "Anti-Slavery Gift-Books," 158-59. Thompson queries the committee's boast, arguing that many volumes were distributed free, and hence at a loss, but even if the committee's figures are inflated there is no reason to believe that the books were not economically successful, especially considering that the cost of each printing was donated.

31. Quoted by Pease and Pease, Bound with Them , 34-35, from a letter by Chapman dated January 27, 1846.

32. The point, of course, is that the sentimentality required by the genre necessarily undermines any aspirations toward realism. For a far more sophisticated and interesting variation on this critique see Walter Benn Michaels's argument that Stowe's claims to realism mask an essentially romantic belief in inalienable property ("Romance and Real Estate," in American Renaissance Reconsidered ).

33. The examples are endless, but to choose three from the stories discussed in this chapter: "The Slave-Wife," by Frances Green, Liberty Chimes (Providence, R.I.: Ladies Anti-Slavery Society, 1845) is presented as told by a friend who met Laco Ray, the slave husband, after his escape to Canada. Reprinting "Mary French and Susan Easton" anonymously in The Slave's Friend (New York:

American Anti-Slavery Society, 1836), Child added this italicized introduction: " Perhaps some of my little readers may remember seeing, about a year and a half ago, advertisements in the newspapers . . . ." " Mark and Hasty," by Matilda G. Thompson, in The Child's Anti-Slavery Book (New York: Carlton and Porter, 1859) is prefaced with a note that the ''facts'' of this St. Louis story "were communicated to the author by a friend residing temporarily in that city." Fiction had, of course, long been viewed with suspicion in Puritan America, and the practice of defending tales with the claim that they were "founded on fact" had become, by the eighteenth century, a conventional attribute of storytelling. Because, however, antislavery stories proposed to alter attitudes and behavior—to change the facts of American slavery—their claims to a factual basis served a double purpose, countering not only the general prejudice against frivolous or decadent fictionality but also the specific charge that fiction had no bearing on political realities.

34. Harriet Beecher Stowe, preface to Uncle Tom's Cabin (New York: The Library of America, 1982), 10; A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin , vol. 2 of The Writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe (Boston: Riverside Press, 1896), 255-56. My evocation of Stowe here, and throughout this paper, is admittedly opportunistic, as her position within the contemporary critical canon allows me to assume a familiarity with the problematics of her work obviously lacking for most of the other texts I cite. Thus her more accessible and discussed novels provide an entry into the issues confronted in their more obscure precursors and also a means of situating these stories within contemporary critical discourse. Implicit in my work, moreover, is the assumption that Stowe's achievement needs to be read and evaluated within a genre of antislavery fiction initiated at least two decades before the success of Uncle Tom . I deemphasize the importance of distinguishing between novel and story, at least for the issues of corporeality and the effort to redefine personhood with which I am here concerned; the anecdotal structure of Stowe's novels, with their focus on repeated and distinct tableaus, diminishes the violence of this critical strategy.

35. Child, "Mary French and Susan Easton" in Juvenile Miscellany (Boston: 'Allen and Ticknor) 3d series, 6 (May 1834): 196.

36. In " Cage aux folles: Sensation and Gender in Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White " ( Representations 14 [Spring 1986]), D. A. Miller argues that the nervous sensations that characterize the reading of sensation novels are associated, within the novels themselves, with femininity. This insight and the implications Miller elaborates from it prove equally suggestive for the similarly gendered weeping that characterizes the reading of sentimental fiction. The gendering of physical response bears somewhat different meanings, however, in sentimental and sensation fiction. For while the feminine nervous-

ness instigated by thrillers produces the sense of confinement and incarceration of femininity, the tears ushered by sentimental fiction flow outward as mechanisms of escape.

37. Analyzing the "power" of Uncle Tom's Cabin , Jane Tompkins finds that in sentimental fiction "not words, but the emotions of the heart bespeak a state of grace, and these are known by the sound of a voice, the touch of a hand, but chiefly in moments of greatest importance, by tears" ("Sentimental Power: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Politics of Literary History," in Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction 1790-1860 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1985], 131-32). Tompkins is most centrally interested in that "state of grace'' expressed by emotions that are themselves spoken through bodily signs. So in her catalogue of scenes marked by weeping, Tompkins defends these tears in terms of the message of "salvation, communion, reconciliation'' that they suggest; in contrast, I am concerned here less with what the tears may say than with Stowe's recourse to bodily symptoms as the most efficacious means of saying.

38. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp , vol. 3 of Writings , 190-91.

39. The Slave's Friend (New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1836-1838), a penny monthly for children, makes its lessons in reading more explicit. The first article of the first number of the 1837 edition shows a picture of two girls—one black and one white—peering together at a large book, followed by three pages of detailed analysis explaining how to interpret the scene. It concludes by pointing to the dog in the lower corner of the print and informing its young readers that "when you see a dog in a picture like this, it is an emblem, or sign of Fidelity" (3). The signs are sure; one need only learn the vocabulary.

40. Stowe, Dred , 247-48.

41. Green, "Slave-Wife, 82.

42. Child, "Mary French," 202.

43. The fantasy of colorlessness in fact amounts to the same thing, for though the pinkish-yellowish-gray of "white" skin is indeed a color, white (as defined in the first entry of Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary ) means "free from color."

44. Child's struggle with this problem can be traced through her revisions of the story as she prepared it for republication in The Slave's Friend of 1836. In this later version "the streak whiter than the rest of [Mary's] face" is replaced by a streak that is "lighter," a substitution that masks the problem but does not really avoid it.

45. One source of difficulty is that black and white have come to symbolize the moral dichotomy between good and evil. For antislavery discourse such symbolism is profoundly troubling and frequently results in absurdly paradoxical rhetoric in which the positive

valuation of the black man is depicted in terms of whiteness. For example, the vignette of "The Apple and the Chestnut" presents a "white man" taunting a "poor colored man" by comparing his own race to an apple and the black's to a chestnut. The black man replies with a witticism that, by inverting the intended insult, ultimately deepens it: "O, Massa, what you say is true. The chestnut has dark skin just like poor black man, but its kernel is all white and sweet. The apple, though it looks so pretty, has many little black grains at the heart." Attempting to explain the moral of this exchange, the narrator only intensifies the contradictions: "Now little boys and girls can't be abolitionists until they get rid of all these black grains in their hearts'' ( The Slave's Friend 1 [1836]: 3). Such logic suggests that the ability to liberate the black people depends upon first expunging blackness.

