Sex, Marriage, and 12 Years a (Single) Slave

In 12 Years a Slave, Solomon Northup’s Southward journey not only catapults him from freeman to chattel, but also from a legally wed husband to an ostensibly uncoupled man in slavery. With his marital rights, along with his other civil liberties, suspended in bondage, Northup is commuted to the status of bachelor at best and widower, with his wife legally dead to him, at worst. This state of singleness—especially because involuntarily enforced—compounds the representation of Northup as abject, denied the benefits of legal marriage as an act of civic participation. Because American ideals of freedom are so moored to the figures of the (happily) married couple and nuclear family, some of the scenes in Steve McQueen’s film 12 Years a Slave that most strikingly communicate slavery as social death are about the threats, affects, and experiences that accompany the conditions of living single. Being unmarried—which becomes conflated with being lonely or alone—becomes a potent sign of social and civic marginality.

My own interest in Solomon Northup’s variable and disrupted marital status aligns with an ongoing study of singleness in African-American cultural narratives. More often, however, literary studies of nineteenth-century black print culture have worked to recuperate the history of marriage and romance, reading coupling as affirmative evidence of African Americans’ community-building. Frances Smith Foster usefully challenges pathologizing ideas that black families were entirely demoralized by slavery, arguing instead “that slave marriages were valued, that strong self-esteem was possible, and that love among slaves could and often did last despite distance and beyond death” (xvi). Likewise, Claudia Tate (Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine’s Text at the Turn of the Century [1992]), Ann duCille (The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women’s Fiction [1993]), and Tess Chakkalakal (Novel Bondage: Slavery, Marriage, and Freedom in Nineteenth- Century America [2011]) have shown that, particularly in black women’s nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century writing, marriage offers an opportunity to present the stable black household as an achievement in itself and as a site for political mobilization. But while such studies indicate how the “coupling convention” allows black writers to present “domestic allegories of political desire,” critics have less readily admitted how this seemingly favorable rhetorical pairing of marriage and political agency hinges on the implicit and sometimes direct stigmatizing of states of singleness—including being never-married, widowed, divorced, deserted, or partnered in nonlegal unions. In shifting our scholarly attention to singleness as both a lived experience and as a metaphor, I examine the constitution and limits of civic subjectivity for antebellum African Americans, as well as interrogate the narrative conventions that associate coupledom, freedom, and marital intimacy, often at the expense of the legally unwed.

After viewing McQueen’s adaptation of 12 Years a Slave, I was compelled by a few friends’ questions about what remain only suggested in the film and entirely muted in Northup’s 1853 printed narrative: details about Solomon and Ann Northup’s individual intimate lives during their involuntary 12-year separation. Was Northup’s wife really waiting for him after all those years? one person asked. Had Northup remained celibate and faithful to his wife throughout his enslavement?¹ Given the pressing issues of injustices represented in 12 Years a Slave, it might seem pedantic or downright nosy to focus on what goes on behind closed doors of singles and couples. Yet concerns of marital status and sexual choice are inextricably related to civil liberties. Take for instance, in perhaps the most famous antebellum example, how autobiographer Harriet Jacobs makes this point clear in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), as the pseudonymous protagonist Linda Brent considers her limited choices for partnering in slavery. Prevented by her master from marrying the free black man of her choice and refusing to “take up with” another slave by cohabitating (39), Brent concludes, “The dream of my girlhood was over. I felt lonely and desolate” (42). Brent’s story, like Northup’s, is partly an account of frustrated love, as she is relegated to singleness...