Death Rights

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Authors Koretsky, Deanna P.

DOI 10.1353/book.83163

Publisher SUNY Press

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DE AT H RIGHTS

DE AT H RIGHTS

Romantic Suicide, Race, and the Bounds of Liberalism

Deanna P. Koretsky Cover art: The Suicide, Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps (French, 1803–1860), ca. 1836. Oil on canvas. The Walters Art Museum, Creative Commons.

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Koretsky, Deanna P., author. Title: Death rights : romantic suicide, race, and the bounds of liberalism / Deanna P. Koretsky. Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2020028028 | ISBN 9781438482897 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781438482903 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Suicide in literature. | Literature and race. | Romanticism. | Liberalism in literature. | Suicide and literature. Classification: LCC PN56.S744 K67 2021 | DDC 809/.933548--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020028028

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 For Jay. Everlong. 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 1 2 3 4 5 Contents 6 7 8 9 10 11 Acknowledgments ix 12 13 Introduction 1 14 15 Chapter 1 Liberty and Death 23 16 17 Chapter 2 Chained to Life and Misery 47 18 19 Chapter 3 Writ in Water 73 20 21 Chapter 4 In Sympathy 97 22 23 Chapter 5 Marvelous Boys 117 24 25 26 Notes 129 27 28 Bibliography 169 29 Index 193 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

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1 2 3 4 5 Acknowledgments 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 I am grateful, first and foremost, to Rebecca Colesworthy, the hard- 15 est-working editor in academic publishing, and to the entire team 16 at SUNY Press for believing in this book. I can’t thank the anony- 17 mous readers enough for their generous and thorough feedback. I owe 18 more than I could possibly express here to the trusted friends, brilliant 19 colleagues, and supportive mentors who patiently read and commented 20 on parts of this project when it was in various states of nonsense. You 21 know who you are, and I know that I couldn’t have done this without 22 you. 23 This book has been made possible in part by a major grant from the 24 National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclu- 25 sions, or recommendations expressed in this book do not necessarily 26 reflect those of the National Endowment for the Humanities. This 27 book was also supported by a UNCF-Mellon Faculty Development 28 Award, without which I’d probably still be writing. An early version 29 of chapter 1 appeared previously as “Habeas Corpus and the Politics of 30 Freedom: Slavery and Romantic Suicide” in Essays in Romanticism 22, 31 no. 1 (2015): 21–33, and parts of it are reproduced with permission of the 32 licensor through PLSclear . An early version of chapter 4 appeared as 33 “Unhallowed Arts: Frankenstein and the Poetics of Suicide,” in European 34 Romantic Review 26, no. 2 (February 2015): 241–260, and parts of it are 35 reproduced by permission of Taylor & Francis, Ltd. 36 37 38 39 40 41

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1 2 3 4 5 Introduction 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 Each suicide is a poem sublime in its melancholy. 15 —Honoré de Balzac, Le Peau de Chagrin 16 17 18 Darkling I listen; and, for many a time 19 I have been half in love with easeful Death. 20 —John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale” 21 22 23 The Mind, that broods o’er guilty woes 24 Is like the Scorpion girt by fire; 25 In circle narrowing as it glows, 26 The flame around their captive close, 27 Till inly searched by thousand throes, 28 And maddening in her ire, 29 One sad and sole relief she knows – 30 The sting she nourished for her foes, 31 Whose venom never yet was vain, 32 Gives but one pang, and cures all pain, 33 And darts into her desperate brain: 34 So do the dark in soul expire, 35 Or live like Scorpion girt by fire. 36 —Lord Byron, The Giaour 37 38 39 40 41 42 1 2 DEATH RIGHTS

1 uicide is a complicated response to a broken world. The factors that 2 Smotivate someone’s decision to die are personal and, to a large extent, 3 fundamentally unknowable. But cultural narratives about suicide are 4 ours to read and weigh; they show us what it is to live in this world. This 5 book recalls a historical moment when stories of suicide were used to 6 rouse the racial consciousness of a nation. It is a book about why those 7 efforts failed and how they were eroded by a cultural narrative still in 8 circulation today—one that idealizes certain suicides in service to ideol- 9 ogies of white male supremacy. 10 In the ubiquity of sentiments such as those expressed in the epigraphs 11 from Balzac, Keats, and Byron, we are reminded that literary romanticism 12 characterized itself by brooding sensuality and irremediable malaise and 13 that these strong emotions often were understood to result in suicide. 14 Nor was interest in suicide limited to “high” literatures during this 15 era. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, English newspapers 16 published suicide notes (some real, others made up for shock value), 17 while politicians debated ancient laws dictating how people who died 18 by suicide should be buried (at crossroads, with stakes driven through 19 their hearts—a gruesome practice finally eliminated in 1822).1 The 20 subject of the last epigraph, Byron’s “Scorpion girt by fire,” led the British 21 ethologist C. Lloyd Morgan to conduct a series of sadistic experiments on 22 whether animals consciously kill themselves, using scorpions as his test 23 subjects.2 Suicide even helped to launch the modern fashion industry: the 24 blue and gold suit worn by the title character of Johann Wolfgang von 25 Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther inspired one of the first ready- 26 to-wear styles produced for mass market consumption, and a popular 27 perfume of the day was called Eau de Werther.3 With suicide being such 28 a prominent and profitable cultural phenomenon, it is surprising that, 29 among a recent wave of scholarship on the cultural history of suicide, not 30 a single monograph has focused on romanticism.4 31 One reason for this may be that romanticism’s role in the history of 32 suicide seems self-evident. There is little doubt as to the relationship 33 between romantic literature and the myth of the tortured artist— 34 implicitly white and almost exclusively male—who is tragically undone 35 by his own brilliance.5 This myth remains with us even today. One 36 especially clear example is Savage Beauty, the retrospective of the work 37 of British fashion designer Alexander McQueen that opened in 2011 38 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Among the show’s most widely 39 publicized pieces were McQueen’s intricately constructed coats, many 40 of which were styled for the exhibition so as to be instantly reminis- 41 cent of romantic figures like the subject of Caspar David Friedrich’s 42 Introduction 3

painting The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog.6 The show also included 1 pieces influenced by the Flemish masters, the Scottish Highlands, the 2 Tudors, Plato’s Atlantis, and others.7 While McQueen cited inspira- 3 tion from many historical periods and subjects, the show was organized 4 into sections titled “The Romantic Mind,” “Romantic Gothic and 5 Cabinet of Curiosities,” “Romantic Nationalism,” “Romantic Exoti- 6 cism,” “Romantic Primitivism,” and “Romantic Naturalism,” effectively 7 rendering McQueen’s entire corpus in terms of the aesthetic arguably 8 most explicit in the curation and presentation of his coats. When 9 an expanded version of the show opened at the Victoria and Albert 10 Museum in 2015, the association between McQueen and romanticism 11 was scaled back in its promotion, suggesting that in 2011, the heavy 12 emphasis on romanticism was at least partly reflective of McQueen’s 13 much-discussed 2010 suicide.8 14 There are good reasons for the myth’s endurance. Rendering suicide 15 an extension of someone’s art dulls the unsettling violence of the act of 16 ending one’s own life. It circumscribes its finality and quiets (however 17 temporarily) questions that can never be answered. This, of course, is 18 precisely the function of myth and part of why this particular myth 19 endures so strongly: it renders the complex and inexpressible somewhat 20 easier to grasp, if not always to accept. Romantic narratives of suicide 21 turn worlds of private pain into something beautiful, something the 22 public can continue to love, or at least consume. In this sense, it’s not 23 hard to see why the myth of romantic suicide still remains with us, in 24 every public reckoning with the artist who hanged himself at the height 25 of his success or the rock star who shot up and then shot himself. But the 26 story we keep recirculating about these deaths—the romantic trope of 27 lonely, tragic genius—barely scratches the surface of the lived realities 28 that actually lead people to kill themselves. By the same token, despite 29 its apparent ubiquity at the turn of the nineteenth century, this trope 30 was hardly the only way in which suicide was represented during the 31 historical moment with which it is most associated. 32 33 The Argument 34 35 Moving beyond conceptions of suicide as an index of romanticism’s 36 fascination with tragic or mad genius, Death Rights: Romantic Suicide, 37 Race, and the Bounds of Liberalism reads the trope of romantic suicide 38 within preexisting political narratives that engage suicide to index 39 the limits of liberal subjectivity. Suicide first appeared as an explicitly 40 political (as opposed to a psychological or emotional) theme in British 41 42 4 DEATH RIGHTS

1 abolitionist writing. This was no mere coincidence. As the following 2 chapters discuss, it is in the institution of racialized enslavement and 3 its afterlives that liberalism most clearly reveals itself as a system that 4 enables freedom for some people at the expense of others. The trope of 5 suicide was widely engaged by different political and aesthetic projects 6 at the turn of the nineteenth century. While this was often (albeit 7 not always) aimed toward emancipatory ends, this book will argue 8 that these well-meaning efforts more often reflected, and functionally 9 served to maintain, liberalism’s foundational inequities. Beginning with 10 literary portrayals of enslaved people’s suicides as exemplary assertions 11 of self-ownership, Death Rights examines how canonical and lesser- 12 known writers of African and European descent combined suicide with 13 liberal rhetorics of individualism, sovereignty, and natural rights to 14 interrogate notions of propertied self-possession, personhood, sympathy, 15 and the human. The texts and authors brought forward in these pages 16 used suicide to challenge racialized logics of exclusion within a social 17 structure based on selective claims to social legibility. However, insofar 18 as most of these engagements turned on liberal fantasies of integration, 19 they could articulate only fundamentally irrational solutions whereby 20 African-identified people could, theoretically, define themselves as liberal 21 subjects but not as free and living subjects on their own terms. 22 More specifically, then, this book examines how eighteenth- and 23 nineteenth-century authors in Britain and the Atlantic world engaged 24 the trope of suicide in ways that buttress antiblackness. They did this 25 by rehearsing, in texts espousing emancipatory aims, what Frank B. 26 Wilderson III identifies as the “symbiosis between the political ontology 27 of Humanity and the social death of Blacks.”9 For Wilderson, whose 28 work is foundational for the cadre of Afropessimist and black optimist 29 thinkers with whom this book is also in conversation, the relation 30 between blackness and death is a structural one—not a matter of 31 intercultural antipathies per se but of antagonisms that constitute the 32 very groundwork of the modern world. Wilderson understands blackness 33 as the “position against which Humanity [i.e., the western bourgeois 34 subject] establishes, maintains, and renews its coherence, its corporeal 35 integrity.”10 In other words, the existence and conceptual coherence of 36 the subject of liberal modernity hinges on black death. 37 Given that the enslavement of Africans, and with it the construction 38 of “blackness” through and as ontological negation, long predates the era 39 with which I am concerned here, it is deeply telling that one of the most 40 popular figures to emerge from British abolitionist discourse is that of 41 the “suicidal slave.”11 This figure appears in texts now long forgotten, 42 Introduction 5

such as John Gorton’s Tubal to Seba: The Negro Suicide, and in those 1 that remain significant, such as Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko and William 2 Wells Brown’s Clotel; or, the President’s Daughter (the first known novel 3 in English by an author of African descent). In British literary studies, 4 representations of enslaved people making the choice to die rather than 5 remain in bondage have been widely understood as efforts to establish 6 African-identified people’s capacity to reason and, thus, the capacity to 7 become liberal subjects deserving of rights.12 Complicating these read- 8 ings, Death Rights argues that when the goal is merely to expand, not to 9 explode, the bounds of liberalism, framing the choice to die as a path to 10 freedom only reinforces the structural antagonism between blackness and 11 the human at the core of liberal modernity. Furthermore, Death Rights 12 reads romantic suicide—the literary and critical commonplace that extols 13 the singularity of white male genius, even in death—in direct relation 14 to these vexed efforts to expand liberalism’s racial and gendered bounds. 15 Even today, as this book will show, the myth of romantic suicide reifies 16 white male individualism. Thus, it is no mere coincidence that it gained 17 in popularity just as the assumed supremacy of the bourgeois subject 18 of liberal modernity was being called into question by abolitionist, 19 protofeminist, and other revolutionary discourses. 20 21 Contexts 22 23 To understand how a certain narrative of suicide became romantic, we 24 need to understand the role played by suicide in literary and cultural 25 discourses proximate to romanticism. For some readers, no two figures 26 will loom larger here than Thomas Chatterton, the seventeen-year-old 27 poet who died of an arsenic overdose when he failed to achieve literary 28 fame, and Goethe’s Werther. Situated squarely within the culture of 29 sensibility (Chatterton died in 1770, The Sorrows of Young Werther was 30 published in 1774), both figures exemplify the “man of feeling” trope 31 taken to its most taboo extreme.13 As this book’s conclusion will discuss 32 in greater detail, Chatterton in his own day was widely dismissed as 33 a forger and a hack, only later to be revived as an early exemplar of 34 romanticism’s “vague malaise and turbid emotions concerning love, 35 death, and the irremediable human inability to communicate.”14 Goethe’s 36 novella, however, had a much more immediate impact. 37 The fictional story of the lovelorn Werther famously fed real-life 38 concerns over the capacity of literature to sway readers to end their 39 lives. Shortly after the novel’s publication, parts of England and North 40 America saw widespread panics over just that possibility (an idea that 41 42 6 DEATH RIGHTS