46. Eliza Lee Follen, "A Melancholy Boy," The Liberty Bell 5 (1844): 94-95.

47. The only notable exception to this trend is Jules Zanger, "The 'Tragic Octoroon' in Pre-Civil War Fiction," American Quarterly 18 (Spring 1966), which discusses some of the strategic uses of this figure in abolitionist writing. His most useful insight for my purposes is that the octoroon "represented not merely the product of the incidental sin of the individual sinner, but rather what might be called the result of cumulative institutional sin, since the octoroon was the product of four [ sic ] generations of illicit, enforced miscegenation made possible by the slavery system" (66).

48. Caroline Wells Healey Dall, "Amy," Liberty Bell 10 (1849): 6, 8, 11, 12. In "The Inalienable Love" ( Liberty Bell 15 [1858]), Dali makes this point explicit, asserting that if she were to write her story with the "nervous strength" of the slave's narration, "all the women in the land would tear the pages out of the fair volume" (87).

49. The opposite, and most conservative, pattern of racial and sexual pairings is demarcated by another frequently told story of miscegenation, one that romanticizes the relation between a white man and a darker woman. In its most prevalent form, a beautiful, refined quadroon loves a white gentleman only to lose him through either death or marriage. This loss entails, in addition to the statutory broken heart, a fall from a life of luxury and endearments into one of slavery and sexual exploitation. Even in these stories, however, where the power of the white man and the exclusion of the black man seem most absolute, miscegenation works to interrogate white male supremacy. These are stories about the unequal positions of men and women within a love relation, where the inherent similarities between the nearly white quadroon and the white woman emphasize the ways in which the quadroon's inability to control her fate is only an extreme example of the victimization of all women in a society that considers love a fair exchange for power.

50. The examples of this last passion are myriad. See especially Harry's incestuous worship of his half-sister and mistress Nina Gordon in Stowe's Dred , and Jan's rivalry with both the husband and the son of his beloved mistress Maria in Child's "Jan and Zaida," Liberty Bell 14 (1856).

51. See the discussion of the revolutionary force of Child's stand on miscegenation in both Karcher's article "Rape, Murder, and Revenge" and in her introduction to Lydia Maria Child's Hobomok and Other Writings on Indians (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986). In Hobomok , as in Catharine Sedgwick's Hope Leslie (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987), the marriages of white women and Native American men are (somewhat equivocally) endorsed, suggesting once again the difference in antebellum racial attitudes toward the noble savage and the slave.

52. Child, An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans (1836; facsimile reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1968), 196-97.

53. Harriet E. Wilson's Our Nig: or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (New York: Vintage Books, 1983) is not essentially an antislavery fiction; in Mag Smith's marriage to the "kind-hearted African" Jim it does, however, narrate this most socially unacceptable of unions. It is worth noting that such a story, when finally written, was first penned by a black woman, not a white.

54. Green, "Slave-Wife," 87, 94, 103, 107.

55. Matilda G. Thompson, "Aunt Judy's Story: A Story from Real Life," The Child's Anti-Slavery Book , 113, 115, 112, 117. For a more extended example of this narrative strategy, see Jane Elizabeth Jones, The Young Abolitionists, or, Conversations on Slavery (Boston: AntiSlavery Office, 1848). This juvenile novel begins with a series of conversations between a mother and her three children and then dramatizes these lessons in abolition as the family helps to hide a group of fugitive slaves.

56. I do not mean to deny that abolitionists found the domestication of slavery politically useful, but only to suggest that despite its strategic efficacy the practice had costs for women, children, and slaves. For a brilliant analysis of how the strategy worked see Philip Fisher, "Making a Thing into a Man: The Sentimental Novel and Slavery," Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). Fisher argues that the domestication of slavery in Uncle Tom's Cabin , and particularly the distillation of the horrors of slavery into the recurring image of the separation and destruction of slave families, performs the cultural work of "making a thing into a man," and so proves efficacious in restructuring popular attitudes toward the slave. The notion of the slave as thing, object, property is replaced in domestic antislavery fiction with the imaginative conception of the slave as person, because this

fiction makes the slave familiar by putting him or her within the ordinary and emotionally accessible realm of the family. Furthermore, Fisher points out that setting the destruction of the black slave family within the context of the white slave-owning family makes "the contradiction between the inevitable sentimental nature of the family and the corrosive institution of slavery . . . the central analytic point of Stowe's novel" (101). I would add that the juxtaposition of the institutions of slavery and family also reveals the corrosive dimension of the family itself.

Gillian Brown's article "Getting in the Kitchen with Dinah: Domestic Politics in Uncle Tom's Cabin " ( American Quarterly 36 [Fall, 1984]) preceded the publication of Hard Facts and is positioned largely in response to Jane Tompkins's evaluation of Stowe's use of domestic values as the source of sentimental power and the ideal replacement for political and commercial power. However, it can also serve as a critique of Fisher on this point, questioning his essentially positive reading of the family. Brown argues that the comparison between slavery and family in Uncle Tom's Cabin reveals the economic basis of existing familial relations and that Stowe's utopian vision of a society governed by familial mores is therefore predicated on a restructuring of the family. Stowe, she asserts, "seeks to reform American society not by employing domestic values but by reforming them. . . . Stowe's domestic solution to slavery, then, represents not the strength of sentimental values but a utopian rehabilitation of them, necessitated by their fundamental complicity with the market to which they are ostensibly opposed" (507). The obvious difference between Stowe's work, as Brown interprets it, and that of Coleman and Thompson is that the latter do not self-consciously embrace the feminist project of rehabilitating domesticity, a fact that makes their unwitting display of the similarities between slavery and family all the more disturbing.

57. Coleman and Thompson, "A Few Words About American Slave Children," The Child's Anti-Slavery Book , 10, 9.

58. "The Difference Between a Slave and a Child," The Child's Book on Slavery, or Slavery Made Plain (Cincinnati: American Reform Tract and Book Society, 1857), 31.

