In Search of Hannah Crafts: Critical Essays on The Bondwoman's Narrative (review)

Written by an impressive assemblage of scholars, the essays in this collection offer a panoply of informed approaches to The Bondwoman's Narrative, By Hannah Crafts, A Fugitive Slave Recently Escaped from North Carolina. As William Andrews, Karen Sanchez-Eppler, and others point out, while the publisher promotes the work as "A Novel," the author herself titled it a "Narrative" by a "A Fugitive Slave." The two titles clearly provide mixed signals. On the one hand, readers are told that the narrative is a literary creation, a tale of a bondwoman. On the other, they are instructed to see it as an account of a fugitive's experience of slavery. The title's mixed signals set the tone for a work that continues throughout to raise a number of vexing questions about the author's relationship to the text. While each essay in In Search of Hannah Crafts makes a variety of claims with respect to the narrative, they all must ultimately confront difficult questions: "Is this author writing pure autobiography under an assumed name?" "Was the author a white woman abolitionist?" "Was she a free African American, who had never been enslaved?" "How much is purely fiction?" All the essays are shaped by the writers's often unstated responses to one or more of these questions.

The first of six sections, "The Literary Marketplace," considers the extent to which the work participates in the literary traditions of the slave narrative and the sentimental novel. The essays identify features of autobiographical fiction, the ghost story, the morality tale, the fable, and the domestic novel. Both Augusta Rohrbach and Ann Fabian—with an account of the fascinating publication history of The Narrative of John Williams—suggest that Crafts chose to remain unpublished, acquiring and maintaining both literary and personal freedom. Lawrence Buell attributes to Crafts a "selective" identification with the other slaves in the story, enabling a certain distancing from the experiences she describes (23). Focusing on the ending, William Andrews compares the text to several contemporaneous slave narratives to conclude that The Bondwoman's Narrative is primarily a work of fiction.

The essays in "Rewriting the Canon" consider the extent to which the narrative borrows from contemporaneous works. Hollis Robbins points out the Narrative's indebtedness to Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1852–1853), while Catherine Keyser argues for The Bondwoman's Narrative as a countertext to Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847). Jean Fagan Yellin traces the ways in which Crafts's portrayal of slavery echoes but differs sharply from that in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). Shelley Fisher Fishkin documents the influence of Williams Wells Brown's The Escape, or A Leap for Freedom (1858).

The essays in "Antebellum Contexts" consider how pre-Civil War contexts shape the narrative. Dickson D. Bruce centers on the period during which Crafts lived with the benevolent slaveholding Henrys, while William Gleason applies principles of landscape theory to analyze the function of physical spaces, using architect Andrew Downing's cottage sketches. Bryan Sinche suggests that Crafts's behavior as represented in the text exemplifies her belief in a God that requires virtuous behavior, even in the face of slavery.

The essays in the fourth section argue that The Bondwoman's Narrative participates in an "emerging subgenre that can be called African American gothic" (xi). Comparing the gothic elements of the text with those in other novels of the same period, Robert Levine comments on Crafts's characterization of the "field" as opposed to the "house" slave; he also argues that Crafts relied heavily on Trappe, the major villain, to make assertions about race, identity, and genealogy. Priscilla Wald questions whether the narrative is in any sense a ghost story or merely engages the generic form to imply that the truth of slavery yields its own authentic brand of horror. Zoe Trodd takes a page from...