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September 6, 2002
Front-Page
News
Haunting Tales
of Slavery
In a book review titled "American Gothic: Two Narratives
Add a Literary Aspect to the Literal Horrors of Slavery"
in the August 11 Chicago Tribune, Associate Professor of English
Elizabeth Young writes about the connections between race and
Gothic horror in American culture as evidenced in two recently
published works about slavery. Young suggests that Hannah Crafts,
in The Bondwoman's Narrative, and Henry Box Brown, in
The Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown: Written by Himself,
employ the creepy literary techniques of Gothic fiction—everything
from ghosts' haunting and supernatural creakiness to gloomy landscapes
and beckoning corpses—as a means of expressing the very real
horrors of slavery.
The Bondwoman's
Narrative is believed to date from around 1855 and to be "possibly
the first novel by a black woman and definitely the first novel
by a woman who had been a slave," according to Harvard professor
Henry Louis Gates Jr., who "rediscovered" what seems
to have been an unpublished manuscript and served as its editor.
Citing passages in Crafts's tale such as "The corpse seemed
to leer horridly, to gibe and beckon and point its long skinny
fingers towards me. . . . [It] seemed to rise and stand over me,
and press with its cold leaden hand against my heart," Young
traces the link between Gothic horror and race back at least as
far as Edgar Allen Poe, "whose stories of white people in
psychic distress are indirectly infused with the fears generated
by slave uprisings like those of Poe's near-contemporary, Nat
Turner," she writes. Young notes that more modern examples
of the African American Gothic tradition include Toni Morrison's
ghost daughters and Ralph Ellison's invisible man. Writes Young,
"Like Morrison and Ellison, Crafts suggests the strengths
of the Gothic as a literary form of resistance for those whose
literal worlds already constitute a night of the living dead."
According to Young,
a nonfiction example of this interplay between slavery and Gothic
horror is provided in The Narrative of the Life of Henry Box
Brown, first published in 1849, revised in 1851, and now reprinted.
The 1849 edition of the story was written by white abolitionist
Charles Stearns; the 1851 version, which this edition reprints,
was
presented as "written by himself." To escape from slavery,
Brown had himself mailed in a small box from Richmond, Virginia,
to Philadelphia. After his successful escape, he became a celebrity
in America and England, forever after known as Henry "Box"
Brown. He told his story repeatedly to audiences and had it dramatized
in a set of paintings. Writes Young, "Read together with
The Bondwoman's Narrative, the story of Henry 'Box' Brown
suggests a Gothic nightmare of claustrophobic enclosure made viscerally
real. 'I had risen as it were from the dead,' Brown says of his
triumphal emergence from the box. This resurrection suggests Christ—but
also Dracula and the Frankenstein monster, other famous figures
of the time—rising from the dead. In the remarkable books
that Crafts and Brown left behind, horror serves not only as a
surprisingly realistic medium through which to represent slavery,
but also as a powerful means of resistance to it. The reader who
steps into the haunted houses built by Crafts, and the claustrophobic
box occupied by Brown, encounters unforgettable reconstructions
of the Horror—slavery—upon which America itself was
built."
Pratt Praise The renovated Pratt Hall was featured in an article
on campus architecture and its significance in higher education
in the summer 2002 issue Connection magazine, the quarterly journal
of the New England Board of Higher Education, The publication
reaches more than 12,000 decision-makers and leaders in higher
education, business, and government.
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