59. Ibid., 30, 28.

60. Such displacements into the moral realm are quite common in abolitionist discourse. For example, see Rev. Charles Beecher's very similar argument in the American Anti-Slavery Society tract, "The God of the Bible against Slavery." Quoting from a decision by Judge Ruffin that distinguishes between the structures of authority associated with slavery and those associated with the family by reference to the differing "ends" of the two systems ("the happiness of youth" versus ''the profits of the master"), Beecher characterizes slavery as "intrinsically and unchangeably selfish" and the parent-

child relation as "intrinsically benevolent." Reprinted in Beecher, Anti-Slavery Tracts , ser. 1 (1855-1856, reprinted, Westport Conn.: Negro University Press, 1970) tract 17, 5-7.

61. See David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1966) especially chapters 6 and 7, "The Legitimacy of Enslavement" and "The Ideal of the Christian Servant," and chapter 10, "Religious Sources of Antislavery Thought: Quakers and the Sectarian Tradition."

62. See Smith-Rosenberg's introductions to parts 1 and 2 of Disorderly Conduct .

63. Consider, for example, the minister Laco Ray consults in "The Slave-Wife" or the whole collection of church apologists for slavery in Dred . Along with Mrs. Shelby from Uncle Tom , compare Mrs. Nelson and Mrs. Jennings in The Child's Anti-Slavery Book , who cannot prevent the sale of Mark in "Mark and Hasty"; a less harsh reading of Edith's delicacy might also cast her in this role.

64. Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin , 415.

65. Tom's soul, however, is not completely disentangled from the commercial realm, for in responding to his taunts, Tom engrafts the New Testament vocabulary of redemption based on Christ's sacrificial payment onto Legree's assertion that the money he paid for Tom establishes his ownership. In claiming God as his purchaser, Tom excludes himself from the conflict and recasts it as a dispute between masters. See Michaels's discussion of the ways in which Stowe found that the body and even the soul "could not be guaranteed against capitalistic appropriation" ("Romance and Real Estate," 176).

66. C., "A Thought upon Emancipation," Liberty Chimes , 80. I do not want to discredit the heroic potential of slave suicides. Surely the will to take one's own life may be the last, and in some situations perhaps the only means of expressing a will at all. What is suspect here is not the slave's motives for suicide but the abolitionist's desire for and glorification of such deaths.

1. Family Notes and Autobiography: Brooklyn and New York , vol. 1 of The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman: Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts , ed. Edward E Grief (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 67. Grier dates this notebook (it survives only in microfilm, Library of Congress Collection item 80) as being used between 1847 and 1854. Consequently, in his judgment, these lines are probably the earliest extant instances of Whitman's new poetic form. See both his introduction to the "albot Wilson" notebook in this volume and his "Walt Whitman's Earliest Known Notebook" ( PMLA 83 [October, 1968]: 1453-56). In so dating this manuscript Grier endorses

Emory Halloway's claim that with these lines "begin the first preserved attempts that Whitman made at creating the verse form which he was to employ in 'Leaves of Grass' "( The Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman [New York: Doubleday, Page and Co., 1921], 2:69). For the less convincing argument for a later dating of notebook and passage see Floyd Stovall, "Dating Whitman's Early Notebooks," Studies in Bibliography 24 (1971): 197-204.

2. Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass: the First (1855) Edition , ed. Malcolm Cowley (New York: Penguin Classics, 1986) ll. 422-23. Whitman sets these words as two lines through the edition of 1871, after which he had them printed as a single long line. In the intervening editions Whitman made changes in punctuation and, more notably, in capitalization, first capitalizing soul in the 1860 edition, and then in 1867 giving body an initial capital as well.

Unless otherwise specified all citations from Leaves of Grass refer to the 1855 edition, for which I use Cowley's text and line numbers. Since in the 1855 edition the poems were not given titles, for convenience I generally employ the titles Whitman used in the final "deathbed" edition of 1881. My commentary on later emendations and on post-1855 poems relies on Leaves of Grass: A Textual Variorum of the Printed Poems , 3 vols., ed. Sculley Bradley et al. (New York: New York University Press, 1980).

3. Indeed, in a discussion of the "Body Language" of the 1855 Leaves of Grass , Helen Vendler writes that "readers who seek in Whitman the poet of social protest find an authentic Whitman. But they do not find the primary one. The primary Whitman, psychologically speaking, is the Whitman who, at some point in his thirties, opened a new circuit between the energies of sexuality and the energies of language . . ." ("Body Language: Leaves of Grass and the Articulation of Sexual Awareness," Harpers 273 [October 1986]: 64). Vendler's stratification of authentic Whitmans into primary and lesser figures exemplifies the disjunction between political and bodily or sexual interpretations that characterizes the vast majority of Whitman criticism. Thus for Vendler, discussing the sexuality of Whitman's poetry entails dismissing its political import.

Conversely, the most interesting discussions of the politics of Whitman's poetry generally disregard issues of corporeality. See Mitchell Breitwieser, "Who Speaks in Whitman's Poems?" in The American Renaissance: New Dimensions , ed. Harry Garvin (Lewisburg, Penn.: Bucknell University Press, 1983); Kenneth Burke, "Policy Made Personal: Whitman's Verse and Prose—Salient Traits," in of Leaves of Grass: One Hundred Years After , ed. Milton Hindus (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1955); and Allen Grossman, "The Poetics of Union in Whitman and Lincoln: An Inquiry toward the Relationship of Art and Policy," in Michaels and Pease, American Renaissance Reconsidered . Thus, for example, in Grossman's brilliant discussion

of the "poetics of union" he hardly refers to sexual union. I argue that a central aim of Whitman's poetics is precisely to mediate between such exclusively bodily or abstractly political conceptions of identity and of poetic utterance. Michael Moon's study, Disseminating Whitman: Revision and Corporeality in "Leaves of Grass" (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991) provides a wonderful and rare exception to this pattern; it does so by focusing on the politics of bodily control evident in cultural attitudes toward male/male desire.

4. Allen Grossman says of these lines (and of Whitman's early formal experiments in "Resurgemus," "Blood-Money," and "Wounded in the House of Friends") that "the 'open' line as formal principle appears simultaneously with the subject of liberation and is the enabling condition of the appearance of that subject" (''The Poetics of Union," 192). Although my analysis is deeply indebted to Grossman's insights, I wish to stress the difference between our readings: my focus on Whitman's identification of the role of the poet with that of the mediator lays the basis for a quite different conception of Whitman's poetics and produces a more reciprocal understanding of the relation between the form and subject of these lines than that Grossman describes.

