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4 | Blood, Bodies, and the Antebellum Slave Narrative
- University of New Hampshire Press
- Chapter
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The first half of the nineteenth century saw a significant development in the discourse on slavery, especially in the United States, as a major shift occurred toward the representation of bodily pain. As Elizabeth B. Clark points out, in antebellum America “the story of the suffering slave . . . began to play a crucial role in an unfolding language of individual rights.” The increased representation of physical pain was linked to a deepening culture of sentiment and compassion, but also to the growing notion that “to be free of physical coercion and deliberately inflicted pain was an essential human right” (Clark 463). In America especially, sympathy received a new kick start, partly thanks to a period of evangelical revival, and a revitalization of the abolitionist movement after William Lloyd Garrison arrived on the scene in the early 1830s. Two important works marked this new trend: Lydia Maria Child’s Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (1833) and Theodore Weld’s collection American Slavery as It Is (1839). While this new emphasis may have contributed to an increased sensationalism in the discourse on slavery , the individual sympathy it aimed at eliciting was supposed to offer the right conduit toward an abolitionist stance based on humanity and natural rights. At the same time, the narratives appealed to other pillars of liberal society, such as the desire for “freedom, love, family” (Clark Chapter 4 u Blood, Bodies, and the Antebellum Slave Narrative 470). The path was broken for the tremendous success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Liberal sympathy had finally arrived. The fact that most of these texts attempted to create moments of Smithian, liberal sympathy while at the same time focusing on bodily pain introduced a difficulty peculiar to the logic of liberalism. We have repeatedly seen throughout this book that liberal sympathy fostered a movement toward interiority, an (often unsuccessful) attempt to turn a blind eye to the politics of the body. The liberal focus on individual freedom and human rights, and its simultaneous attempt to neutralize the corporeal realm, left it with little ideological equipment when it came time to submerge the public with shocking images of physical suffering. The public ’s low tolerance for racial difference impelled a number of strategies on the part of black and white authors bent on eliciting liberal emotion, most of which were designed to downplay representations of the racial body even as the body itself tended to become objectified. In her investigation of several sentimental antislavery stories, Karen Sánchez-Eppler uncovers their tendency to combine the “effort to depict goodness in black” with “the obliteration of blackness” (31). One good example is Harriet Beecher Stowe’s description of Dred in her 1856 book, in which, Sánchez-Eppler points out, he appears as “a magnificent, herculean, and imperial gladiator ” (28). Here the downplaying of blackness makes it easier for Nina Gordon to “read” him, and the power of physiognomy helps the book’s liberal paradigm, in its confidence that the sign represented by the body can be a truthful mirror of its interior qualities. Black authors found themselves adopting similar strategies for predominantly white audiences. In black texts, though, as this chapter will show, one does find some attempts to induce a full recognition of bodily others, in passages that aimed at drawing readers emotionally into a more republican worldview.1 It is thus predominantly in its appeal to sentiment through representations of blood and the body, and by extension of the family, that the nineteenth-century slave narrative conveyed its political ideas. Bodies in pain are ubiquitous in the slave narrative, yet they reveal their political content only through their particular emphases and their narrative context . The liberal impulse often entailed a suppression of race and an objectification of the body, even as the retreat into interiority fostered definitions of the individual self through blood, which now carried a metaphorical rather than a physical meaning. More republican, communityoriented visions, on the other hand, did attempt representations of bodies even though, as the authors were probably fully aware, those bodies Blood, Bodies, and the Antebellum Slave Narrative 191 [3.239.96.229] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 10:23 GMT) would be experienced as alien by most readers. The contrast between a retreat away from the racial body and an attempt at full recognition forms the emotional core of many nineteenth-century slave narratives, and reveals their political leanings. The language of individualism...