Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-v9fdk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-03T09:05:56.356Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Breathing Free: Environmental Violence and the Plantation Ecology in Hannah Crafts's The Bondwoman's Narrative

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2020

Emily Waples Open the ORCID record for Emily Waples [Opens in a new window]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This essay presents an ecocritical analysis of Hannah Crafts's The Bondwoman's Narrative, the 1850s manuscript novel by a formerly-enslaved African American woman that was recovered by Henry Louis Gates in 2001. Examining Crafts's extensive engagement with Charles Dickens's Bleak House, it argues that Crafts's fictionalized narrative of enslavement and self-emancipation re-imagines a Victorian politics of environmental health as a critique of environmental racism. Showing how Crafts presents the material ecology of the plantation South as a site and vector of violence, it reads The Bondwoman's Narrative as resisting nineteenth-century scientific discourses of racialized immunity that sought to legitimize the systemic neglect of enslaved people in the antebellum United States.

Type
Disturbance
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 48 , Special Issue 1: Open Ecologies , Spring 2020 , pp. 91 - 126
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Allewaert, Monique. Ariel's Ecology: Plantations, Personhood, and Colonialism in the American Tropics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ballinger, Gill, Lustig, Tim, and Townshend, Dale. “Missing Intertexts: Hannah Crafts's ‘The Bondwoman's Narrative’ and African American Literary History.” Journal of American Studies 39, no. 2 (2005): 207–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Balme, Joshua Rhodes. American States, Churches, and Slavery. 3rd ed.London: Hamilton, Adams, 1864.Google Scholar
Bernier, Celeste-Marie, and Newman, Judie. “‘The Bondwoman's Narrative’: Text, Paratext, Intertext and Hypertext.” Journal of American Studies 39, no. 2 (2005): 147–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bosman, Julie. “Professor Says He Has Solved a Mystery Over a Slave's Novel.” New York Times, 13 September 2013.Google Scholar
Bowen, Elias. Slavery in the Methodist Episcopal Church. Auburn: William J. Moses, 1859.Google Scholar
Brown, James. American Slavery, in Its Moral and Political Aspects, Comprehensively Examined. Oswego: George Henry, 1849.Google Scholar
Buell, Lawrence. “Bondwoman Unbound: Hannah Crafts's Art and Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literary Practice.” In In Search of Hannah Crafts: Critical Essays on The Bondwoman's Narrative, edited by Gates, Henry Louis Jr. and Robbins, Hollis, 16–29. New York: Basic Books, 2005.Google Scholar
Carby, Hazel V.Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.Google Scholar
Cartwright, Samuel. “Report on Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race.” New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal 7 (1851): 691–715.Google Scholar
Catalogue of the Library of John H. Wheeler, the Historian of North Carolina. New York: Bangs, 1882.Google Scholar
Chadwick, Edwin. Report on the Sanitary Population of the Laboring Classes of Great Britain. London: W. Clowes and Sons, 1843.Google Scholar
Chavis, Benjamin. Foreword to Confronting Environmental Racism: Voices from the Grassroots, edited by Bullard, Robert D., 3–5. Boston: South End Press, 1993.Google Scholar
Child, Lydia Maria. The Patriarchal Institution: As Described by Members of Its Own Family. New York: The American Anti-Slavery Society, 1860.Google Scholar
Cowper, William. The Task: A Poem in Six Books. Philadelphia: Bennett and Walton, 1811.Google Scholar
Crafts, Hannah. The Bondwoman's Narrative. Edited by Gates, Henry Louis Jr.New York: Warner Books, 2002.Google Scholar
Crèvecoeur, J. Hector St. John. Letters from an American Farmer. 1782. New York: Fox, Duffield, 1904.Google Scholar
Cutter, Martha J. “Skinship: Dialectical Passing Plots in Hannah Crafts’ The Bondwoman's Narrative.” American Literary Realism 46, no. 2 (2014): 116–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Day, Brian J. “The Moral Intuition of Ruskin's ‘Storm-Cloud.’” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 45, no. 4 (2005): 917–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dew, Thomas Roderick. Review of the Debate in the Virginia Legislature of 1831 and 1832. Richmond: T. W. White, 1832.Google Scholar
Dickens, Charles. American Notes: For General Circulation. Paris: A. and W. Galignani, 1842.Google Scholar
Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. 1853. London: Penguin, 1985.Google Scholar
Dickens, Charles. Speech of Charles Dickens Delivered at Gore House, Kensington, May 10, 1851. Boston: The Bibliophile Society, 1909.Google Scholar
Dickens, Charles, and Morley, Henry. “North American Slavery.” Household Words, September 1852, 260–70.Google Scholar
Downs, Jim. Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering During the Civil War and Reconstruction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Duffy, John. “States’ Rights Medicine.” In Encyclopedia of Southern Medical Culture, edited by Wilson, Charles Reagan and Ferris, William R., 1355–56. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989.Google Scholar
Ellis, R. J. “‘so amiable and good’: Hannah Crafts's The Bondwoman's Narrative and Its Lineages.” Mississippi Quarterly 62, no. 1 (2009): 137–62.Google Scholar
Equiano, Olaudah. The Interesting Narrative. 1789. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.Google Scholar
Fett, Sharla M.Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Fisch, Audrey A.American Slaves in Victorian England: Abolitionist Politics in Popular Literature and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fitzhugh, George. Sociology for the South, or the Failure of Free Society. Richmond: A. Morris, 1854.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76. Edited by Davidson, Arnold I.. Translated by Macey, David. New York: Picador, 2003.Google Scholar
Gilbert, Olive, and Truth, Sojourner. Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave, Emancipated from Bodily Servitude by the State of New York, in 1828. Boston: n.p., 1850.Google Scholar
Gleason, William A.Sites Unseen: Architecture, Race, and American Literature. New York: New York University Press, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goudie, Sean X.Creole America: The West Indies and the Formation of Literature and Culture in the New Republic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Greeson, Jennifer Rae. Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
[Grimké, Angelina].An Appeal to the Women of the Nominally Free States. 2nd ed.Boston: Isaac Knapp, 1838.Google Scholar
Hack, Daniel. Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hartman, Saidiya V.Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Hepworth, George Hughes. The Whip, Hoe, and Sword; or, The Gulf-Department in ’63. Boston: Walker, Wise, 1864.Google Scholar
Hogarth, Rana N.Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780–1840. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017.Google Scholar
Hosmer, William. Slavery and the Church. Auburn: William J. Moses, 1853.Google Scholar
“Houses for Negroes.” De Bow's Southern and Western Review 9 (1850): 325.Google Scholar
Jackson, Cassandra. Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body. New York: Routledge, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Boston: n.p., 1861.Google Scholar
Jefferson, Thomas. Notes on the State of Virginia. 1785. Boson: Lilly and Wait, 1832.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kiple, Kenneth F., and King, Virginia Himmelsteib. Another Dimension to the Black Diaspora: Diet, Disease, and Racism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.Google Scholar
Levine, Robert. Dislocating Race and Nation: Episodes in Nineteenth-Century American Literary Nationalism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Li, Stephanie. Something Akin to Freedom: The Choice of Bondage in Narratives by African American Women. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Livingstone, David N. “The Moral Discourse of Climate: Historical Considerations on Race, Place, and Virtue.” Journal of Historical Geography 17, no. 4 (1991): 413–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Long, Lisa A.Rehabilitating Bodies: Health, History, and the American Civil War. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.Google Scholar
MacDuffie, Allen. Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Meer, Sarah. Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy, and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005.Google Scholar
Metropolitan Sanitary Commission. First Report: Minutes of Evidence Taken Before the Commissioners Appointed to Inquire Whether Any and What Sort of Means May Be Requisite for the Improvement of the Health of the Metropolis. New York: McSpedon & Baker, 1852.Google Scholar
Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Norton, Charles Eliot. Letters of Charles Eliot Norton. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913.Google Scholar