5. See Whitman's own description of the creole Margaret in Franklin Evans , cited below.

6. Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel , rev. ed. (New York: Stein and Day, 1966), 301.

7. Franklin Evans, in The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman: The Early Poems and the Fiction , ed. Thomas L. Brasher (New York: New York University Press, 1963), 206. All subsequent citations refer to this edition.

8. My thanks to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who, on hearing a version of this chapter, pointed out the suppression of fustigate .

9. Evans's description of Margaret as "dark and swarthy" provides the most pointed instance of the manufacturing of difference I am discussing here. His penchant for explaining her emotional vehemence as a sign of her African ancestry functions similarly; see his references to "the fiery disposition of her nation" (210), "the spirit of her fiery race" (213), and the observation that "her heart had still a remnant of the savage" (224). Margaret's progressive darkenings culminate in the scene in which, standing outside Mrs. Conway's sickroom window, her entire body is absorbed into the blackness of the night so that only "those glittering things, which were human eyes'' remain visible (225).

10. Though the fact of their cohabitation is mentioned, the days between the wedding and the awakening of Evans's disgust are carefully elided: "It needs not that I should particularize the transactions of the next few days" (207).

11. Later, when Louis's death from the Southern disease drives the maddened Margaret to confession and suicide, Evans merely reports the events, not even stating how she killed herself. (Piercing dagger or strangling noose perhaps?) In a story built out of oppositions and mediation, once Mrs. Conway's death collapses the triangle of their relations, Margaret's suicide becomes redundant and uninteresting. For this story of mergings, the single term remains outside the structures of linkage and therefore unrepresented and indeed largely meaningless.

12. See Sharon Cameron, Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979).

13. Breitwieser draws the related conclusion:

The word I in Leaves of Grass is the self-designation of two entities, one a single member of the wide spectrum of American possibility, the other a reverse prism that, after such single members have painfully resigned their warped centrality, collects them and emits the plain friendly light of day: "He judges not as the judge judges but as the sun falling around a helpless thing." What we call "Whitman" is always both the blessing sun and one of the naked helpless things it blesses. ("Who Speaks in Whitman's Poems," 142)

The difference between our readings is that I would divide Whitman's "I" still further, not stopping with the impersonal allencompassing "I" and the single individual but going on to note how even the naked, helpless things are self-divided, encompassing a staggering multiplicity.

14. This passage is one of the four excerpts from Whitman's work anthologized in The Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse , ed. Stephen Coote (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1983). For Coote, at least, the erotic appeal of the drowning has become the defining characteristic of these lines.

15. F. O. Matthiessen was, I believe, the first to identify this event: "Thus merged with the night, his series of flickering pictures expands into a few that take up whole paragraphs: of a swimmer being drowned; of a ship being wrecked—a reconstruction of his memory of the Mexico as it is broken to pieces on Hampstead beach in 1840." American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941), 572. Matthiessen's account of the expansion of flickering pictures into whole paragraphs describes the generic instability I am discussing as an instance of losing poetic control: Whitman apparently forgets that he is writing a dream.

16. The money paid "for their blood" that identifies this oppressive relation as slavery rewrites the poem "Blood-Money" that Whitman published in the New York Tribune Supplement of March 22, 1850, probably as a commentary on Webster's support of the fugitive slave law. "Blood-Money" equates the sale of slaves with the sil-

ver Judas took for the body of Jesus and so offers an explicitly political version of this Luciferian moment.

17. Manuscript drafts reveal that the process of erasing the particular contents of slavery begins with the initial composition of this passage: an early version refers to "Black Lucifer." Notes and Fragments Left by Walt Whitman , ed. R. M. Bucke (London: Talbot, 1899), item 40.

18. Fredric Jameson defines mediation as "the classical dialectical term for the establishment of relationships between, say, the formal analysis of a work of art and its social ground, or between the internal dynamics of the political state and its economic base" ( The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981], 39; Jameson discusses this concept of mediation on 39-44 and 225-26). My work obviously entails such an effort to relate Whitman's poetic practice to the contemporaneous political problematics of slavery. In his own work, however, Whitman is engaged in a similar project of mediation, both in his placement of the poet between master and slave and in the political and social impact of poetry that such a stance assumes.

19. As, for instance, I basically do in my reading of "The Sleepers." Breitwieser's discussion of Whitman's use of the word "I" helpfully demonstrates how Whitman's poetry exaggerates and so confronts the mobile nature of deictic signs and the consequent precariousness of written assertions of presence. His analysis focuses on the linguistic implications of Whitman's extravagant transpositions of first person utterance, mine on the significance of Whitman's mobile "I" for his definition of identity and his conception of embodiment.

20. For a more general discussion of this dynamic see Tenney Nathanson's analysis of the pathos inherent in Whitman's "intense literalism," the poet's acute insistence that all sorts of external things, steamships as well as human flesh, are literally present in his poems ("Whitman's Tropes of Light and Flood: Language and Representation in Early Editions of Leaves of Grass," ESQ 32 [1985]: 118).

1. Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself , ed. Lydia Maria Child (1861). Reprint, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987). Jacobs's letters to Post of 1852[?] and June 21, 1857, are included in the "Correspondence" section of Yellin's edition (232, 242). Amy Post clearly saw these statements as significant, quoting the latter in her postscript to Incidents as evidence of how Jacobs's "sensitive spirit shrank from publicity" (203).

In the correspondence Jacobs's own practices of punctuation, capitalization, and spelling have been retained. I follow Yellin, however, in inserting an additional space where a period and the subsequent capital letter have been omitted (see Yellin's "Note on this Edition," xxxiv). All quotations from Incidents refer to the Yellin edition and are given parenthetically within the text.

2. Henry Louis Gates Jr., "Introduction," Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the "Racial" Self (New York: Oxford University Press,1987), xxiv.

3. Harriet Jacobs to Amy Post, February 14, 1853, in Yellin, Incidents , 233.

4. Harriet Jacobs to Amy Post, April 4, 1853, in Yellin, Incidents , 235.

5. Henry Louis Gates Jr. explains that Frederick Douglass was "the representative colored man of the United States" in part because he was "the most presentable" ("The Trope of a New Negro and the Reconstruction of the Image of the Black," Representations 24 [Fall 1988]: 128).