1 social scientists still refer to as “the Werther effect”).15 Goethe himself 2 argued that the supposed suicide craze was due not to his novel but to 3 the “earnest melancholy” considered endemic to English culture—a 4 view popularized by George Cheyne’s 1733 medical treatise, The English 5 Malady, which posited that “the suicidal tendencies of the English were 6 tied, on the one hand, to the progress of atheism and the philosophic 7 spirit . . . and on the other, to the melancholy temperament of an island 8 people living in unfavorable geographical and climactic conditions.”16 9 Recently, Kelly McGuire has suggested that the Werther controversy 10 was symptomatic of a different sort of crisis in English national iden- 11 tity. The true threat, McGuire posits, was not suicide as such but rather 12 the “contagion” of foreign influences on an overly sensitive reading 13 public.17 Indeed, as this book will suggest, when British stories of 14 suicide center an English man (e.g., Chatterton), the motif functions 15 to close the social field not only to foreign influences abroad but also 16 to those already marginalized within England’s borders by (re)empha- 17 sizing notions of white male “greatness.” 18 Even in the ostensibly apolitical hands of these sad white men, 19 literary suicide is necessarily political insofar as it extends from earlier 20 debates that framed self-killing in relation to individualism, property, 21 and other core tenets of liberal modernity. Eighteenth-century debates 22 about suicide drew heavily from the discourses of natural rights, free- 23 doms, and entitlements that would also animate the French, American, 24 and Haitian revolutions, the abolitionist movement, and early agita- 25 tion for white women’s rights.18 Historians of suicide have long held 26 to the general thesis that loosening religious strictures led to more 27 open discussions about voluntary death in general, which in turn laid 28 the groundwork for drawing on the idea of killing the self in more 29 abstractly political arguments. Michael McDonald and Terrance R. 30 Murphy neatly summarize this evolution of European thought on 31 suicide: 32 33 Ancient philosophies that condoned and in some circumstances 34 celebrated suicide gave way in the Middle Ages to theological 35 condemnations and folkloric abhorrence. The Reformation intensified 36 religious hostility to self-murder in England and some other European 37 countries. Finally, in the eighteenth century, Enlightenment 38 philosophy and the secularization of the world-view of European elites 39 prompted writers to depict suicide as the consequence of mental illness 40 or of rational choice, and these concepts still dominate discussions of 41 self-destruction today.19 42 Introduction 7

Prosuicide arguments emphasized the idea that people are born free and 1 have the right to live and die as they choose. While nearly every major 2 European thinker of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries weighed 3 in on the suicide debates, David Hume’s essay “On Suicide” tends to be 4 singled out by scholars today as the text that made the subject of suicide 5 modern—that is, “secularized, decriminalized, medicalized.”20 6 “On Suicide” was published and almost immediately pulled in 1756, 7 not to be made available again until 1777, a year after the author’s death. 8 In that brief essay, Hume connects suicide to liberalism’s pillars of reason, 9 free will, and individual rights—that is, an individual’s right to choose 10 when and how he dies. First, Hume posits that every man possesses “the 11 free disposal of his own life” and may “lawfully employ that power” 12 because “Providence” or “the Almighty” designed it that way.21 Flying 13 in the face of centuries of religious dogma, Hume effectively suggests 14 that suicide is divinely sanctioned: if “nothing happens in the universe 15 without its consent and cooperation . . . then neither does my death, 16 however voluntary.”22 Next, Hume considers whether suicide adversely 17 impacts society and determines that it does not because “a man who 18 retires from life does no harm to society: he only ceases to do good.”23 19 Likewise, when he becomes a drain on society, his “resignation of life 20 must not only be innocent, but laudable.”24 Hume reckons that people 21 who consider or complete suicide must fall into one of these categories 22 because “those who have health, or power, or authority, have commonly 23 better reason to be in humor with the world.”25 Finally, Hume posits that 24 suicide can, in some cases, fulfill one’s duty to oneself: “age, sickness, 25 or misfortune, may render life a burden, and make it worse even than 26 annihilation. I believe that no man ever threw away life while it was 27 worth keeping.”26 What prevents people from killing themselves, Hume 28 concludes, is the fear of death itself, and when someone takes it upon 29 himself to conquer that fear, he is entitled to noninterference. And others 30 have a duty to get out of his way. 31 Within the liberal framework in which he meant it, Hume’s 32 oft-quoted assertion that “no man ever threw away life while it was 33 worth keeping” affirms the power of the individual will over state (if not 34 also divine) sovereignty. Certainly, this is the sense in which abolitionist, 35 protofeminist, and other “radical” liberal thinkers would engage the idea 36 of suicide later in the eighteenth century. Implicitly left out of Hume’s 37 framework, however, are those people denied full ownership over their 38 lives by the social structures of liberal modernity, including enslaved 39 Africans, dispossessed indigenes, non-Christians, white women, the poor, 40 and the list goes on. In different ways, these and other groups stand in 41 42 8 DEATH RIGHTS

1 opposition to “Man,” the representative subject of liberal modernity that, 2 as Sylvia Wynter puts it, “overrepresents itself as if it were the human 3 itself.”27 4 For Hume, as for many European thinkers credited with shaping 5 the modern world, enslaved Africans represent the absolute limit point 6 against which “Man” defines itself. Hume makes this apparent in the 7 infamously racist footnote he added to his essay “Of National Characters” 8 in 1753. In the first iteration of the footnote, Hume claims that “the 9 negroes and in general all other species of men (for there are four or 10 five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to whites. There never was 11 a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any 12 individual eminent either in action or speculation.” Though he begins 13 by measuring whiteness against all nonwhite people, the remainder of 14 the statement clarifies his specific target: 15 16 Not to mention our colonies, there are NEGROE slaves dispersed all 17 over EUROPE, of which none ever discovered any symptoms of inge- 18 nuity; tho’ low people, without education, will start up amongst us, 19 and distinguish themselves in every profession. In JAMAICA, indeed, 20 they talk of one negroe man of parts and learning; but ‘tis likely he is 21 admired for very slender accomplishments, like a parrot, who speaks 22 a few words plainly.28 23 24 John Immerwahr has underscored the significance of Hume’s sustained 25 attention to the footnote, noting that the revisions he made to it while 26 preparing the final edition of his works (the same 1777 edition in 27 which “On Suicide” would reappear) indicate “that Hume’s racism was 28 deliberate rather than casual.”29 Namely, Hume “changed the target 29 of his attack; the revised argument is directed only at blacks, rather 30 than against all non-whites.”30 Challenging some scholars’ efforts to 31 dismiss these comments as incidental, Immerwahr rightly maintains 32 that Hume’s revision process shows that he “did seriously consider 33 objections to his racist position. His response, however, was to sharpen 34 his attack on blacks further. His racism should thus be read as something 35 he was willing to defend, rather than an offhand remark.”31 And, as 36 Henry Louis Gates Jr. reminds us, this matters a great deal for our 37 understanding of the foundations of the modern world because “Hume’s 38 opinion on the subject . . . became prescriptive.”32 39 Understood in tandem with his antiblackness, Hume’s essay on 40 suicide highlights how liberal modernity constitutes itself through 41 exclusion. More precisely, it demonstrates how black being and social 42 Introduction 9

standing in the world is positioned as the negative to the liberal subject’s 1 positive claims to the same. In this frame, Hume’s pronouncement that 2 “no man ever threw away life while it was worth keeping” contains 3 within it an unheard question about whose life is worth keeping, and 4 moreover, what it means to “keep” life in the first place—one’s own 5 life or someone else’s. Here, the philosophical gambit that the decision 6 to die represents the apotheosis of individual liberty reveals its limits. 7 That logic presumes an autonomous subject whose coherence as such 8 is marked against those classified as nonsubjects. In contradistinction 9 to that subject’s presumed entitlement to keep or destroy his life, the 10 nonsubject’s political, social, and physical existence is indexed as not 11 her own, a kind of non- or not-quite life—“worth keeping,” perhaps, 12 but only as determined by someone else. Thus, Hume’s essay implic- 13 itly forecloses the very liberation efforts to which its central idea would 14 later be applied. 15 This proviso, implied in “On Suicide,” is more apparent in Hume’s 16 footnote, which clearly reveals how liberal modernity fixes the 17 racialization of black people in terms of nonbeing, even in relation to 18 other minoritized groups. As an analytical framework, Afropessimism 19 helps us to understand how “Black death is subtended by the psychic 20 integration of everyone who is not Black.”33 It also exposes what 21 Wilderson calls the ruse of analogy: the fiction that black suffering can 22 be analogized to other structures of violent exclusion and oppression. 23 Thus, as he explains in his foundational work, Red, White and Black, 24 the racialization of people of African descent and of indigenous peoples 25 in North America are variously underwritten by literal and metaphysical 26 relations to death. Europeans rendered Africans “black” through 27 ontological negation for the purpose of extrapolating the labor power 28 of their bodies. Indigenous peoples in North America were made “red” 29 through genocides that facilitated Europeans’ expropriation of their 30 lands. However, without denying the historical events of genocide and 31 dispossession, Wilderson maintains that as a structuring modality, the 32 “red” position remains “ontologically possible . . . half-alive” through, 33 among other things, the discourse of sovereignty.34 By contrast, the 34 nonontology of blackness is absolute: 35 36 Chattel slavery did not simply reterritorialize the ontology of the 37 African. It also created the Human out of culturally disparate entities 38 from Europe and the East. . . . The race of Humanism (White, Asian, 39 South Asian, and Arab) could not have produced itself without the 40 simultaneous production of that walking destruction which became 41 42 10 DEATH RIGHTS

1 known as the Black. Put another way, through chattel slavery the 2 world gave birth and coherence to both its joys of domesticity and to 3 its struggles of political discontent; and with these joys and struggles, 4 the Human was born, but not before it murdered the Black, forging a 5 symbiosis between the political ontology of Humanity and the social 6 death of Blacks.35 7 8 It is worth pausing here to acknowledge that this framework has serious 9 limits. Iyko Day stresses that Afropessimist accounts put forward by 10 Wilderson and Jared Sexton lean too heavily on notions of indigenous 11 sovereignty that turn on recognition by the liberal state.36 Along 12 similar lines, Mark Rifkin contends that the two positions belong 13 to fundamentally “disparate political imaginaries and trajectories,” 14 not least because the varied, culturally specific models of indigenous 15 sovereignty are often at odds with the emphasis on (social) death and/ 16 as political nonbeing in black radical discourses like Afropessimism.37 17 Afropessimism’s insistence on social death as the condition of possibility 18 for black life has also been notably recalibrated by Fred Moten, whose 19 answer to Afropessimism, black optimism, emphasizes the deathliness 20 of liberal modernity itself. Discussed more fully in this book’s third 21 chapter, Moten posits that social death is “the field of the political . . . the 22 fundamentally and essentially antisocial nursery for a necessarily 23 necropolitical imitation of life.”38 In response to Moten, Sexton insists 24 that “nothing in afro-pessimism suggests that there is no black (social) 25 life, only that black life is not social life in the universe formed by the 26 codes of state and civil society, of citizen and subject, of nation and 27 culture, of people and place, of history and heritage . . . Black life is not 28 lived in the world that the world lives in.”39 Likewise, Christina Sharpe, 29 whose In the Wake resonates, in certain ways, with both Afropessimism 30 and black optimism, demonstrates how “Black life [is] lived in, as, 31 under, despite Black death” in multivalent ways that are irreducible to 32 Eurocentric frameworks of sociality.40 33 That irreducibility is precisely what makes Afropessimism, black 34 optimism, and related discourses that variously seek to demystify liberal 35 modernity’s dependence on black (social) death relevant to this study. 36 If black life turns on what Moten calls “an always already imposed and 37 interdicted ‘right to death,’” it does so in ways that are thoroughly at 38 odds with—and thus reveal the limits of—Hume’s assertion of that right 39 for “Man” and subsequent liberal revolutionaries’ appropriations of that 40 right for those excluded from that category, including enslaved Afri- 41 cans.41 In this frame, to posit enslaved Africans’ suicides as emancipatory 42 Introduction 11

