The American Slave Narrative and the Victorian Novel (review)

The signal achievement of Julia Sun-Joo Lee's book is to transform the conjoining performed in its title from a provocation into a statement of the obvious: after reading this book, one no longer registers the title as "The American Slave Narrative and the Victorian Novel?" but rather as "Of course the American Slave Narrative and the Victorian Novel!" While these two much-studied genres have rarely been studied together, Lee shows how much they have in common: the two genres overlap temporally, with the production of slave narratives peaking in the 1840s and 1850s, and they coincide geographically as well, both forms being popular in Britain and the United States. More important, for Lee, are the formal affiliations: not only do several major Victorian novels employ the first-person, retrospective narrative voice characteristic of the slave narrative, but a number of Victorian works of fiction also share what she identifies as its primary chronotope, which is characterized by "scenes of illicit reading and writing, of physical privation and punishment, of forced displacement and harrowing escape," along with "an insistent teleology toward freedom" (19).

Lee's intervention is even bolder than the "and" in her title suggests: rather than comparing the two genres or locating them in a common discursive field, she seeks instead to reveal "the shaping influence of the American slave narrative on the Victorian novel in the mid-nineteenth century" (9). Thus, what I referred to above as the two genres' shared chronotope is in fact identified by Lee as a distinctive "fugitive slave chronotope" that is developed in the slave narrative and then borrowed by Victorian novelists (18). As Lee rightly notes, there is little precedent for her claim that the vector of influence runs in this direction. Although critics such as Ann duCille and Cindy Weinstein have discussed the mutual influence of slave narratives and American sentimental fiction (discussions with which Lee might have fruitfully engaged), The American Slave Narrative and the Victorian Novel is truly pioneering work.

Lee proceeds in broadly chronological fashion, with each chapter focusing on one (or in one case, two) Victorian texts: Jane Eyre (1847), Pendennis (1848–50), Elizabeth Gaskell's "The Grey Woman" (1861) and My Lady Ludlow (1858), North and South (1855), and Great Expectations (1861); there is also an epilogue on The Dynamiter (1885), by Robert Louis and Fanny Stevenson. In each chapter, Lee offers biographical evidence of the authors' interest in American slavery and possible familiarity with American slave narratives, before turning to the textual evidence of these narratives' presence. (The exception to this pattern is the chapter on Pendennis, which focuses on William Makepeace Thackeray's ironic use of slavery metaphors, extending a line of analysis familiar from Deborah Thomas's Thackeray and Slavery [1993].) Evidence of influence that Lee adduces includes specific verbal and narrative echoes as well as the adoption of various elements of the fugitive-slave chronotope.

Lee succeeds in showing that her chosen Victorian texts share key generic features with the slave narrative (especially Frederick Douglass's). Her insistence on direct influence, however, is less persuasive and less productive, as it tends to treat the two genres in isolation from other texts and discourses, on the one hand, and to sell short the complexity of the interplay that does seem to be occurring, on the other. In other words, Lee's narrow focus and overly rigid version of intertextuality lead her at times to overstate the strength or uniqueness of certain tropes' association with the slave narrative, and to identify as borrowing and even allusiveness similarities that might better be attributed to shared sources, the use of widely disseminated tropes and plots, and ongoing cross-pollination. In some cases where Lee identifies signs of the slave narrative's influence, for example, other readers might see evidence for the influence of Frankenstein (1818) (or explicit allusion to it in the case of Great Expectations), a work which...