6. Harriet Jacobs to Amy Post, April 4, 1853, in Yellin, Incidents , 235. In her letter to Post of October 9, 1853, Jacobs writes, "Mrs Stowe never answered any of my letters after I refused to have my history in her key perhaps it is for the best at least I will try and think so," and then discusses her "scribbling" of antislavery pieces for the New York Tribune in preparation for writing her history herself (236). As such letters indicate, Jacobs understood her own writing as a means of responding to Stowe's treatment.

7. The evaluations of Jacobs's deportment are from Lydia Maria Child's editorial introduction to Incidents (3). Amy Post provides a similar, if warmer, assessment in an appended postscript to the volume: "the author of this book is my highly-esteemed friend. . . . [When introduced] I immediately became much interested in Linda; for her appearance was prepossessing, and her deportment indicated remarkable delicacy of feeling and purity of thought" (203). Thus Jacobs's story is framed by the testimony of well-bred abolitionist women to her fine character and manners.

8. See Dorothy Sterling, We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), 84.

9. Before Yellin's superb work in documenting Jacobs's authorship of Incidents , Jacobs's existence was almost completely concealed by her book. Some critics argued that though the basic story might have been that of a fugitive slave, the book itself was merely an imitation of a slave narrative written by its purported editor, Lydia Maria Child. See, for example, John Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 367-82, as well as Yellin's discussion of Blassingame and this critical trend in Yellin, "Written By Her-

self: Harriet Jacobs's Slave Narrative," American Literature 53 (November 1981): 479-86.

Even among those critics who upheld the text's authenticity as a slave narrative, Linda Brent was generally noted as its author, with significant results. For example, Annette Niemtzow's perceptive comparison of Incidents and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass an American Slave, Written by Himself (New York: Signet, 1968), includes a discussion of these texts' different attitudes toward names: "male slaves needed names and control of naming to achieve adult identity; for women, bound to give up their names, the issues of adulthood were different" ("The Problematic of Self in Autobiography: The Example of the Slave Narrative," in The Art of the Slave Narrative: Original Essays in Criticism and Theory , ed. John Sekora and Darwin T. Turner [Macomb, Ill.: Western Illinois University, 1982], 104-5). Niemtzow is clearly unaware that "Linda Brent," the name she ascribes to the author of Incidents , is itself an instance of the control over naming she associates with the narratives of male slaves.

10. Taken together, Annette Niemtzow's and Valerie Smith's discussions of Incidents can be read as a debate over the relation of Jacobs's text to generic norms. In their analyses of Incidents , both critics examine the influence of domestic fiction, and particularly the Richardsonian plot of seduction, on the form of the slave narrative. Niemtzow ultimately presents these conventions as disabling. She argues that, finding no space for her experiences as a female slave in the fundamentally male genre of the slave narrative, Jacobs evokes the female seduction story, only to be imprisoned within its white and middle-class definitions of femininity. Smith, on the other hand, argues that in her juxtaposition and manipulation of these two genres—that of the male slave and that of the free woman—Jacobs radically critiques and transforms them both. Niemtzow, 104-8, and Smith, "Form and Ideology in Three Slave Narratives," Self Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 28-43.

11. See Hortense Spillers's discussion of the paradox by which the "peculiar institution" both denies slaves a "private realm" and makes them "the very stuff of domesticity as planter-aristocrats envisioned it" ("Changing the Letter: The Yokes and Jokes of Discourse, or, Mrs. Stowe, Mr. Reed," in McDowell and Rampersand, Slavery and the Literary Imagination , 25).

12. My thanks to my Amherst College students Jonathan Flatley, who helped me to think of Jacobs as "poaching" on the private, and Margaret Stohl, whose paper on Incidents taught me a good deal about Jacobs's use of domestic space and specifically that the peephole looked out but not in.

13. Margaret Horniblow's testament is among the many documents Yellin has discovered. In a codicil she wills "that my negro

girl Harriet be given to my niece Mary Matilda Norcom Daughter of Dr. James Norcom, and I further give & bequeathe to my said niece my bureau & work table & their contents." Not recognized as a neighbor, Jacobs is rather in the category of "negro girl," a possession little different from a work table. Yellin prints a facsimile of the codicil ( Incidents , 213).

14. As Hazel Carby notes, "Any feminist history that seeks to establish the sisterhood of white and black women as allies in the struggle against the oppression of all women must also reveal the complexity of the social and economic differences between women." Carby's reading of Incidents examines Jacobs's treatment of this problem specifically in terms of Linda's relations to her various mistresses (" 'Hear My Voice, Ye Careless Daughters': Narratives of Slave and Free Women before Emancipation," Reconstructing Womanhood , 53). See also her discussion of the "sisterhood" of Linda's mother and mistress (51-53).

15. Angela Davis has made similar observations about the power of the slave woman who, in tending to the needs of the slave community, "was performing the only labor of the slave community which could not be directly and immediately claimed by the oppressor" ("Reflections on the Black Woman's Role in the Community of Slaves," Black Scholar 3 [December 1971]: 7).

16. Jacobs details the privations of plantation domesticity:

If the dinner was not served at the exact time on that particular Sunday, [Mrs. Flint] would station herself in the kitchen, and wait till it was dished, and then spit in all the kettles and pans that had been used for cooking. She did this to prevent the cook and her children from eking out their meager fare with the remains of the gravy and other scrapings. The slaves could get nothing to eat except what she chose to give them. Provisions were weighed out by the pound and ounce, three times a day. I can assure you she gave them no chance to eat wheat bread from her flour barrel. She knew how many biscuits a quart of flour would make, and exactly what size they ought to be.

Dr. Flint was an epicure. The cook never sent a dinner to his table without fear and trembling; for if there happened to be a dish not to his liking, he would either order her to be whipped, or compel her to eat every mouthful of it in his presence. The poor, hungry creature might not have objected to eating it; but she did object to having her master cram it down her throat till she choked. (12)

In Mrs. Flint's domestic economy, the household wisdom so prized by nineteenth-century matrons produces deprivation, not the bounty its proponents promised. Mrs. Flint spitting into the pots or Dr. Flint force-feeding the cook literally invert the normative and life-sustaining processes of consumption: the kettle, instead of containing food for the body, becomes a receptacle for excretions from the body; the cook, instead of preparing the meal, is choked by

it. Food withheld, contaminated, or crammed down the throat becomes punitive, its nutritive value perverted into a sign of dominance and submission. Significantly, many of the women who wrote for the abolitionist cause also wrote treatises on household management, thus casting the well-ordered, thrifty, but bountiful freehome as a mechanism of political reform. See, for example, Catherine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, The American Woman's Home: Or, Principles of Domestic Science (New York: J. B. Ford and Co., 1869) and Lydia Maria Child, The Frugal Housewife (Boston: Carter, Hendee, 1830).