is oxymoronic. The dead don’t get free by dying. Rather, as Saidiya 1 Hartman contends, what may appear to be an act of self-destruction is, 2 in fact, “a radical refusal of the terms of the social order,” an embrace 3 of forms of life that can only be lived in spaces of death, inaccessible 4 through (or, indeed, to) the liberal imaginary.42 As a result, attempts 5 by well-meaning liberals to appropriate Hume’s formulation in order to 6 highlight the wrongs of enslaving people of African descent presents a 7 classic case—which is to say, an inevitable failure—of using the master’s 8 tools to dismantle his house.43 The liberal trope of the “suicidal slave” 9 forecloses the possibility of black life within and beyond the bounds of 10 liberalism, rendering the suicidal figure really a murdered one. 11 And while historical cases of African-identified people choosing 12 death over bondage certainly underline the brutality of enslavement, 13 so too do the actions of those maintaining and profiting from the insti- 14 tution, and these are often obscured in literary efforts to build a case 15 for abolition through the liberal argument for suicide. Sentimental 16 depictions of black people dying by suicide diminish white culpability. 17 In most cases, they write white people out of the picture completely 18 (except, as we’ll see, those who can be made into sympathetic avatars 19 for white readers). Such representations feed the delusion that what’s 20 at stake is, in Wilderson’s terms, conflictual rather than structural— 21 that antiblackness can be overcome by facilitating African-identified 22 people’s entry into liberal society. But the point is that antiblackness is 23 not an event that can be overcome. It is a structural foundation of the 24 modern world. Thus, as Wilderson puts it, “The imaginary of the state 25 and civil society is parasitic on the Middle Passage.”44 Extending the 26 scope of the metaphor, Sharpe reminds us that “we are all positioned 27 by the wake [of the slave ship], but positioned differently.”45 What is 28 needed, then, is the wholesale destruction of “Man”—not the self-de- 29 struction of individual women or men—to move toward anything that 30 might approximate liberation. 31 32 Methods 33 34 It is worth pausing here to explain my methodological foundation, with 35 which readers situated in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British 36 literary studies may be unfamiliar. With some recent exceptions, these 37 fields have historically authorized and have been authorized by epistemic 38 and institutional structures grounded in liberal humanism, including 39 the liberal arts and the neoliberal university.46 These are some of the 40 givens through and toward which Eurocentric humanistic knowledges 41 42 12 DEATH RIGHTS

1 continue to be produced. Discussions of race in these fields, especially in 2 romantic literary studies (where I am primarily situated), have tended 3 to be subordinated to or subsumed by discussions of enslavement or 4 colonialism. As a result, much of the work on romanticism’s relationship 5 to the subject—and subjects—of African enslavement reads black 6 histories and black lives through white critical lenses. In Marlon Ross’s 7 assessment, this is because to substantively foreground race in historically 8 white fields requires confronting certain discomfiting truths: “No one 9 wants to seem so vulgar as to call romantic writers racists.”47 Ross notes 10 that much of the work on “race” (i.e., enslavement and/or colonialism) 11 in romantic literary studies has avoided implicating romanticism as 12 such, except where canonical writers can be praised for antislavery 13 sentiments or abolitionist efforts. Thus, even as the field’s interest in 14 the historical construction of modern racial categories has grown in 15 recent years, in its critical practices, it has largely avoided or actively 16 precluded the necessary methodological transformations that must 17 attend rigorous engagement with antiracist thought and action. 18 Notably, this is not the case in all areas of literary studies.48 In 19 romanticism, this discrepancy can be understood, at least in part, as 20 a function of the field’s peculiar relationship to western academia 21 relative to other areas of literary and cultural studies. As Manu Samriti 22 Chander has keenly observed, “Romanticism survived the culture wars 23 unscathed.”49 This is not to say, as Chander acknowledges, that the 24 social upheavals at the end of the last century had no effect on the 25 study of romanticism. Without a doubt, one of the most profound 26 and significant interventions in the history of romanticist scholarship 27 was the expansion of the field to include (white) women writers. But 28 attending to gender is not the same as attending to race, not least 29 because evidence of “gender,” however one defines or engages that 30 concept, can be recovered in ways that evidence of “race” cannot. And 31 thus Chander, like Ross, registers a largely unexamined privilege that 32 runs through much scholarly work in the field—the luxury not to see 33 race and the choice, conscious or unconscious, not to address it. 34 Indeed, as Bakary Diaby reminds us, efforts to bring race to the 35 forefront of romantic literary studies have a long—and long-forgotten— 36 history. In 1942, Eva Beatrice Dykes, the first African American woman 37 to complete the requirements for a doctoral degree in the United States, 38 published The Negro in British Romantic Thought. Written well before 39 the interventions of feminist, postcolonial, or critical race theory, Dykes’s 40 work situates canonical romantic writers’ engagements with the topic 41 of African enslavement against texts by lesser-known British writers, 42 Introduction 13

including many white women whose “recovery” in the field is credited 1 to white feminist scholars working later in the twentieth century. In 2 so doing, Dykes highlights a related problem in historically white 3 fields such as ours: the tendency to assume that “race” signals only 4 nonwhiteness. We don’t just encounter “race” because, for example, the 5 subjects of antislavery texts are black; we also encounter “race” when the 6 writers we study are white. In their efforts to represent blackness, white 7 writers tell us a lot about the privileges and blind spots of whiteness— 8 blind spots too often reproduced or insufficiently interrogated in 9 our scholarship. Dykes’s work underscores the urgency of recognizing 10 and naming these forms of discursive violence, even as she decries the 11 fact that romanticism’s investment in antislavery efforts (which, she 12 emphasizes, cannot be divorced from its antiblackness) is not more widely 13 discussed: “Almost all the well-known writers of the eighteenth and early 14 nineteenth centuries wrote against slavery; yet they are remembered 15 by the general student of English literature not for their anti-slavery 16 utterances but for their conforming more or less to those principles 17 of writing which make their works take place among the classics of 18 English literature.”50 Ultimately, as Diaby points out, Dykes recenters 19 the canon, “ask[ing] us to believe that Romanticism can revolve around 20 the lowly and the oppressed; that, at its best, Romanticism is a field of 21 study intimately tied to the vulnerable.”51 Even so, in her insistence that 22 “many of these writers were not prompted by any consideration of social 23 equality for the Negro,” Dykes challenges us to read against the grain of 24 the self-professed emancipatory aims of many of the era’s best-known 25 texts and authors.52 As this book will highlight, many of these texts 26 exemplify how racism reproduces itself in discourses where we might 27 expect to see it challenged. 28 Nearly a century since Dykes’s groundbreaking work, and more 29 than a generation after critical race, ethnic, and feminist studies were 30 institutionalized in university curricula, it should go without saying 31 that romanticism as a field of knowledge organized within the broader 32 disciplinary construction of English literature is deeply rooted in racism 33 in its most fundamental sense: “When a racial group’s collective prejudice 34 is backed by the power of . . . institutional control, it is transformed 35 into racism, a far-reaching system that functions independently of 36 the intentions or self-images of institutional actors.”53 In the imperial 37 mission to “civilize” the world through domination and exploitation, 38 British colonizers and enslavers enabled a knowledge economy that 39 continues to reproduce ideologies of whiteness as the universal ideal and 40 transparent default by way of (among other tools) literary education. 41 42 14 DEATH RIGHTS

1 Gauri Viswanathan has shown that “as early as the 1820s, when the 2 classical curriculum still reigned supreme in England . . . English as the 3 study of culture and not just language had already found a secure place 4 in the British Indian curriculum.”54 Building on this work, Chander has 5 demonstrated how, in negotiating their relationship to colonial curricula, 6 Indian intellectuals effectively consolidated one of the first canons of 7 what we now recognize to be British romanticism.55 When versions of 8 this canon moved to England later in the nineteenth century, they came 9 first, as Terry Eagleton has shown, to Mechanics’ Institutes as a way of 10 “providing a cheapish ‘liberal’ education for those beyond the charmed 11 circles of public school and Oxbridge.”56 Long before romanticism was 12 emblematic of bourgeois sophistication, it was “literally the poor man’s 13 Classics.”57 And while it has evolved, in some ways, beyond these roots 14 in ideological apparatuses used to educate but not to equalize, the study 15 of romanticism remains, as Paul Youngquist puts it, “oblivious to its 16 whiteness.”58 17 A word about my usage of the term “romanticism.” I engage “romantic” 18 and “romanticism” here in the most conventional sense, referring to 19 the cadre of European poets and artists who turned against empiricism 20 toward the epistemological efficacies of emotion, saw in the volatility of 21 the natural world an answer to what they considered restrictive within 22 their highly ordered societies, and took seriously the possibilities opened 23 by idealism to counteract absolutism. While I can appreciate the intent 24 of recent efforts to claim these characteristics toward more “inclusive” 25 narratives of the historical era against which it developed, I maintain 26 that the term itself is inextricable from the bourgeois white male 27 individualism with which it has been most closely associated.59 When 28 speaking of the era in and against which romanticism developed, this 29 book aims to highlight the period’s cacophony of political, moral, and 30 aesthetic ideologies—conflicts and antagonisms too often flattened by 31 framing the period through romanticism (i.e., “the romantic era”) because 32 of that term’s loaded relationship to bourgeois white male individualism. 33 Romanticism, then, is treated here not as the defining discourse of an age 34 but as one of many interconnected responses to social transformations 35 that occurred between the rise of the abolition debates in the 1770s 36 and the emancipation of enslaved people of African descent in Britain’s 37 colonies in the 1830s. 38 A word, too, about the term “whiteness,” which refers not to ethnic 39 or cultural identity but to the dominant institutions that socialize all 40 of us into habits, attitudes, and value systems that enable the unequal 41 distribution of cultural and financial capital and power. Whiteness, in 42 Introduction 15 this sense, is not reducible to skin color, even as the privileges associated 1 with being read as white stem from racial hierarchies developed, in 2 no small part, during the era many of us associate with romanticism. 3 Because it is socially constructed, whiteness is fluid (who and what gets 4 considered white changes over time), relational (it cannot exist without 5 those against whom it defines itself), and turns on invisibility (those 6 who benefit most from it usually do not see it).60 Moreover, whiteness 7 cannot be disarticulated from other instruments of oppression, including 8 patriarchy.61 In this sense, whiteness is really “white manness,” or what 9 Sara Ahmed discusses using the shorthand “white men”: “When we talk 10 of white men, we are describing an institution . . . a persistent structure or 11 mechanism of social order governing the behavior of a set of individuals 12 within a given community.” This encompasses not only “what has already 13 been instituted or built but the mechanisms that ensure the persistence 14 of that structure.”62 Regardless of who we are or understand ourselves to 15 be as individuals, scholars of romanticism in its current configuration are 16 all white men, which is to say, we work in a field that was not only built 17 around white bodies and sustained through white critical perspectives 18 but that has explicitly and deliberately been used to maintain fictions of 19 whiteness as transparent and thus universal ever since romantic literatures 20 were introduced into school and university curricula. We cannot begin to 21 think seriously about “race” in this field without naming whiteness as 22 part of that discussion. However, it must be said that making whiteness 23 visible as a category of analysis within the larger purview of “race” in 24 romantic studies is only a small step toward unsettling “the production 25 and perpetuation of [romanticism’s] blank authority.”63 26 That authority, I will argue here, is closely bound up with the myth of 27 romantic suicide. Even as the canon as such was established around them, 28 British romantic writers were intentional about how future generations 29 would receive them. Instrumental to their efforts was the idea of 30 creative genius that so thoroughly underpins the myth of romantic 31 suicide. Andrew Bennett has shown how the romantic authors we 32 inherit as canonical actively constructed their literary reputations 33 in order to make themselves indispensable to their own and future 34 generations. By making the white male “genius” into an aesthetic 35 ideal, they effectively created the criteria through which they would 36 achieve literary immortality. Their attention to posterity, according to 37 Bennett, was intimately tied to “the crucial possibility that the death 38 of the writer will, in itself, produce an effect on the survivors.”64 This 39 was achieved, in part, by seizing on the idea of Chatterton. Through 40 effusive affirmations of Chatterton’s poetry, coupled with public 41 42 16 DEATH RIGHTS

