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.