17. For a reading of how these three stories interact with each other and with the chapter's explicitly gendered title, "The Slave Who Dared to Feel like a Man," see Smith, Self-Discovery , 34-35.

18. The questions that accompany Child's request for a longer and more explicit account of the Southern outrages that followed Turner's rebellion make dear the titillating violence inherent in antislavery's appeal.

My object in writing at this time is to ask you to write what you can recollect of the outrages committed on the colored people, in Nat Turner's time. You say the reader would not believe what you saw " inflicted on men, women, and children, without the slightest ground of suspicion against them." What were those inflictions? Were any tortured to make them confess? And how? Were any killed? Please write some of the most striking particulars, and let me have them to insert. (Lydia Maria Child to Harriet Jacobs, August 13, 1860, in Yellin, Incidents , 244).

Ambivalent in her assessment of the allure of cruelty, Child also included suggestions such as grouping the more gruesome stories of neighborhood atrocities together in one chapter "in order that those who shrink from 'supping upon horrors' might omit them" (Yellin, Incidents , xxii). To note that two of these digressive chapters were suggested by Child only illustrates the discontinuities entailed in coupling the requirements of a personal narrative to the needs of abolitionist politics.

19. Baker, Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature , 52. In general, Jacobs does not extend this concern to "any slave boy." She associates sexual vulnerability primarily with the body of the female slave; thus, while admitting that "slavery is terrible for men," she contends that "it is far more terrible for women. Supperadded to the burden common to all, they have wrongs, and sufferings, and mortifications peculiarly their own" ( Incidents , 77). Though she relates stories of white women whose offspring are fathered by their slaves, she does not present such incidents as evidence of the oppression of these enslaved men, but rather as a sign of the moral laxity inherent to slaveholding (51-52). The one exception is the story of Luke, who

was forced to wear nothing but his shirt so as to be always ready for the whip, and who was made to submit to "the strangest freaks of despotism. . . . Some of these freaks were of a nature too filthy to be repeated." Yet what Jacobs labels most freakish about Luke's ordeal is undoubtedly that he has been fashioned into a slave girl. The feminization that characterizes Luke's enslavement is reversed as the story of his eventual escape includes the symbolic castration of his now dead master: Luke requests and receives his master's old trousers, their pockets secretly loaded with bills (192-93).

20. Douglass's story of writing "protections" is not of course without its ambivalences: on discovery of the escape plan, he and his friends must destroy the evidence by eating the forged passes along with their biscuits ( Narrative , 94-97). Such scenes of bodily incorporation, however, ultimately reiterate Douglass's sense of writing as replacing and filling the slave body: "My feet have been so cracked with the frost, that the pen with which I am writing might be laid in the gashes" (43). William Wells Brown, "The Life and Escape of William Wells Brown," in Clotel, or, The President's Daughter (New York: University Books, 1969), 38. Also see Brown's barter of barley sugar for lessons in spelling (36-37).

21. The recognition that the act of telling about sexual abuse may prove largely indistinguishable from the abuses told is common among the narratives of slave women. Stories of interracial rape and sexual compulsion might well fuel abolitionist zeal, but they also necessarily cater to the voyeurism of Northern audiences. For a particularly explicit example of these dynamics, see the Rev. H. Mattison's interview of Louisa Piquet, published as an antislavery tract in 1861. Piquet speaks about her experiences under slavery in the hope of gaining subscriptions to a fund for the purchase of her mother. While Mattison is supportive of her efforts, his questions pruriently focus on the more pornographic aspects of her story: how thin her dress when she was whipped, what parts of her body were scarred by the cowhide, whether she was stripped at the auction, and of course, what her sexual relations were with her various masters (Rev. H. Mattison, Louisa Piquet, The Octoroon: A Tale of Southern Life , included in Collected Black Women's Narratives , ed. Anthony G. Barthelemy, Schomburg Library of Nineteenth Century Black Women Writers [New York: Oxford University Press, 1988]).

22. My analysis owes much to Hortense Spillers's treatment of this passage in "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book," Diacritics 17 (1988): 65-81. Spillers discusses the analogy between the position of the jealous mistress and that of the master and concludes, as I do, that such an analogy provides neither the white woman nor the slave woman with a position of authority: "Neither could claim her body and its various productions—for quite different reasons, albeit—as her own" (77). My reading differs

from Spillers's, however, in the attempt to relate this scene to the more general dynamics of a discourse of female sexuality.

23. Jacobs's concern with bourgeois standards of feminine virtue was characteristic of early black feminists. Linda Gordon and Ellen Dubois note that since the problems of maintaining respectability common to all nineteenth-century women were especially severe for the black woman, "the black women's movement conducted a particularly militant campaign for respectability, often making black feminists spokespeople for prudery in their communities" ("Seeking Ecstasy on the Battlefield: Danger and Pleasure in Nineteenth-Century Feminist Sexual Thought," Feminist Studies 9 [Spring 1983]: 10). At stake in such campaigns, and in Jacobs's narrative project, is both an acknowledgment of the black woman's position as the one recognized site of sexuality in a purportedly asexual female world, and the desire that it were otherwise.

24. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood , 61.

25. I thank P. Gabrielle Foreman for allowing me to quote from her manuscript "Manuscript in Signs," 7.

26. Jacobs is not alone in suggesting the erotic power of antislavery work. For example, in an article published in the 1854 giftbook Autographs for Freedom the white feminist-abolitionist, Jane Swisshelm, describes William Lloyd Garrison's abolitionist fervor in just these terms: "It is necessary to his existence that he should work—work for the slave; and in his work he gratifies all the strongest instincts of his nature, more completely than even the grossest sensualist can satisfy his , by unlimited indulgence!" That Swisshelm should draw such an analogy is no doubt indicative of the relation between politics and sexuality in her own life and mind. Nevertheless, it is important to note that her discussion of the sexual dimension of political work is explicitly framed in terms of male, not female, experience. See Ronald Walters, "The Erotic South: Civilization and Sexuality in American Abolitionism," American Quarterly 25 (May 1973): 177-201; Walters quotes Swisshelm on 178.