1 self-identifications with the poet, many of our most canonical romantic 2 writers elevated a now-familiar set of ideas about the relationship between 3 genius and suicide as part of a strategy to fix their own posthumous 4 fame.65 In so doing, they also ensured the canon’s epistemic homogeneity, 5 creating inherently ethnocentric standards of supposedly universal taste. 6 Romantic suicide, then, is necessarily implicated in modernity’s racial 7 consciousness, even as it presents itself as apolitical and thus unrelated. 8 Romantic suicide purports to turn our gaze to private suffering, but in 9 highlighting the “genius” of representative white men, it reveals itself 10 to be essentially political. In 1830, Victor Hugo celebrated romanticism 11 as “liberalism in literature.”66 To a certain sensibility, liberalism held— 12 and still does hold—the promise that all those whom it acknowledges 13 as worthy can freely pursue individualistic goals. The primary texts and 14 authors discussed in this book sought to call attention to liberalism’s 15 racial exclusions in order to reimagine and expand its boundaries. 16 However, despite some recent arguments to the contrary, this book 17 maintains that liberalism cannot be transformed to meaningfully serve 18 the interests of those it holds as its “others.”67 Thus, Death Rights is 19 oriented beyond it. 20 I am guided in this orientation by the work of, among others, Fran 21 Botkin, Bakary Diaby, Jared Hickman, Atesede Makonnen, Patricia A. 22 Matthew, Joel Pace, Marlon Ross, Matt Sandler, Rebecca Schneider, and 23 Paul Youngquist. Each of these thinkers, in their own uniquely different 24 ways, engages with critical modalities developed by scholars in black 25 studies to read romanticism. Black studies and romantic literary studies 26 are relevant to one another insofar as both fields are centrally concerned 27 with many of the same historical events (e.g., the revolutions in America, 28 France, and Haiti) and theorize many of the same issues (e.g., social 29 transformation, freedom, human dignity). Dwight McBride has suggested 30 that conversations between these fields should be undertaken in the 31 interest of foregrounding the relationship between literary romanticism 32 and the development of modern racial politics in the historical backdrop 33 against which it unfolded. McBride asserts that such a practice of reading 34 across academic disciplines and cultures would require scholars of 35 romanticism to substantially expand how we understand the relevance 36 of blackness to our knowledge of the early nineteenth century—that is, 37 to move beyond noting “the appearance of traditional Romantic tropes 38 in Black-authored texts.”68 Nor should such a practice be seen as purely 39 in the service of contextualizing texts written by black authors. Rather, 40 it can enable scholars across subdisciplines of literary and cultural studies 41 to understand romanticism not only as an artistic watershed in European 42 Introduction 17

cultural history but as a set of discourses that have substantially shaped 1 (and been shaped by) modern racial thinking. Moreover, it can enable 2 romanticists to move beyond historicizing enslavement and colonialism 3 toward rigorous interrogations of romanticism’s role in producing—not 4 merely reflecting—the antiblack logics of liberal modernity. 5 While many of the critical frameworks I engage in this book emerge 6 from the study of enslavement and racialization in the United States, 7 their theoretical elucidations of “blackness” and “the west” as complex 8 transnational phenomena offer indispensable counternarratives to how 9 scholars of, for example, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain have 10 understood modernity’s discourses of death, freedom, and the particular 11 relevance of suicide to both. As Moten reminds us, “what is called Western 12 civilization is the object of black studies” just as surely as “blackness . . . is 13 not but nothing other than Western civilization.”69 However, though 14 romanticism and black studies can both be said to originate, in some way, 15 in the eighteenth century, their epistemic orientations are fundamentally 16 different and those differences should not be elided. Black studies, as 17 Alexander Weheliye explains, “works toward the abolition of Man, and 18 advocates the radical reconstruction and decolonization of what it means 19 to be human . . . [thereby pursuing] a politics of global liberation beyond 20 the genocidal shackles of Man.”70 By contrast, “Man” is the condition 21 of possibility for the study of romanticism and, as I will show, romantic 22 ideas continue to circulate in service to its attendant ideologies. In 23 bringing romanticism into conversation with black studies, my goal is 24 not to locate points of commonality but rather to attend rigorously and 25 ethically to their frictions.71 26 Nowhere are these frictions more pronounced than in each field’s 27 relationship to liberalism. On one hand, even as individual romantic 28 writers varied in their views on liberal politics and institutions, as a field 29 of study, romanticism’s epistemic grounding in liberal principles is often 30 taken for granted as part of its engagement with the era’s revolutionary 31 ideologies.72 Where scholarship on gender, class, disability, enslavement, 32 and empire has brought much-needed nuance to the study of romanticism, 33 as I note above, much less has been made of the role played by race, both 34 within and beyond the black/nonblack binary. Black studies, by contrast, 35 has been at the forefront of ongoing reassessments of liberalism. As 36 Hartman elucidates in Scenes of Subjection, 37 38 Liberalism, in general, and rights discourse, in particular, assure 39 entitlements and privileges as they enable and efface elemental 40 forms of domination primarily because of the atomistic portrayal 41 42 18 DEATH RIGHTS

1 of social relations, the inability to address collective interests and 2 needs, and the sanctioning of subordination and the free reign of 3 prejudice in the construction of the social or the private. Moreover, 4 the universality or unencumbered individuality of liberalism relies 5 on tacit exclusions and norms that preclude substantive equality; all 6 do not equally partake of the resplendent, plenipotent, indivisible, 7 and steely singularity that it proffers. Abstract universality presumes 8 particular forms of embodiment and excludes or marginalizes others. 9 Rather, the excluded, marginalized, and devalued subjects that it 10 engenders, variously contained, trapped, and imprisoned by nature’s 11 whimsical appointments, in fact, enable the production of universality, 12 for the denigrated and deprecated, those castigated and saddled by 13 varied corporeal maledictions, are the fleshy substance that enable the 14 universal to achieve its ethereal splendor.73 15 16 Along similar lines, Charles W. Mills has shown how liberalism turns on 17 a “racial contract” whereby the political ontology of the rights-bearing 18 subject is buttressed by the state-sanctioned exclusion of racialized 19 nonsubjects. While this is theoretically also true of those excluded 20 through social logics other than racialization (e.g., white women), in 21 practice, whiteness offers proximity to hegemonic power structures that 22 remain inaccessible to racialized peoples. As a result, liberalism “has 23 historically been predominantly a racial liberalism, in which conceptions 24 of personhood and resulting schedules of rights, duties, and government 25 responsibilities have all been racialized. And the [social] contract, 26 correspondingly, has really been a racial one, an agreement among 27 white contractors to subordinate and exploit nonwhite noncontractors 28 for white benefit.”74 Thus, if literary romanticism developed at least 29 partly as a set of engagements with liberal discourses of universal rights 30 and freedoms, then taking seriously liberalism’s foundational exclusions 31 should fundamentally alter our understanding of and approaches 32 to those engagements. By overlooking or minimizing the relevance 33 of these exclusions, the study of romanticism effectively reproduces 34 them. 35 Death Rights reads romanticism as part and parcel of the legal and 36 philosophical discourses that underwrite liberal modernity’s antiblack 37 foundations. In this frame, I argue that the trope of romantic suicide 38 (re)inscribes the rights, entitlements, and freedoms promised by liber- 39 alism as the exclusive province of white men. In romantic suicide, the 40 choice to die represents neither a critique of an unlivable society nor 41 even a sign of mental illness but instead suggests that a particular sort 42 Introduction 19

of “genius” transcends the material conditions and political ontologies 1 that variously delimit everyone else’s lived realities. Romantic suicide 2 obscures structural inequities that can render some realities unliv- 3 able. Moreover, it stymies our capacity to recognize forms of social 4 life that exist outside of hegemonic conceptions of “human being.” 5 Addressing this requires an epistemic reorientation, accessed here 6 through careful engagements with critical modalities developed in 7 black studies including, but not limited to, Afropessimism and black 8 optimism. Ultimately, this book endeavors to ask what the study of 9 romanticism stands to gain from embracing intellectual traditions that 10 challenge epistemologies rooted in liberalism—and whether it offers 11 them anything in return. But let me be clear: this is not about “soli- 12 darity” nor about opening the field to be more “inclusive.” Opening 13 historically Eurocentric fields to perspectives they have implicitly or 14 explicitly marginalized does not address the underlying assumptions 15 driving those fields’ disciplinary formations. Consequently, this book 16 is about complicity. It is about what, if anything, remains ethically 17 possible. 18 Death Rights joins a growing movement to reorient romanticism’s 19 conventional self-definitions and confront structural racism in British 20 literature and literary studies more broadly.75 Making every effort not 21 to elide foundational differences, I have tried to make connections while 22 attending carefully to my positionality and speaking with and to—not 23 as or for—positionalities that are not my own. The questions I raise in 24 these pages are, I believe, the questions that will define the next 25 generation of romanticist scholarship: On what foundations has our 26 field been built? Toward what ends does it currently exist? How can 27 we read these literatures ethically, attending honestly and rigorously to 28 their internal contradictions rather than relegating those contradictions 29 to the margins or worse, never becoming aware of them at all? If these 30 questions unsettle some readers, that is testament to how urgently they 31 need to be asked. 32 33 Chapters 34 35 The chapters that follow underline the absurdity of using the self- 36 destruction of black bodies to advocate for the liberation of black 37 people. This is not to minimize the important social transformations 38 achieved by abolitionist and women’s rights campaigns at the turn of 39 the nineteenth century but to highlight the limitations of revising, 40 rather than eradicating, the antiblack logics embedded in the structures 41 42 20 DEATH RIGHTS

1 those movements ostensibly sought to dismantle. The first three 2 chapters examine how white abolitionists, early liberal feminists, and 3 Afrodiasporic writers engaged the trope of suicide in different ways to 4 negotiate liberal discourses of rights and freedoms. Chapters 4 and 5 are 5 more speculative explorations of these ideas in practice, both historically 6 and in the present day. 7 “Liberty and Death” traces how the idea of suicide enters liberal 8 political discourses in England within broader discussions of the 9 relationship between property, legal personhood, and individual freedom. 10 This chapter reads Thomas Day and John Bicknell’s 1773 abolitionist 11 poem, The Dying Negro, as a reimagining of the 1772 ruling in Somerset v. 12 Stewart, a decision that freed one man but did not extend to all enslaved 13 people. Day and Bicknell replace the promise that some saw in that 14 legal victory with an act of suicide, thus highlighting a fundamental 15 aporia in the logic of classical liberalism found explicitly in John Locke’s 16 inability to reconcile enslavement with suicide in his Second Treatise of 17 Government. Reading Locke alongside and against the legal principle 18 on which Somerset was actually freed, the writ of habeas corpus, the 19 chapter shows that The Dying Negro is not finally committed to the 20 freedom or personhood of enslaved Africans at all. Rather, the poem 21 capitalizes on its readers’ interests in more general questions about the 22 nature of Britons’ freedoms, brought forward in public responses to the 23 Somerset trial. 24 “Chained to Life and Misery” extends the scope of the inquiry to 25 white women’s negotiations of liberalism’s racial logics for their own 26 emancipatory ends. This chapter considers white women’s racialized 27 representations of suicide in early calls for (white) women’s rights. In 28 contradistinction to abolitionist representations of black, typically male 29 figures choosing death to “prove” African-identified people’s capacity 30 to reason, in the hands of white women writers, nonwhite women’s self- 31 annihilation is tied to excessive emotionality and the inability to reason. 32 Foregrounding the racism characteristic of the era’s gendered discourses 33 of feeling, this chapter observes how suicide operates to sublimate white 34 supremacist logics in works by Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Robinson, 35 Claire de Duras, and Felicia Hemans. The chapter concludes with a 36 reading of The Story of Mattie J. Jackson, an autobiography by a formerly 37 enslaved woman that registers and challenges, at the level of form, the 38 long reach of these discursive patterns of liberal feminist antiblackness. 39 “Writ in Water” extends the discussion of black life writing by 40 considering how The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano 41 likewise challenges European tropes associated with enslaved Africans’ 42 Introduction 21

