Haunted Property: Slavery and the Gothic by Sarah Gilbreath Ford (review)

Sarah Gilbreath Ford's Haunted Property: Slavery and the Gothic closely reads a selection of American novels and poetry to address a previously unanalyzed purpose of gothic literature: to highlight slavery's primary horror of turning people into property. In the text's introduction, titled "The Bill of Sale: Gothic, Property, Slavery, and the South," Ford thoroughly outlines her work's contribution to gothic studies. For one, Ford's study continues the American literary conversation aligning gothic conventions with interrogation of the American dream that connects success and personhood with owning property. Additionally, Haunted Property analyzes works by Harriet Jacobs, Hannah Crafts, Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Sherley Anne Williams, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, and Natasha Trethewey to argue that hauntings in these works result solely from "the conflation of people and property in slavery" that continued into the post-slavery era (6). Ford notes that placing nineteenth-through twenty-first-century gothic works in conversation with each other departs from typical southern gothic studies that focus on one author instead of engaging in broad analysis.

One issue in gothic studies, Ford argues, is the association of gothic narratives of slavery with marginal "aberrations located only in the South"; instead, Ford posits these gothic tales as central and "essential counternar-ratives to tales of freedom offered by the American dream" (7). Another issue in gothic scholarship is the overwhelming number of different approaches to and definitions of the gothic. Ford's solution is to see the gothic not as a genre with specific conventions but as a tool for writers and a lens for readers. While writers will use the gothic "to signal fear," readers using a gothic lens will study texts for "moments of fear" (14–15).

Haunted Property, she notes, furthers the long-established connection between race and the gothic by focusing on the terror of humans being property, a status that leads to the destruction of Black personhood through White pursuit of wealth and power. Ford's selection of authors for her study centers on those who "use the gothic's oppositional power" against slavery laws that render people as property (16). Ford contends that instead of dismissing the gothic as a monolith, current scholars should recognize the gothic's powers of opposition even in its most clichéd tropes. Ultimately, Ford's work departs from regional, macabre conceptions of the gothic and engages with gothic works depicting slavery by viewing the works as "the very distillation of the anxieties about race and property located in the larger American tradition" (8).

Chapter 1, "From Damsels to Specters in Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Hannah Crafts's The Bondwoman's Narrative," is a creative analysis of the works' reliance on fictionalized gothic tropes to elicit support from the writers' contemporary audiences. Although Ford argues that Jacobs's and Crafts's departure from the typical slave narrative's adherence to bare facts seems puzzling, she makes a convincing case for the damsel in distress figure in both works appealing to all audiences, even those far removed from slavery, since the damsel figure is familiar and elicits sympathy. To affirm the novels as cohesively gothic, Ford analyzes language used to depict slave masters that renders them monsters in sexual pursuit of damsels in distress, the slave women. The slave women's constant fear of rape highlights their lack of legal possession of their own bodies. Additionally, Incidents and Bondwoman focus on mixed race damsels, which calls into question a "system of property based on constructed racial categories that can easily dissolve" (36). Addressing the oppositional power of the gothic, Ford argues that Jacobs's and Crafts's works push back against the inescapable legal possession of slavery with haunting. Their damsels resemble ghosts, haunting Black-owned property after having been haunted by slavery in White-owned property; although the women's hauntings empower them and keep them free from slavery, only a safe home...