1. One of the "snatches" Joseph Lyman copied out and preserved from Emily Dickinson's letters to him. Richard Sewall provisionally dates these passages "about 1865" ( The Lyman Letters: New Light on Emily Dickinson and Her Family , ed. Richard B. Sewall [Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1965], 71).

2. Throughout the 1850s and 1860s the Dickinson home, eminent in the town of Amherst, was a decidedly politicized space. Nevertheless, the family's political loyalties and class position did not foster a reformist zeal. When discussing "the 'great questions' of public policy which agitate the country," Edward Dickinson, the

poet's father, felt sufficiently untouched by the agitation to signal his distance from the great questions with quotation marks. Whatever his concern over the great questions, Edward Dickinson's years of party politics belonged to the most divisive period of sectional debate. His record is that of an inveterate Whig: he supported the Compromise of 1850 as a means of preserving the Union and voted for Daniel Webster through all fifty-three ballots at the Whig National Convention of 1852. His one term in Congress coincided with the debate over the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which he called an "unnecessary, unjust & iniquitous bill"; the morning after its passage, he served as host for a meeting at which the founding of a new "Republican" party was discussed. This was the limit, however, of his antislavery activity. He refused to run for Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts on the Constitutional Unionist ticket of 1861, and in declining the nomination he urged the party to "denounce as subversive to all constitutional guarantees, if we expect to reconstruct or restore the Union, the heretical dogma that immediate and universal emancipation of slaves should be proclaimed by the government as a means of putting an end to the war." See Millicent Todd Bingham, Emily Dickinson's Home: Letters of Edward Dickinson and His Family (New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1955), 244-45, 390-98; and Jay Leyda, The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960) 1:337, 303-4. A discussion of the class implications of Edward Dickinson's politics is forthcoming in Robert Gross, "Squire Dickinson and Squire Hoar" (manuscript).

Whatever his shortcomings as a reader of her poems, Dickinson's epistolary mentor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, was a publicly recognized reformer, consistent and adamant in his support of both feminist and abolitionist causes. When she began their correspondence, he was serving as the colonel of the Twenty-ninth Regiment, the first corps of black soldiers in the Union army. For biographies of Higginson see Anna Mary Wells, Dear Preceptor: The Life and Times of Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963) and Tilden G. Edelstein, Strange Enthusiasm: A Life of Thomas Wentworth Higginson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968).

3. Analysis of Dickinson's resistance to referential readings has proved the most fertile and sophisticated approach to her poetry. See, for example, Robert Weisbuch's precise discussions of Dickinson's "sceneless poetry" and her "extreme subordination of subjects to structures" ( Emily Dickinson's Poetry [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972], 24). Interestingly, this critical tradition has not served to dismiss Dickinson's elusive subjects. Thus Leyda's invaluable compilation of data on Dickinson's world proposes to supply the "omitted center" of her writing in order "to get at the truth of Emily Dickinson" ( Years and Hours , xxi, xix); and Barton St. Armand's Emily Dickinson and Her Culture: The Soul's Society (Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) strives to situate her poems among the stuff of New England culture, from scrapbooks to gravestones. Similarly, a great deal of work has been done to explain Dickinson's poetry in terms of her sexual and psychological experience: the apparent ''scenelessness'' of her poetry and the mythic isolation of her life reinforce each other in eliciting circular readings that use poems and life to decode one another. See, for example, the countless searches for the identity of Dickinson's lover, as well as John Cody, After Great Pain: The Inner Life of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1971); Barbara Antonina Clarke Mossberg, Emily Dickinson: When a Writer is a Daughter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982); and Vivian R. Pollak, Dickinson: The Anxiety of Gender (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984).

The task of situating the poems in terms of a larger social nexus is more difficult, and Shira Wolosky's Emily Dickinson: A Voice of War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984) remains the only book-length study to attempt such a historical grounding. Wolosky is surely right to heed the fact that Dickinson's "flood years" of astounding poetic production coincide with the fighting of the Civil War, but she is less persuasive in explaining what that coincidence might tell us about Dickinson's poems.

4. Karl Keller uses this phrase to explain what he considers the uniquely apolitical nature of Dickinson's poetry: "It is not at all possible, I believe, to refer to her writings as political in any sense, whereas those of the others almost always are in some sense or other," ( The Only Kangaroo Among the Beauty: Emily Dickinson and America [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979], 122).

5. The Poems of Emily Dickinson , ed. Thomas Johnson, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1955). All citations of Dickinson's poetry refer to Johnson's edition, and I rely on his numbering system to identify each poem. I use the first lines of Dickinson's poems as titles.

6. Harriet Jacobs describes Linda Brent as just such an "unsuspecting Heir" of her slave status: "When I was six years old my mother died; and then, for the first time, I learned by the talk around me, that I was a slave" ( Incidents , 6).

7. Martha Dickinson Bianchi, Emily Dickinson Face to Face (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1932), 65-66.

8. Letter number 330, dated June 1869. In The Letters of Emily Dickinson , ed. Thomas Johnson and Theodora Ward, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1958), 2:460.

9. Feminist critics have long argued over whether Dickinson's domestic imagery and housebound days are signs of creative entrapment or of emancipation. If Dickinson is the "helpless agoraphobic" (583) of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's account, should her domestic enclosure and "secret art" (634) be understood as

an extreme literalization of the nineteenth-century emblem of female creativity, so that Dickinson actually becomes the fictional "madwoman in the attic"? ( The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979]). Or should her domestic seclusion be understood as, in Adrienne Rich's words, "a necessary economy" that permitted, or indeed liberated, Dickinson to write poetry? ("Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson'' [1975], On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978 [London: Virago, 1980]). Wendy Martin's An American Triptych: Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984) concurs in this interpretation of Dickinson's self-empowering position and then uses it to inform her reading of Rich's own poetic strategies.