suicides. Calling into question the era’s social and scientific theories of 1 race as they undergirded liberal definitions of personhood and, more 2 broadly, the human, Equiano uses suicide to develop an alternative 3 imaginative space for black social existence. His radical (re)vision of black 4 life is precisely not beholden to the bounds of liberalism, relying on a 5 relational rather than an individualistic frame. This chapter concludes by 6 reading the trope of tragic romantic genius, as developed in the poetry of 7 John Keats, through the understanding of suicide put forth by Equiano. 8 “In Sympathy” considers how the treatments of suicide discussed in 9 the first three chapters are synthesized and mobilized in Mary Shelley’s 10 Frankenstein. Incorporating philosophical essays on sympathy by Percy 11 Shelley, Wollstonecraft’s framing of suicide as a form of feminist protest, 12 and Mary Shelley’s personal experiences with suicide, this chapter argues 13 that Frankenstein works to grapple with how liberalism frames suicide 14 in two competing ways: on the one hand, Shelley treats suicide as the 15 apotheosis of liberal subjecthood and on the other, marks self-destruction 16 as the logical end to which nonsubjects like the creature are driven. The 17 chapter concludes by reading Victor LaValle’s Destroyer, a modern-day 18 sequel of sorts to Frankenstein, as reflective of the limitations of engaging 19 liberalism to imagine black freedom. 20 Finally, “Marvelous Boys” returns to where this book began: the 21 popular and critical commonplace of romantic suicide. Theorizing its 22 mythic structure and ideological function, this chapter demonstrates 23 how romantic suicide reproduces fantasies of the posterity and invul- 24 nerability, even in death, of bourgeois white masculinity. Moreover, 25 it argues that the deification of white male solipsism has served to 26 reproduce an isolationist and exclusionary status quo. Through broad 27 readings ranging from the Victorian afterlife of Thomas Chatterton 28 to Kurt Cobain’s resurgence in hip-hop, this chapter argues that the 29 singular genius implied in the myth of romantic suicide has really been 30 a representative man—an ideological symbol through which liberal- 31 ism’s social, epistemic, and ontological frameworks are reaffirmed, and 32 threats to their cohesion are evacuated. 33 Though Death Rights happens to be the first book-length study of 34 suicide during the period traditionally associated with British roman- 35 ticism, this is not a comprehensive study of romantic representations 36 of self-destruction. It is, rather, a work of cultural criticism that traces 37 how ideas about suicide were mobilized to challenge liberal moder- 38 nity’s organizing structures of antiblackness even as they reinscribed 39 them. While the authors discussed in these pages devote a great 40 deal of narrative energy to death, most express a desire to change 41 42 22 DEATH RIGHTS

1 the world, not to leave it. There is no transcendental embrace of 2 the sublime melancholy of oblivion and no fetishistic attraction to 3 suicide as a means of securing literary immortality. These authors 4 look outward and confront a broken world. And while I argue that 5 suicide was always an ironic, failed cipher of liberalism’s (im)possi- 6 bilities of inclusion, I insist that there is value in understanding the 7 nature of these failures. That they have been overwritten in our collec- 8 tive memory by a reverential ideal of bourgeois masculinity exemplifies 9 how white supremacist logics reproduce themselves by seizing on the 10 very discourses meant to challenge them. 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 1 2 3 Chapter 1 4 5 Liberty and Death 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 Go pine in want and anguish and despair, 15 There is no mercy found in human-kind— 16 Go Widow to thy grave and rest thee there! 17 But may the God of Justice bid the wind 18 Whelm that curst bark beneath the mountain wave, 19 And bless with Liberty and Death the Slave! 20 —Robert Southey, from Poems Concerning the Slave Trade 21 22 23 efore Werther was Europe’s most fashionable ideal and Chatterton 24 Bwas immortalized as the romantic suicide par excellence, British 25 society was captivated by another suicide—that of “a black [man] who 26 shot himself on board a vessel in the river Thames,” the protagonist 27 and speaker of Thomas Day and John Bicknell’s abolitionist poem, The 28 Dying Negro.1 First published in 1773 and revised five times over the 29 course of the next two decades, The Dying Negro was among England’s 30 best-known abolitionist poems. According to the authors’ prefatory 31 note, the poem was “occasioned by an article of news” that discussed an 32 enslaved man who left his captors and was baptized in preparation for 33 marrying a white woman. Before the wedding could take place, he was 34 kidnapped and detained aboard a docked slave ship set to sail for the 35 Americas. Refusing to be forced back into bondage, he “took an oppor- 36 tunity of shooting himself through the head.”2 This framing narrative 37 closely recalls the circumstances that led to the 1772 trial of Somerset v. 38 Stewart, a landmark case in the history of human rights law, which Day 39 and Bicknell evoke with one key difference: James Somerset obtained 40 41 42 23 24 DEATH RIGHTS

1 freedom through legal maneuvering, while the speaker of The Dying 2 Negro chose to die for it. 3 This chapter reads Day and Bicknell’s poem as a reassessment of 4 the legal grounds on which the Somerset trial was decided—specifi- 5 cally, Somerset’s successful appeal for a writ of habeas corpus. Habeas 6 corpus, an injunction that protects against illegal detainment, gained 7 special status in the eighteenth century as a legislative tool central to 8 protecting the rights and freedoms of liberal subjects. Perhaps more than 9 any other legal construct, habeas corpus turns on the interdependence 10 of liberal modernity’s pillars of personhood, property, and freedom: as 11 Paul Halliday writes, “Ideas about liberties running through the writ 12 of habeas corpus marked out an astonishingly vast subjecthood [such 13 that] liberties came from subject status and thus from those parts of law 14 that defined who were subjects.”3 By replacing the victory that granted 15 Somerset some degree of legal standing with an act of self-destruction, 16 Day and Bicknell introduce an important and far-reaching idea into eigh- 17 teenth-century suicide debates, framing the choice to die not in terms 18 of insanity or criminality but as a sign of one’s capacity to reason—and 19 with it, one’s suitability for inclusion in liberal society. More specifically, 20 Day and Bicknell present the speaker’s capacity to reason as evidence of 21 African-identified people’s suitability for inclusion in liberal modernity’s 22 covenant of personhood. But, crucially, they are only able to argue this 23 by turning the ontological relation between blackness and death into an 24 occasion for bolstering the social structures that compel that relation in 25 the first place. 26 The politics of hyperliteralizing black death—of responding to it 27 only at the level of individual events rather than as a structure—has 28 been undertheorized in studies of British abolitionist literatures. Part 29 of the reason for this stems from the liberal grounding of scholarly 30 pursuits, especially as undertaken in this and other historically white 31 fields. As Frank Wilderson suggests, “If the Black is death personified, 32 the White is the personification of . . . life itself . . . White academics’ 33 disavowal of Black death as modernity’s condition of possibility 34 [bespeaks] their inability to imagine their productive subjectivity as an 35 effect of the Negro.”4 This chapter situates Day and Bicknell’s interven- 36 tion in the habeas corpus debates of the late eighteenth century within 37 critical frameworks that center blackness, namely Alexander Weheli- 38 ye’s concept of habeas viscus. Weheliye invents the term habeas viscus 39 to disarticulate liberal politico-ontological categories from both the 40 specific problem of establishing black social legibility within restric- 41 tive notions of “social life” in western modernity and the much more 42 Liberty and Death 25

expansive project of acknowledging and accommodating all forms of 1 human being. 2 The sections that follow establish the historical relation between 3 habeas corpus and liberal subjectivity and then turn to how Day and 4 Bicknell engage suicide to draw attention to paradoxes at the core of 5 liberalism, which are traced here to John Locke’s inability to reconcile 6 slavery with suicide in his Second Treatise of Government. Through this 7 reading of Locke, coupled with an analysis of Day and Bicknell’s formal 8 innovation of the suicide note in verse, this chapter argues that The 9 Dying Negro is not finally committed to the freedom or personhood of 10 African-identified people but to defining and maintaining white Britons’ 11 freedoms. Ultimately, then, The Dying Negro is an exemplar of how 12 emancipatory arguments rooted in liberal notions of integration tacitly 13 reproduce exclusionary logics. This book’s larger argument concerning 14 the relation of literary romanticism to racialized representations of 15 suicide begins with The Dying Negro for two reasons. While it was 16 not the first text to depict a black person dying by suicide, its immense 17 popularity at the inception of a range of revolutionary eruptions in 18 Europe (Britain’s abolitionist movement chief among them) established 19 a distinctively racialized dimension to popular discourses about rights, 20 personhood, and voluntary death against which the trope of romantic 21 suicide would subsequently develop.5 Emerging as it does from this 22 uniquely charged moment, The Dying Negro is thus also a paradigmatic 23 example of how racialization often escapes scrutiny in well-intentioned 24 texts and movements grounded in liberal epistemologies. 25 As defined by Weheliye, “racialization” refers here “not [to] a biolog- 26 ical or cultural descriptor but [to] a conglomerate of sociopolitical 27 relations that discipline humanity into full humans, not-quite-hu- 28 mans, and nonhumans.”6 In liberal modernity, this process has been 29 underwritten by a vexed relation to property as a prerequisite for person- 30 hood. The legal framework of personhood adjudicates which humans 31 are free based on evidence of self-ownership, usually expressed through 32 rationality and self-consciousness. Because legal personhood is strongly 33 predicated on an ontological relation to the body, the protection against 34 unlawful detainment granted by the writ of habeas corpus has been 35 central to establishing personhood by authorizing a claim of ownership 36 of one’s own body. But personhood is not necessarily restricted to people, 37 which is to say, to human beings—corporations were granted personhood 38 long before people of color and white women; and legal arguments for the 39 personhood of nonhuman animals also gained traction in the nineteenth 40 century.7 Personhood grants those rights that liberal societies reserve 41 42 26 DEATH RIGHTS

1 for free individuals, but it does not speak to the more fundamental 2 question of who or what is seen as worthy of those rights. The liberal 3 logics of The Dying Negro appeal to and operate within the rule of law, 4 seeking to redress wrongs done to enslaved Africans by demonstrating 5 the speaker’s capacity to be recognized as a person. But if personhood is 6 not tantamount to humanity, then appealing to the former will only ever 7 modify (without really confronting or moving to eradicate) those social 8 logics that keep human beings defined against each other through largely 9 nonsensical relations to property. A truly universal project of liberation 10 would begin with the abolition of notions of self-definition through 11 property—with the abolition, that is, of the construct of “Man.” Though 12 it draws attention to cracks in that construct’s foundations, The Dying 13 Negro ultimately does little to challenge them. 14 15 John Locke, Property, and Self-Destruction 16 17 Less than a year before The Dying Negro was published, the Somerset 18 ruling declared illegal precisely the kind of scenario the poem opens 19 with: the detainment of a person of African descent on a ship set to sail 20 for the Americas. That the poem is based on an actual event demon- 21 strates that the Somerset ruling, widely considered to have been a 22 monumental step toward abolition, was in fact less effective than many 23 believed. As Brycchan Carey has suggested, for Day and Bicknell, two 24 London lawyers, to write a poem about “the extent to which the law 25 could be flouted” indicates that the poem “must therefore be seen first 26 as a commentary on the ineffectiveness of the law.”8 Indeed, The Dying 27 Negro lays bare fundamental problems not only with the laws as they 28 stood but also with their philosophical foundations. 29 In 1769, James Somerset was brought to England by the enslaver 30 Charles Stewart. Because the legality of slavery in England was never 31 codified, Somerset remained with Stewart as a servant until 1771, when 32 he decided to leave. Though there was precedent for this, Stewart retali- 33 ated by having Somerset captured and held on board the Ann and Mary 34 with the aim of reenslaving him once the ship set sail for Jamaica. With 35 support from Granville Sharp, three abolitionists claiming to be Somer- 36 set’s godparents from his baptism in England brought the case to court by 37 appealing for a writ of habeas corpus. The ship’s captain, John Knowles, 38 was ordered to bring Somerset before the Court of King’s Bench, which 39 would determine whether his imprisonment aboard the ship had been 40 legal. After six months of proceedings, on June 22, 1772, William Murray, 41 42 Liberty and Death 27

