Something about Rock Glen: fugitive movement and queer black geographies in Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative

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Notes

1 In general, critics acknowledge the ending as at least partially a retreat from further exposure to a presumably white reading audience, which by the 1850s, as scholars note, had cultivated a literary craving for the violent exploits and suffering of enslaved and formerly enslaved black people. Still, scholars have also read the ambiguity of the ending as a sign of Crafts’s ambivalences about freedom (Andrews 2004), black belonging, white female relations (Castiglia 2004; Fabian 2004), and marriage (Chakkalakal 2011; Heiniger 2018).

2 This claim is the culmination of Haslam’s larger argument that Crafts strategically mixes gothic and domestic novel conventions in order to establish a spatial logic in which the boundaries of domestic sanctuaries are constantly interdicted by the incompatible violence and vulgarities of slavery. Haslam contends that over the course of the novel, Hannah encounters several domestic spaces that, drawn with conspicuously sentimental conventions, echo the rhetoric and ideological vision of the mid-nineteenth century cults of domesticity and true womanhood. In their very physical appearance and spatial arrangements, these domestic spaces seem to promise Hannah much-needed nurture, physical refuge, and spiritual repose. But as Haslam notes, Hannah finds that promise repeatedly broken as these domestic ideals prove unable to shelter her from violent seizure by slave catchers, slave speculators, and slave owners.

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Allison S. Curseen

Allison Curseen is an Assistant Professor of English and African & African Diasporic Studies at Boston College. She received her BA from Oberlin and her PhD from Duke University. She also holds an MFA from American University. She writes and teaches about Black expressive culture and American literature in the long nineteenth century, with particular interests in black kinesthetic imagination, blackgirl geographies, and childish mobilities. She is currently working on her book manuscript Minor Moves, which examines the poetics and performance of childish mobility in black antebellum narratives.