The problem with this debate lies in the either/or structure of its readings, in which "home" can mean only one—freeing or incarcerating—thing. Helen McNeil's work on Dickinson offers a wonderful corrective to this debate by demonstrating that Dickinson's houses mean differently in different poems. Although my work is indebted to McNeil's multifaceted understanding of Dickinson's domestic imagery, I want also to emphasize how we differ. For McNeil, Dickinson's elastic and innovative uses of the house to detail "the borderline between inner and outer, between what one has generated and what is given, between present and past" contrasts with a depiction of the body as a site of "easy dualism'' unmarked by culture or time ( Emily Dickinson [New York: Pantheon, 1986], 114). My own work in this chapter presents Dickinson's house and body in a mutually destabilizing network of imagery.

10. Jean Mudge's discussion of the ways in which Dickinson's actual Amherst houses leave their marks on her poetry is of interest here ( Emily Dickinson and the Image of Home [Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1975]). See also the appendix in which Mudge selectively lists Dickinson's recurrent "vocabulary of space." Mudge does not comment, but it seems worth noting that Dickinson's most commonly used spatial words are "away" (216 uses), "go" (152 uses), "without" (140 uses), and "out" (114 uses), only then followed by "home" (86 uses) and "within" (also 86 uses): in this count the vocabulary of escape far exceeds that of enclosure (229).

11. Ralph Franklin argues that the lines from " 'Twould start them" to "it is calm" do not belong in this poem, but instead form a concluding stanza to "A Pit—but Heaven over it" (1712). I do not find the placement of these lines in poem 1712 wholly convincing: at least, I find Franklin's reliance on the repetition of " 'Twould start" in both this passage and in poem 1712 no more compelling than the repetition of "held," "hold," and "hold" in the passage and the last lines of "I tie my hat." See Franklin, The Editing of Emily Dickinson: A Reconsideration (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967), 40-

46, and his facsimile reproduction of fascicle 24 in The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson , 2 vols. (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1981),1:533-60.

12. Cameron, Lyric Time , 77. Cameron goes on to situate these disjunctions as an instance of sexual passion or love transformed into a fury as capable of rupturing sanity as it has proved able to rend the poem's narrative facade. I find this a powerful reading and only want to supplement it by giving attention to the domestic nature of these "vacuous actions."

13. The Dickinson family owned a copy of the 1844 edition of Noah Webster. The volume's other definitions of home are "a dwelling house," "one's own country," "the place of constant residence,'' and "grave, death; or a future state." See Mudge's discussion of these entries in Image of Home , 11-12.

14. Thomas Foster, "Homelessness at Home: Placing Emily Dickinson in (Women's) History," in Engendering Men: The Question of Male Feminist Criticism , ed. Joseph A. Boone and Michael Cadden (New York: Routledge, 1990), 243-44.

15. For a discussion of God as master of ceremonies, including a reading of this poem, see Cynthia Griffin Wolff, Emily Dickinson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), 326-31.

16. Letter number 471 written to her cousins Louise and Frances Norcross, dated August 1876 ( Letters , 2:559).

17. Letter number 342a of Thomas Wentworth Higginson to his wife, in which he lists samples of Emily Dickinson's conversation at their first meeting ( Letters , 2:473-74). After leaving Amherst he sent her "another sheet about E.D." that included the question "Could you tell me what home is?" (letter 342b, Letters , 2:475).

18. The identification of Bee and Goblin is further supported by another poem that Dickinson placed in the same fascicle with "The Soul has Bandaged moments." "If you were coming in the Fall" ends, "It goads me, like the Goblin Bee— / That will not state—its sting" (511). See Manuscript Books , fascicle 17, 1:353-77.

19. Joanne Dobson, Dickinson and the Strategies of Reticence (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 79. Dobson details Dickinson's rhetorical use of public issues, especially poverty, throughout her fourth chapter, " 'The Grieved—are many—I am told—': The Woman Writer and Public Discourse."

20. Letter number 30, dated 23 January 1850 ( Letters , 1:84).

21. Letter number 1004, dated summe 1885. The patriotism of "Carol" and signature refer to Todd's present state of "exile"—on vacation in Europe ( Letters , 3:882).

1. Shirley Samuels writes about the ways in which this doll both postulates and refuses racial reversibility ("The Identity of Slavery,"

in The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America , ed. Shirley Samuels [New York: Oxford University Press, 1992]).

2. The structures of racial difference embodied by topsy-turvy dolls may even be evoked explicitly within antislavery fiction. I suspect, for example, that Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Topsy" may well take her name from these dolls; such a source makes her pairing with the angelic Little Eva poignant indeed. See Uncle Tom's Cabin (New York: The Library of America, 1982), chapters 18-20. Pairs of "Topsy" and "Little Eva" dolls were marketed by both Sears and Montgomery Ward during the 1930s, and as late as 1950 topsy-turvy versions of Stowe's characters were still being manufactured (Doris Y. Wilkinson, "The Toy Menagerie: Early Images of Blacks in Toys, Games and Dolls" in Images of Blacks in American Culture: A Reference Guide to Information Sources , ed. Jessie Carney Smith [New York: Greenwood Press: 1988], 283).

3. The interpretation I am detailing here corresponds to what I believe to be the prevalent and hegemonic cultural function of these dolls within antebellum society. Signs are rarely, however, univalent, and the doll suggests culturally subversive meanings as well. In particular, as one head emerges from the skirts of the other, she can be seen as enacting an interracial birthing (marking past acts of miscegenation). Or, conjoined as they are, the paired figures may suggest the more radical challenge of interracial lesbianism. Such readings demonstrate how even the most conservative and absolute structural dualisms remain inherently unstable and so open to subversion.

4. My thanks to Laura Wexler, who in talking with me about the inhibition of sentimental response to Incidents helped me elaborate this contrast.

5. Douglass, Narrative , 32.

6. Outside the epistolary and fascicle models of private publication discussed here, at least ten Dickinson poems were printed by the popular press, some of them more than once. The evidence for contemporary interest in publishing Dickinson's poems is sufficient to suggest that the infrequency of public publication reflects an aesthetic decision. Thus the readers of these few Dickinson poems in the Springfield Republican and elsewhere ought not to be viewed as her primary or intended readership; they are rather the readership she chose to do without. See Karen Dandurand, "Publication of Dickinson's Poems in Her Lifetime," Legacy 1 (Spring 1984) and her "New Dickinson Civil War Publications," American Literature 56 (March 1984).

7. My thanks to Joseph Harrison, whose work on Dickinson's manuscript books as strategies for "canonical self-inscription" informs these alternatives.