First Earl of Mansfield declared that the air in England was “too pure” 1 to suffer the “odious” institution of slavery.9 With these strong words, 2 Somerset was pronounced legally free.10 3 For over two centuries, Mansfield’s decision has been celebrated as a 4 key precedent to the 1807 abolition of the trade in enslaved Africans and 5 their 1834 emancipation in England’s colonies. By extension, it is also 6 considered an important precedent for emancipation in the United States. 7 The Somerset case continues to be cited in everything from international 8 human rights law to debates on the rights of nonhuman animals.11 But 9 despite Mansfield’s vehement antislavery language, Somerset v. Stewart 10 was not technically about the institution of slavery. It was, instead, a 11 strong defense of habeas corpus. As Mansfield reminds us no fewer than 12 four times in the decision, the ruling is not about the legality, nor even 13 the morality, of enslavement. In fact, it is precisely because the case was 14 about his seizure and detainment on English soil that Somerset was 15 freed at all. Nevertheless, the case continues to be extolled as everything 16 from “a major weapon in the arsenal of abolitionism” to “co-equal with 17 the Declaration of Independence” in establishing and maintaining indi- 18 vidual freedoms.12 19 Beyond exaggerated claims of its bearing on the institutions of slavery 20 in England and the United States, Somerset v. Stewart also opened the 21 door for an important reassessment of habeas corpus. Indeed, the wide- 22 spread notion that habeas corpus is a fundamental safeguard of personal 23 liberty is an eighteenth-century invention. Emerging largely from public 24 responses to the Somerset trial, this reassessment gained traction again in 25 response to Pitt’s suspension of habeas corpus during the Treason Trials 26 of 1794, and reemerged overseas during the uproar over Lincoln’s suspen- 27 sion of habeas corpus in 1861.13 In this sense, Mansfield’s ruling in 1772 28 inaugurated what we might call the “habeas corpus century,” wherein 29 the relationship between the individual and the state grew increasingly 30 embattled, even as that relationship became central to a range of policies 31 and theoretical debates about the liberal subject. I emphasize that this 32 particular shift occurred during the eighteenth century, although the idea 33 of habeas corpus is ancient, traceable at least as far back as the Norman 34 Conquest; some scholars have located its roots in ancient Greece.14 All 35 agree, however, that it was codified in its modern form in Britain on the 36 eve of “enlightenment.” 37 In 1679, Parliament passed 31 Cha. 2 c. 2, better known as the Habeas 38 Corpus Act. Although there had been an earlier Habeas Corpus Act in 39 1641 and others subsequently passed in 1803, 1804, 1816, and 1862, the 40 41 42 28 DEATH RIGHTS

1 Act of 1679 remains one of the most important events in modern legal 2 history because of how substantially it limited the power of the state 3 over the individual.15 Specifically, the act laid out for the first time 4 explicit procedures and timelines for carrying out the writ: it mandated 5 near-immediate issue and return within three days, and it enabled those 6 detained to appeal for a writ of habeas corpus even when courts were 7 not in session. The act also established penalties for delaying trials 8 and introduced fines for judges who refused to grant the writ, thereby 9 incentivizing its strict enforcement. Prior to 1679, habeas corpus had 10 been widely abused by agents of the state. For example, it was not 11 unusual for members of the Privy Council to move detainees to secret 12 prisons without due process; and while a number of measures were 13 introduced to limit these abuses, most went unenforced.16 The 1641 14 Habeas Corpus Act—the first explicitly named for the writ—stripped 15 the Privy Council of its jurisdiction over civil matters and abolished 16 the Star Chamber, which was “a notorious tribunal used by the Crown 17 to circumvent judicial scrutiny over detainments.”17 When Charles I 18 was dethroned, Parliament suspended habeas corpus for his supporters, 19 and this fueled Charles II’s attacks on Parliament when the monarchy 20 was restored in the 1660s. Exactly why it was revisited in 1679 remains 21 unclear due to a lack of documentation on the matter.18 However, as 22 summarized by nineteenth-century constitutional theorist A. V. Dicey, 23 the 1679 Act and the revisions that followed “declare no principle and 24 define no rights, but they are for practical purposes worth a hundred 25 constitutional articles guaranteeing individual liberty.”19 More than 26 a century later, in 2013, legal scholar Kevin Gutzman echoed Dicey’s 27 sentiment, calling the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679 “the chief reason 28 that Anglophones have long been free.”20 29 A decade after the 1679 Act was passed, John Locke published his 30 Two Treatises of Government. In the oft-discussed section of the Second 31 Treatise, “Of Property” (chap. 5), Locke famously declares that “every 32 man has a property in his own person.”21 This claim is advanced as 33 part of Locke’s theoretical reconstruction of how “Man” emerged 34 from the state of nature to civil society, the philosophical blueprint 35 for the modern liberal state. To briefly summarize, for Locke, asserting 36 ownership over parts of the commons begins with individuals exerting 37 physical labor over entities in nature, thereby claiming the right to call 38 those entities their own: “The labour that was mine, removing them 39 [objects in nature, e.g. acorns and berries] out of that common state 40 they were in, hath fixed my property in them.”22 He emphasizes here 41 that one can only own as much property as one can reasonably use. 42 Liberty and Death 29

Moving from the advent of private property in a hunting and gath- 1 ering society to one based on agriculture and land ownership, the labor 2 imposed on the land delineates what land can be enclosed. The next 3 stage involves the introduction of money. Before money, Locke imagines 4 a degree of economic equality because exchange was largely confined 5 to the satisfaction of needs, and most necessities were perishable— 6 berries, meat, and so forth.23 The introduction of money, however, 7 leads to differential increases in private property ownership, resulting 8 in economic inequality that results in contentions and increased viola- 9 tions of the laws of nature. This, then, leads to the formation of civil 10 government. At this point, any limits on property ownership are set 11 aside, and the system that develops allows for unlimited acquisition. 12 In this system, possession of property is the precondition of legibility 13 and political representation in society.24 14 Within such a context, it is not hard to see why the writ of habeas 15 corpus emerges as central to establishing personhood by authorizing a 16 claim of ownership over one’s own body. In fact, both the notion that 17 property ownership can be established through the use of one’s body 18 and that personhood is asserted through the possession of property are 19 etymologically embedded. From the Latin habeas (second-person singular 20 present subjunctive active of habere—to have, to hold) and corpus (accu- 21 sative singular of corpus—body), habeas corpus literally means “you shall 22 have the body.” In delineating the terms by which one can challenge 23 the state’s claim to possess their body, the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679 24 effectively anticipates a common, if not altogether accurate, reading of 25 Locke’s Second Treatise that emerged in the late eighteenth century—a 26 popular conflation that cemented habeas corpus as a defining marker of 27 personhood. 28 Isaac Kramnick has shown the extensive influence of Locke’s philos- 29 ophy on reform movements of that era, even going so far as to call late 30 eighteenth-century England “Locke’s country.”25 According to Kram- 31 nick, late eighteenth-century reformers “made a clear link from Locke 32 to British reform and socioeconomic change” by emphasizing natural 33 rights over historical entitlements.26 Where property was at the core of 34 many other conceptions of freedom in civil society, Lockean liberalism 35 was particularly embraced because it asserted that all people could, at 36 least in theory, define and distinguish themselves through their work. 37 Pointing to the wide circulation of pamphlets and treatises extolling 38 Lockean ideas, Kramnick notes that “Of Property,” the fifth chapter of 39 the Second Treatise, “became the received wisdom in advanced radical 40 circles in the late eighteenth century.”27 41 42 30 DEATH RIGHTS

1 Debates about habeas corpus, in turn, offered commentators an apt 2 field within which to consider the vicissitudes of these Lockean princi- 3 ples. For instance, Thomas Hallie Delamayne, a barrister and author of 4 the pamphlet The Rise and Practice of Imprisonment in Personal Actions, 5 Examined, makes explicit the link between habeas corpus and Lockean 6 principles of property. According to Delamayne, English courts had 7 always been organized around three kinds of property, “body, land, and 8 goods,” and changing relationships among these three kinds of property 9 shaped the course of English legal history.28 Writing in 1772, the year of 10 the Somerset trial, Delamayne notes that in his contemporary moment, 11 this relationship was strongly influenced by the 1679 Habeas Corpus Act: 12 “Here indeed the people rejoiced—they had much reason for so doing— 13 and seemed satisfied in the acquisition of so great a second charter of 14 their liberty” (the first being the Magna Carta).29 Delamayne argues that 15 throughout most of England’s history, the laws had been determined 16 by “the prerogative of the crown over the body” and that the 1679 Act’s 17 limitation of the Crown’s claims of ownership over individual bodies set 18 the course for a new epoch, one where the individual could be consti- 19 tuted through his own claims of ownership, either to external property 20 or to his own body.30 21 Direct responses to Somerset v. Stewart exemplify further how strongly 22 habeas corpus spoke to eighteenth-century notions of property as a 23 precondition for personhood. In a 1773 pamphlet protesting the Mans- 24 field decision, Samuel Estwick argues that the outcome of the case created 25 what he considers an illogical shift in the relationship of property and 26 personhood. Charles Stewart’s case, as Estwick summarizes it, had rested 27 on a legal claim to Somerset as an object of property. Estwick, in turn, 28 is unable to understand “by what new law or magic [formerly enslaved 29 people like Somerset] are now become the subjects of the Crown of 30 England, and intitled [sic] to the benefit of Habeas Corpus.”31 In other 31 words, Estwick maintains that Somerset was, in a purely legal sense, 32 property—a shaky claim given that England’s laws did not define the 33 status of people enslaved elsewhere when they stepped on English soil— 34 and that to assert otherwise would be to set a precedent that effectively 35 entitles property (the capacity for ownership, including self-owner- 36 ship, and the rights that accompany it) to property (enslaved people). 37 Estwick maintains that Mansfield’s decision did not adequately address 38 the constitutional principles by which Somerset had been constituted as 39 property via enslavement; thus, the protections granted to him through 40 the writ of habeas corpus, which effectively established his personhood, 41 42 Liberty and Death 31

should be treated as an undue exception to the laws of England rather 1 than their full and just exercise.32 2 To make this argument, Estwick takes for granted a clear distinction 3 between the constitution of an individual through property, as in Locke, 4 and the notion of human beings as property under slavery. That is, in 5 theory, the notion of an enslaved person as property differs categori- 6 cally from the notion that liberal subjects are also constituted through a 7 relationship to property. However, this distinction has never really been 8 clear, not least because Locke’s commitment to liberty is severely under- 9 mined by his own active participation in the institution of slavery.33 10 Jennifer Rae Greeson has argued persuasively that Locke’s core theory 11 of personhood as constituted through property is predicated on an 12 economic history in which people were already viewed and treated as 13 property, thus the two ideas are necessarily linked.34 Moreover, even if 14 it were reasonable to except the realities of African enslavement for the 15 sake of argument, the Lockean doctrine of self-ownership remains explic- 16 itly predicated on preventing the hypothetical enslavement of Britons 17 and thus cannot be disarticulated from the idea that any and all human 18 beings are, or can become, objects of property. 19 The Two Treatises are expressly framed as a challenge to Sir Robert 20 Filmer’s 1680 Patriarcha. Locke’s counterpoint to Filmer’s veneration of 21 the divine right of kings is grounded in the assertion that a theory of 22 government founded on the original sovereignty of one man over another 23 is, in fact, an attempt to justify a form of slavery. Locke’s Second Treatise 24 asserts that a society based on the constitution of personhood through 25 property is necessary specifically in order to curtail the possibility of free 26 people—that is, Britons—becoming enslaved to their own government. 27 The alternative to government as slavery, then, is government as contract. 28 But as Fred Moten suggests below, the law of contract grants only a 29 limited fantasy of freedom, one that turns on the exercise of the “free” 30 individual’s sovereignty over those excluded from the contract. This rela- 31 tionship between enslavement and freedom manifests itself in (among 32 other places) how liberal society negotiates its relationship to death: 33 34 What if slavery and freedom are each other’s condition of possibility? 35 What if the distinction between life and death is just a way of naming 36 the distinction between life and lives? What if the irreducible mutu- 37 ality of slavery and freedom occurs in the realm of lives, which is 38 the zone in which life and death are made to (seem to) negotiate? 39 What if the right of death and power over life that is given in and as 40 41 42 32 DEATH RIGHTS

