Novel Bondage: Slavery, Marriage, and Freedom in Nineteenth-Century America by Tess Chakkalakal (review)

Novel Bondage: Slavery, Marriage, and Freedom in Nineteenth-Century America is fresh, surprising, cleanly written, and wonderfully effective. Tess Chakkalakal's central insight—that representations of slave marriages in nineteenth-century American fiction present such marriages as embodying an ideal or a potential for a love-based commitment uncontaminated by worldly constraints—is at first blush paradoxical, and indeed, strongly counterintuitive. We are so used to thinking of the deprivation of the status, rights, and protections of marriage as one of slavery's central dehumanizing strategies that Chakkalakal's claims appear almost to disregard slavery's horrors. Not so. Instead, her arguments, deeply perceptive and carefully researched, have the power to make readers rethink both the linked history of slavery and marriage in America and the literary strategies nineteenth-century authors adopted to imagine narratives of private relationships and national potential.

Keeping a sharp eye on the distinction between history and literature, recoverable fact and imagined narrative, Chakkalakal argues that it is precisely because the slave's marriage takes place outside the law—because the slave, as a legal non-person, has no contractual capacity; no right to own property, make a will, or receive an inheritance; and no right as a husband to control or constrain a wife—that the slave's marriage is free from the deforming influence of Victorian culture's class and gender inequalities as expressed through and protected by law. From the days of marital coverture to the present, feminists have critiqued the law's active role in preserving and enforcing economic, emotional, and interpersonal gender constraints in legal marriage, and slave law famously condoned the sexual abuse and exploitation of enslaved women by whites. In the fictions Chakkalakal studies, however, slaves who establish non-legal unions can choose each other out of love rather than strategy or necessity, as they are freed from family pressures or hopes for material gain and social advancement. Because marriage does not change enslaved persons' legal status, they gain no rights and obligations that can be used to enforce inequalities or shelter abuse. A truly private matter, their relationship is not created or overseen by the law, nor is its making an act of public record. Nineteenth-century feminists argued powerfully that legal marriage is like slavery, but in Chakkalakal's analysis, fictional slave marriage becomes, surprisingly, a lot like freedom. Importantly, her careful analyses recognize that the slave marriages she studies are imagined spaces of possibility rather than transparent historical records of sweet romance among those brutally enslaved; while she relies on archival and historical sources, her focus is not on unraveling the historical reality of enslaved relationships but on how her authors imagined and represented them, and why.

Anything but naive, Chakkalakal's excellent, succinct readings of William Wells Brown, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frank Webb, Frances Harper, and Charles Chesnutt fearlessly resituate texts and their interactions with readers, upending our assumptions and challenging the work of many recent critics. With none of the unnecessary detouring or repetitiveness one encounters frequently in literary studies, she offers five tight, elegant, and persuasive chapters, each pursuing her central claim in a different direction. While all the chapters are very strong, I especially enjoyed those on Stowe and Chesnutt. For Stowe, Chakkalakal argues, the slave marriage becomes the affirmatively sentimental alternative to the infected, materialist, and unsuccessful marriages of whites; indeed, as she claims (and as no one has argued before, to my knowledge), good white characters recognize the power of the bond between George and Eliza in Uncle Tom's Cabin and Harry and Lisette in Dred and turn to them for advice grounded in admiration for the authority of their experience. By tracing how George and Eliza flee slavery precisely and ironically "to protect their marriage from the law" (9, emphasis added), Chakkalakal brings a fresh angle of vision to Stowe's much-studied work, letting...