Parham, John. “Bleak Intra-actions: Dickens, Turbulence, Material Ecology.” In Victorian Writers and the Environment: Ecocritical Perspectives, edited by Mazzeno, Laurence W. and Morrison, Ronald D., 114–29. London: Routledge, 2017.Google Scholar
Parker, Theodore. A Letter to the People of the United States Touching the Matter of Slavery. Boston: James Munroe, 1848.Google Scholar
Parrish, Susan Scott. American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Parsons, Charles Grandison. Inside View of Slavery; or, A Tour among the Planters. Boston: John P. Jewett, 1855.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pendleton, E. M. “On the Susceptibility of the Caucasians and Africans to the Different Classes of Disease.” Southern Medical Reports 1 (1849): 336–42.Google Scholar
Price, Thomas. Slavery in America: With Notices of the Present State of Slavery and the Slave Trade throughout the World. London: George Wightman, 1837.Google Scholar
Prichard, James Cowles. A Treatise on Insanity and Other Disorders Affecting the Mind. Philadelphia: E. A. Carey & A. Hart, 1837.Google Scholar
Ramsay, Henry A.The Necrological Appearances of Southern Typhoid Fever in the Negro. [Augusta?]: Office of the Constitutionalist, 1852.Google Scholar
Ring, Natalie J.The Problem South: Region, Empire, and the New Liberal State, 1880–1930. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012.Google Scholar
Robbins, Hollis. “Blackening Bleak House: Hannah Crafts's The Bondwoman's Narrative.” In In Search of Hannah Crafts: Critical Essays on The Bondwoman's Narrative, edited by Gates, Henry Louis Jr. and Robbins, Hollis, 71–86. New York: Basic Books, 2005.Google Scholar
Rusert, Britt. Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2017.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rusert, Britt. “Plantation Ecologies: The Experimental Plantation in and against James Grainger's The Sugar-Cane.” Early American Studies 13, no. 2 (2015): 341–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ruskin, John. The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century: Two Lectures Delivered at the London Institution, February 4th and 11th, 1884. Kent: George Allen, 1884.Google Scholar
Savitt, Todd L.Medicine and Slavery: The Diseases and Health Care of Blacks in Antebellum Virginia. 1978. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Savitt, Todd L., and Young, James Harvey. Disease and Distinctiveness in the American South. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988.Google Scholar
Schwarzbach, F. S. “Bleak House: The Social Pathology of Urban Life.” Literature and Medicine 9, no. 1 (1990): 93–104.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Select Committee on Metropolitan Sewage Manure. Report from the Select Committee on Metropolitan Sewage Manure, no. 474, 1846.Google Scholar
Soares, Rebecca. “Literary Graftings: Hannah Crafts's The Bondwoman's Narrative and the Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Reader.” Victorian Periodicals Review 44, no. 1 (2011): 1–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stepto, Robert B.From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative. 2nd ed.Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991.Google Scholar
Strick, Simon. American Dolorologies: Pain, Sentimentalism, Biopolitics. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Taylor, Dorceta E.Toxic Communities: Environmental Racism, Industrial Pollution, and Residential Mobility. New York: New York University Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Taylor, Jesse Oak. The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016.Google Scholar
Teukolsky, Rachel. “Pictures in Bleak Houses: Slavery and the Aesthetics of Transatlantic Reform.” ELH 76, no. 2 (2009): 491–522.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Treadwell, Seymour Broughton. American Liberties and American Slavery: Morally and Politically Illustrated. New York: John S. Taylor, 1838.Google Scholar
Truth, Sojourner, and Gilbert, Olive. Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave, Emancipated from Bodily Servitude by the State of New York, in 1828. Boston: n.p., 1850.Google Scholar
Weiner, Mark S.Black Trials: Citizenship from the Beginning of Slavery to the End of Caste. New York: Vintage Books, 2004.Google Scholar
Weiner, Marli F., and Hough, Mayzie. Sex, Sickness, and Slavery: Defining Illness in the Antebellum South. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2012.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Willoughby, Urmi Engineer. Yellow Fever, Race, and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017.Google Scholar
Wilson, Jonathan S. “The Negro—His Mental and Moral Peculiarities.” American Cotton Planter and the Soil of the South 3, no. 3 (1859): 92–93.Google Scholar