1 sovereignty . . . is given and held in the fantastic domain of individu- 2 ated lives. . . . If individuation is the regulation of social life, then the 3 law of contract is one of its most essential formal mechanisms.35 4 5 This aporia—the inability to fully reconcile the dependence of (social) life 6 and freedom on (social) death—asserts itself elsewhere in the Second Treatise. 7 In his explication of the limits of individual liberty in a contrac- 8 tarian system of government, Locke has severe difficulties in dealing 9 with two seemingly unrelated kinds of actions: owning another person 10 (i.e., actual practices of enslavement) and suicide. In order to explain 11 why suicide cannot be classified as an assertion of individual liberty, 12 Locke reverts to the very schema of sovereignty he had argued against 13 in the First Treatise. To make suicide the exception to self-determining 14 individualism, Locke insists that free individuals are still subject to a 15 more powerful entity, God, and thus “though man . . . have an uncon- 16 trollable liberty to dispose of his person or possessions, yet he has 17 not liberty to destroy himself.”36 Elsewhere in the Second Treatise, he 18 also claims that the voluntary death of an enslaved person isn’t really 19 suicide. For Locke, enslavement is acceptable as a form of punishment: 20 when a man has committed an act for which he deserves to have his 21 liberty taken away, he may justly lose his legal standing as a person and 22 be enslaved to another. And thus, “having, by his fault [effectively] 23 forfeited his own life, by some act that deserves death . . . whenever he 24 finds the hardship of his slavery outweigh the value of his life, ‘tis in 25 his power, by resisting the will of his master, to draw on himself the 26 death he desires.”37 Because the enslaved person no longer belongs to 27 himself, if he ends his life it is not a self-determining act but rather the 28 logical extension of his punishment. The voluntary death of an enslaved 29 person thus does not “count” as suicide because to lack freedom is to 30 be, in some sense, already dead. It follows, then, that to commit suicide, 31 one must first be free; and yet, Locke insists that free individuals are 32 not actually free to kill themselves. 33 These stipulations are fundamentally irreconcilable with one 34 another, as well as with Locke’s larger notion of a society governed by 35 self-determining individuals who are constituted as such through prop- 36 erty. Even as Locke claimed to be opposed to the condition of slavery in 37 general, his theory is troubled from within at two levels. Firstly, Locke’s 38 theory is unable to distance itself from the theory of sovereignty he 39 claims makes slaves of free individuals. Secondly, Locke has difficulty 40 allowing for what most readers would consider as obvious—that the 41 voluntary death of an enslaved person is, indeed, an act of suicide. It is 42 Liberty and Death 33 this tension between sovereignty and individualism—which, in Locke, 1 exists in both the question of suicide and that of enslavement—that 2 comes to the fore in The Dying Negro, as separate debates over suicide 3 and racialized enslavement converge around the limits of freedom and 4 the exclusionary logics that underwrite legal personhood. 5 6 7 The Dying Negro and the Politics of Freedom 8 Understood in the context of Somerset v. Stewart and the debates it 9 engendered among eighteenth-century Britons, The Dying Negro calls 10 attention to the precarious grounds on which the category of personhood 11 determines and underwrites the condition of freedom, broadly defined. 12 Written in heroic couplets sustained over nineteen pages (in its original 13 1773 printing), The Dying Negro is presented as the final words of an 14 unnamed African man aboard a slave ship bound for the Americas. The 15 poem primarily addresses the white woman he left behind in England, 16 though it also periodically appeals to the enslavers holding him captive. 17 The Dying Negro is, at bottom, a defense of the speaker’s decision to kill 18 himself. The poem begins with a series of assertions about why suicide 19 is his only recourse and then alternates between sentimental addresses 20 to his lover and vengeful rage over his captivity. It concludes with his 21 thoughts of the guilt and shame his enslavers will feel when they witness 22 his death. The implication, then, is that once the poem is complete, he 23 shoots himself in the head.38 24 The Dying Negro opens by complicating a seemingly straightforward 25 category, the language of secular freedoms that we might expect from 26 a late eighteenth-century poem about suicide. In its opening lines, Day 27 and Bicknell set the language of individual rights against that of religion: 28 29 Blest with thy last sad gift—the power to dye, 30 At length, thy shafts, stern fortune, I defy; 31 Welcome, kind pass-port to an unknown shore!— 32 The world and I are enemies no more. 33 This weapon ev’n in chains the brave can wield, 34 And vanquish’d, quit triumphantly the field.39 35 36 By opening with the word “blest,” the poem suggests that the deci- 37 sion to kill himself, as the rest of the stanza contends, is not only the 38 speaker’s natural right—a “weapon” he will “wield” against the struc- 39 tures that keep him enslaved—but also providential, a divine “gift.” It 40 is worth underscoring here that liberalism holds natural rights to be, 41 42 34 DEATH RIGHTS

1 indeed, those “gifts” with which each person enters life. However, it is 2 unclear from whom or what this “gift” (the right to suicide) is bestowed: 3 whether “the power to dye [sic]” is given by nature, by those who oppose 4 enslavement, or by God. As Marcus Wood has demonstrated, the idea 5 that freedom can be given or “gifted” is deeply problematic because 6 freedom, in this scenario, must first be taken away: 7 8 Gift is a key word—but a very slippery word . . . Gift might not seem 9 to be a very hard word to define; in Chambers Dictionary it has two 10 primary meanings as a noun, and they are short and sharp: ‘A thing 11 given; a quality bestowed by nature.’ But certain things, freedom 12 being one of them, cannot be given, and freedom in the context of 13 slavery and emancipation consequently has a difficult, maybe impos- 14 sible relation to these two definitions of gift. The impossibility is 15 exposed in the following question: How can freedom be given, either 16 individually or collectively, if it already exists as nature’s gift to all?40 17 18 This question conjures a long history of racial oppression written through 19 “a series of justificatory, indeed self-serving, rhetorics that take liberty 20 and dress it up as a gift.”41 Freedom, Wood argues, is a mythology created 21 by self-professed liberators to obscure wrongdoings that made liberation 22 necessary in the first place. Thus, the opening lines of The Dying Negro 23 obscure—perhaps intentionally, or perhaps simply because it has never 24 really been clear within a liberal framework—the question of whether 25 freedom is an entitlement of nature, a blessing bestowed by some higher 26 power, or a social state that can be fought for and won. Compounded 27 by the poem’s historical situatedness in the immediate aftermath of the 28 Somerset trial, it is not entirely clear which of these options (if any) the 29 final act of suicide is meant to evoke or suggest. Arguably, the condition 30 the poem purports to be aimed at—freedom—is itself the condition in 31 question. 32 For Locke, freedom can be taken away but not given. The contro- 33 versial fourth chapter of the Second Treatise, “Of Slavery,” posits that 34 enslavement is justifiable when one deserves to have his freedom taken 35 away. Locke does not indicate whether or how it can ever be attained 36 again. Enslavement as a form of retributive punishment suggests that 37 the removal of one’s freedom (which everyone implicitly has in the 38 state of nature) creates a permanent condition of living death. And it 39 is only here, as we have seen, that Locke condones suicide, reasoning 40 that although the free individual does not possess the right to take his 41 own life, an enslaved person may choose to do so. But if enslavement 42 Liberty and Death 35

suggests that the lack of freedom is tantamount to a kind of death, 1 how do we categorize the actual death of someone who is considered, 2 in this society, already dead? More precisely, as Sharon Patricia Holland 3 asks, “When ‘living’ is something to be achieved and not experienced, 4 and figurative and literal death are very much a part of the social land- 5 scape, how do people of color gain a sense of empowerment?”42 In The 6 Dying Negro, an enslaved African must kill himself to claim a form of 7 power. By replacing Somerset’s release (what, in Wood’s terms, can be 8 understood as a bestowal of the “horrible gift of freedom”43) with the 9 narrator’s decision to demonstrate self-ownership by dying, the poem 10 raises a question it is not equipped to answer: what or who gets to 11 define the interrelated conditions of life and/as freedom? 12 Although it opens on an ostensibly Christian note, by immediately 13 turning to the paradoxical condition of freedom, The Dying Negro 14 divorces from the issue of suicide its Christian prohibitions and instead 15 turns suicide into a tool that may be used even by Christians to combat 16 social evils far greater than the spiritual evil of self-murder. Later, this 17 becomes the poem’s explicit argument. In this sense, the poem follows 18 a long tradition of drawing on rhetoric associated with Christianity to 19 argue against institutions of enslavement. Seymour Drescher locates this 20 strategy in European thought going as far back as the Middle Ages, when 21 rural peasants “grounded their claims to liberation in Christian teachings 22 and general assertions of human dignity, liberty, and equality . . . Christ’s 23 sacrifice did not just free humanity from original sin but restored it to its 24 original liberty.”44 In a similar vein, the poem concludes with an exten- 25 sive indictment of the hypocrisy of Christian “morality” in perpetuating 26 institutionalized enslavement. The long final stanza begins: 27 28 Thou Christian God, to whom so late I bow’d, 29 To whom my soul its fond allegiance vow’d, 30 When crimes like these thy injur’d pow’r prophane, 31 O God of Nature! Art thou sall’d in vain?45 32 33 The speaker appeals directly to Christ, asking, “Did’st thou for this 34 sustain a mortal wound?”46 In the background here there is perhaps some 35 parallel between the speaker and Christ, who, in early Christianity, was 36 sometimes considered a suicide.47 Day and Bicknell do not go so far as 37 to make this parallel explicit, though their poem does hearken back to 38 eighteenth-century conventions of black martyrdom. 39 In her expansive work on the subject, Celeste-Marie Bernier has 40 demonstrated how African and Afrodiasporic peoples “have been 41 42 36 DEATH RIGHTS

1 conceptualized solely as either barbaric fiends in an array of pro-slavery 2 atrocity literatures or as sacrificial martyrs in didactic, seemingly 3 redemptive antislavery tracts.”48 The Dying Negro propagates both 4 stereotypes. By disseminating antiblack stereotypes, even from within 5 a framework ostensibly interested in challenging them, the poem 6 assumes the paternalistic position of “proving” or “redeeming” Afri- 7 cans’ humanity. Yet where it moves to humanize the speaker, the poem 8 cannot help but reduce him to a less-civilized counterpart to “Man.” 9 For example, much of the middle of the poem depicts the original 10 enslavement of West Africans. The authors’ footnotes tell us that these 11 depictions are based on a European travelogue: Michel Adanson’s A 12 Voyage to Senegal (1759). The speaker recalls how his people (who may 13 or may not have been Senegalese) bestowed “gifts” on the colonizers, 14 rendering the “last, sad gift” of the opening especially poignant by 15 recalling the paradox of the “gift of freedom” in the last place where 16 he was physically free. He then describes how European traders tricked 17 his people onto slave ships, foreclosing further consideration of African 18 agency. The language of detainment here hearkens to the Somerset 19 trial, which was likewise only superficially invested in the person- 20 hood and humanity of the black subject at its center. In the absence of 21 human recourse or agency, the speaker turns to the divine. Prefiguring 22 the manner in which he will rebuff Christianity later in the poem, in 23 an anticlimactic narrative of becoming, the speaker denounces African 24 deities who did not come to save him: “No power descended to assist 25 the brave, / No lightning flashed, and I became a slave.”49 26 Shortly thereafter, Day and Bicknell divorce the speaker from any 27 claims to martyrdom in the Christian sense. The Dying Negro calls up 28 Christianity in order to emphasize its ethical incoherence in a society 29 that profits from enslaving others. Thus, even as the speaker’s regular 30 reminders that he, too, is a Christian may be strategic moves toward 31 establishing common ground with the poem’s intended readers, they 32 simultaneously serve the opposite function of distinguishing him from 33 his audience and calling the entire institution of Christianity into 34 question:50 35 36 On thee I call’d with reverential awe, 37 Ador’d thy wisdom, and embrac’d thy law; 38 Yet mark thy destin’d convert as he lies, 39 His groans of anguish, and his livid eyes, 40 These galling chains, polluted with his blood, 41 Then bid his tongue proclaim thee just and good!51 42 Liberty and Death 37

