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1. Cottage Desire: The Bondwoman’s Narrative and the Politics of Antebellum Space
- NYU Press
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| 33 1 Cottage Desire The Bondwoman’s Narrative and the Politics of Antebellum Space I learned to see freedom as always and intimately linked to the issue of transforming space. —bell hooks, “House, 20 June 1994” Near the end of Hannah Crafts’s novel The Bondwoman’s Narrative , on the run from the North Carolina plantation of her final owners, the escaped slave narrator Hannah seeks a night’s rest in the deep woods. For two weeks she has moved slowly north, seeking shelter and sustenance where she can find it, always anxious she will be discovered and reenslaved: “In every shadow I beheld, as in every voice I heard a pursuer.” Although she has spent some of her fugitive nights in the houses of “kind and hospitable” people touched by her cover story—dressed as a young man, she is passing as a destitute orphan seeking relatives in the North—on this particular night, having learned that a paper describing her “exact size and figure” (albeit in female apparel) is circulating the countryside, Hannah avoids “the habitations of men.” She finally “compose[s]” herself to sleep “in the friendly shelter of a small thicket,” feeling “almost happy in the consciousness of perfect security.” In the middle of the night, however, Hannah is awakened by the sound of voices. Peering through a gap in the thicket, she sees two other people—also fugitive slaves—making beds of dry leaves not far from her own temporary shelter. They, too, have sought security in the woods. “We will rest here,” says one; “I think we can do so in perfect safety.” What had been a private shelter , it would seem, is now a fugitive neighborhood. The distinction the novel makes between habitations that threaten and those that protect is heightened by an uncanny dream Hannah has later that night. Having watched the newcomers prepare themselves for sleep, Hannah herself begins to drowse. “Presently my thoughts became confused, with that pleasing bewilderment 34 | Cottage Desire which precedes slumber,” she relates. But bewilderment quickly turns to hallucination : “I began to lose consciousness of my identity, and the recollection of where I was. Now it seemed that Lindendale rose before me, then it was the jail, and anon the white towers of Washington, and—but the scene all faded; for I slept.”1 On one level Hannah’s hallucinatory tableau signals the tremendous anxiety that the presence of two strangers near her hideaway might produce. Even though the couple do not appear to pose an immediate threat—one is deliriously ill, the other preoccupied with making his companion comfortable —Hannah’s watchfulness suggests that the sense of “perfect security” engendered by her temporary abode has indeed been breached, until in her drowsy state she imagines she is no longer safe in her “friendly shelter” at all but in a succession of built spaces patrolled by whites. These decidedly unfriendly (and, for Hannah, unfree) spaces—plantation, prison, metropolis —rise before her like specters, ghostly architectural hauntings from her enslaved past. To be returned to one of them at this point in the narrative would likely mean reenslavement instead of freedom, which is why Hannah experiences her momentary dissolution of identity (who am I?) in spatial terms (where am I?). On another level, this tableau also signals the text’s deep interest in the shaping power of architectural form and epitomizes what one might call the broader architectural consciousness of the novel. The succession of spaces that rises in Hannah’s confused imagination recapitulates , in the order in which they appear, the locations anchoring three of the main stages of the text: the plantation from which she first escapes; the jail in which she is imprisoned after her recapture; and the cityscape to which she is removed by her final owner. Hannah’s hallucinatory tableau, that is, can be read not merely as a sign of one character’s anxiety but also as a partial map of the novel’s larger fascination with the uses and meanings of physical space under the system of chattel slavery.2 For The Bondwoman’s Narrative, as this episode makes clear, is a text not only concerned with, but in many ways structured by, the architectural forms of both bondage and freedom. An examination of the role of these forms in the novel will shed light on specific authorial tactics as well as more general mid-nineteenth-century cultural practices. It will be instructive to consider the text’s use of...