God’s power, he argues here, is either “too weak”52 to spare him the 1 sufferings of enslavement, or this God simply doesn’t care. Relinquishing 2 the possibility of Christian salvation, the speaker turns, finally, to 3 revenge—if not against Christianity itself, then at least against its adher- 4 ents, the perpetrators of his suffering. The speaker’s revenge will come 5 through the power of sympathy to affect Christian readers, in whom he 6 expects suicide will elicit intense moral outrage: 7 8 And may these fiends, who now exulting view 9 The horrors of my fortune, feel them too! 10 Be theirs the torment of a ling’ring fate, 11 Slow as thy justice, dreadful as my hate, 12 Condemn’d to grasp the riven plank in vain, 13 And chac’d by all the monsters of the main, 14 And while they spread their sinking arms to thee, 15 Then let their fainting souls remember me!53 16 17 As he moves toward his conclusion, it is clear that this poem is less inter- 18 ested in sympathy than it is in guilt and shame—emotions commonly 19 associated with suicide but that are here linked to those upholding the 20 system of enslavement. In his final plea that his death be remembered, 21 readers are made to focus not on his suicide but on the conditions that 22 drove him to it and to find those conditions, rather than the act of 23 suicide, deplorable and outrageous. 24 The moral strategy here is convoluted at best. Having rejected Chris- 25 tianity because of its inability to recognize the suffering of enslaved 26 people, the speaker nevertheless imagines that his captors and implied 27 readers will be moved to sympathy by his death and that the negative 28 emotions elicited by his suicide will be his revenge. But why should the 29 speaker believe that his captors will care about his suicide? Here, the 30 poem reveals itself to be primarily interested in the social conditions 31 that define its intended Anglo-European readership rather than the 32 freedom of enslaved Africans. By beginning and ending with the Chris- 33 tian prohibition against suicide, Day and Bicknell emphasize that this 34 is a poem about subverting rhetorical and conceptual norms, including 35 those on which readers assume their society is built. Where Christianity 36 is expected to be opposed to suicide, within the logic of the poem, suicide 37 emerges as the only reasonable option. And as the poem moves away from 38 religious restrictions against voluntary death, it makes apparent deeper 39 paradoxes at the core of liberal modernity. Thus, beyond circumventing 40 Christian stigma in drawing a parallel between suicide and habeas corpus 41 42 38 DEATH RIGHTS

1 (and with it, liberal political categories and ideologies more broadly), 2 The Dying Negro makes an important political intervention: by alter- 3 nately referring to the decision to die as a blessing, a gift, a power, and a 4 weapon, the poem suggests an inherent tension in western conceptions 5 of freedom. As Wood has asked, once freedom is taken away, who gets 6 to restore it? Or, who finally “owns” freedom? 7 Though Day and Bicknell claim an antislavery ethos, The Dying Negro 8 cannot get past paradoxes laden within the liberal principles it engages 9 to bolster its cause. The trope of the “suicidal slave” raises far more ques- 10 tions than the poem can reasonably answer about the foundations of 11 modern political and legal institutions. And precisely because of its ubiq- 12 uity in European and American discourses of abolition, it behooves us to 13 remember that this trope has never been a beacon of black liberation.54 14 As Wilderson rightly explains, “the circulation of Blackness as metaphor 15 and image at the most politically volatile and progressive moments in 16 history (e.g., the French, English, and American revolutions) produces 17 dreams of liberation which are more inessential to and more parasitic on 18 the Black, and more emphatic in their guarantee of Black suffering, than 19 any dream of human liberation in any era heretofore.”55 In The Dying 20 Negro, the parasitism of white freedom dreams at the expense of black 21 liberation is particularly visible at the level of form: the relatively obscure 22 form of the suicide note in verse. Juxtaposing the legal and philosophical 23 foundations of habeas corpus with the idea of suicide, Day and Bicknell 24 call into question the right to own one’s body, the right to own and sell 25 other people’s bodies, and whether self-possession constitutes the right to 26 do what one pleases with either. By engaging a literary form that presup- 27 poses the speaker’s death, Day and Bicknell circumvent the black subject 28 ostensibly at the center of their interrogation. 29 30 The Suicide Note and the Poetics of Personhood 31 32 The issue of personhood emerges not only in the poem’s abolitionist 33 politics and engagement with contemporary legal questions but also 34 at the level of form. It is important, first of all, to acknowledge the 35 rhetorical distinctiveness of the suicide note as an anticipatory account 36 of one’s own death. In terms of genre, it exists at the intersection of, at 37 least, autobiography, epistle, confession, and apologia. It also draws on 38 a then-popular print form. In the mid-eighteenth century, newspapers 39 began to publish suicide notes—first real ones and, when these proved 40 to be popular reading, fictional ones sometimes presented as real. Public 41 consumption of the suicide note reached its peak in the 1770s, the same 42 Liberty and Death 39

decade as the first three printings of The Dying Negro (1773–1775) and 1 declined sharply after 1779. Michael MacDonald has posited that this 2 fad was reflective of a larger cultural shift toward increasingly tolerant, 3 secular attitudes toward suicide.56 Eric Parisot has gone a step further, 4 suggesting that the publication of suicide notes also made visible the 5 limits of morality in literary sensibility and sentimentalism. Parisot 6 argues that the suffering suggested by suicide notes gave readers the 7 occasion to “test their own capacity to feel and . . . to provoke substantive 8 moral response” and that in so doing, suicide notes “reinforce[d] patterns 9 of social dysfunction.”57 Insofar as the culture of sensibility enabled 10 readers’ self-congratulatory postures of sympathy toward evils of their 11 own making, Parisot understands published suicide notes as “uncom- 12 fortably public notices where the failures of society are writ large.”58 13 In this sense, Day and Bicknell’s choice of form buttresses the tenu- 14 ousness of their political strategy. Among the first explicitly abolitionist 15 poems in English, The Dying Negro is widely considered to be a proto- 16 typical example of the problem of engaging sentimental strategies for 17 political ends. As Parisot argues, political sentimentalism encourages 18 readers to assert themselves as moral individuals without effecting any 19 real ethic of care toward others. Thus, sentimental texts can, and often 20 do, enable a self-involved myopia that masquerades as outward-looking 21 concern for others while excusing a culture of unexamined bigotry.59 22 Saidiya Hartman offers arguably the definitive explication of how 23 sentimental strategies in abolitionist writing subsume the agency of 24 the person or group positioned as the object of the sentimental stance. 25 Recalling the white abolitionist John Rankin’s attempts to express 26 the atrocities of the institution by imaginatively describing himself 27 in the position of enslaved people being whipped, Hartman contends 28 that Rankin does more to reveal his own ideas about torture than he 29 does to enable readers to understand those who actually are tortured: 30 “by virtue of this substitution the object of identification threatens to 31 disappear. . . . [I]n making the other’s suffering one’s own, this suffering 32 is occluded by the other’s obliteration.”60 This projection of the self 33 onto the other “fails to expand the space of the other but merely places 34 the self in its stead.”61 By writing in the voice of an enslaved person, 35 Day and Bicknell likewise assume that their subject’s suffering can 36 be “known” through the imaginations of free white men and women. 37 Without denying that the effort to voice others can be understood as 38 a complex and daring act toward knowing, in this context, that act 39 renders dispensable the lives, experiences, and voices of the very people 40 it ostensibly means to liberate. 41 42 40 DEATH RIGHTS

1 Much has been made of the interracial love story as the rhetorical 2 vehicle for the poem’s intended sentimental effect on its implicitly white 3 readership. If the speaker’s bride is understood to function as a proxy 4 for English readers, the speaker’s declarations of love for her, as well 5 as his memory of her love for him, are meant to engender some degree 6 of sympathy for the speaker among Day and Bicknell’s readers. Lynn 7 Festa argues that the speaker’s appeals to his white lover’s compassion 8 “reanimate the speaker from the social death of slavery” in the minds of 9 English readers who, in consuming his final words, issue him a kind of 10 “afterlife.”62 Such a reading captures the rhetorical function of racialized 11 sentimentalism in the era’s abolitionist discourses. However, centering the 12 interracial love story deflects from the poem’s engagement of the cultural 13 and religious politics of suicide. Indeed, the suggestion that the speaker 14 is given an “afterlife” in readers’ minds effectively undermines the impact 15 of his final act, thereby leaving his blackness, rather than his death, as 16 the apparent object of readers’ sympathies. In this way, too, his “afterlife” 17 circumvents the ethnoreligious politics that the poem brings forward. As 18 we have already seen, the speaker argues that the horrors of enslavement are 19 so un-Christian that suicide is a more forgivable sin than the ones perpe- 20 trated by those who profit from slavery. By aligning the reader with the 21 position either of the speaker or his bride (in the absence of whose voice 22 we assume her agreement), the poem seems to argue the same thing.63 23 What goes largely unaccounted for are the diverse religious and 24 cultural beliefs that actually informed many enslaved African-identified 25 people’s decisions to kill themselves. Even accepting that the discourse 26 of Christianity is part of the poem’s political appeal to white readers, in 27 its overwhelming emphasis on the speaker’s relationship to Christianity 28 (both in positive and negative terms), The Dying Negro reveals its inability 29 to fully imagine the subject it wants to represent. Terri L. Snyder has 30 shown that attitudes toward suicide differed substantially among West 31 African peoples. The Yoruba and Ashanti saw it as acceptable and even 32 commendable in certain circumstances, while other nations condemned 33 or weaponized it as a form of punishment. Snyder theorizes that the 34 brutal realities of enslavement “may have rendered suicide both more 35 easily imaginable and more acceptable for forcibly transported Africans 36 regardless of their origins.”64 Europeans, however, saw African peoples’ 37 suicides within a homogenizing framework of “racial character,” as we see 38 in the following firsthand account by a crew member on a slave ship:65 39 “In the barracoons, it was known that if a Negro was not amused and 40 kept in motion, he would mope, squat down with his chin on his knees 41 and arms clasped about his legs and in a very short time, die. Among 42 Liberty and Death 41

the civilized races it is thought impossible to hold one’s breath until 1 death follows. It is thought that the African can do so.”66 The speaker 2 of this passage claims that Africans kill themselves through a method 3 that seems impossible or inaccessible to Europeans. This sailor’s sense of 4 distance from the method he is describing underscores the vast cultural 5 and conceptual distance between how acts of suicide were understood by 6 enslaved peoples and how they were represented by European observers. 7 One widely circulated explanation for why enslaved people killed 8 themselves was the idea of transmigration, or the notion that the soul 9 or spirit of the dead would be returned to the community into which 10 the person had been born—a belief held by some African cultures. A 11 1791 British House of Commons report notes that enslaved Africans felt 12 “such an aversion to leaving their native places that they threw themselves 13 overboard, on an idea that they should go back to their own country.”67 14 Snyder suggests that transmigration took hold among Europeans as a 15 popular explanation for voluntary death among enslaved Africans because 16 it rendered the act of suicide a function of cultural or racial difference 17 rather than unlivable conditions of Europeans’ making. With the publi- 18 cation of The Dying Negro, Day and Bicknell further transformed an 19 already whitewashed set of ideas about African peoples’ relationship to 20 suicide by reframing it in political terms. While The Dying Negro was 21 not the first text to misapprehend and misrepresent enslaved people’s 22 cultures and experiences, in popularizing the sentimental trope of the 23 “suicidal slave” and couching it in explicitly antislavery terms (which 24 earlier texts, such as Behn’s Oroonoko, did not do), the poem was instru- 25 mental in popularizing a particular trope of black suffering ameliorated 26 by freedom in death. This trope compromises, even as it appears to facili- 27 tate, the capacity of well-meaning white people to recognize the prospect 28 of black freedom as on par with their own.68 In this way, it also main- 29 tains blackness as a politico-ontological impossibility within the world 30 it claims to want to bring into being, perhaps illuminating but never 31 challenging liberal modernity’s inability to make space for black life on 32 its own terms. 33 That inability becomes acutely visible in Day and Bicknell’s choice 34 of form. That The Dying Negro is written as a suicide note aligns it 35 with the aesthetic and political work of another kind of death note 36 popular in the eighteenth century: the epitaph.69 Like the suicide note, 37 the epitaph reflects a culture’s understanding of its ideological assump- 38 tions, interests, and commitments. Barbara Johnson has suggested that 39 key rhetorical features of poetic epitaphs—anthropomorphism/person- 40 ification (the act of conferring human attributes onto a nonhuman 41 42 42 DEATH RIGHTS

1 entity) and prosopopoeia/apostrophe (an address to an absent or dead 2 person)—also inform the legal construction of personhood. In positing 3 a relationship between a lyric person (“emotive, subjective, individual”) 4 and a legal person (“rational, rights-bearing, institutional”), Johnson 5 argues that the two illuminate each other such that these seemingly unre- 6 lated categories are, in fact, complementary structures through which 7 personhood is negotiated and understood.70 If we take seriously Johnson’s 8 claim that “lyric and law are the fault lines along which ‘personhood’ is 9 structured,” then Day and Bicknell’s suicide note in verse can be read as 10 a formal interrogation of the racialized limitations of legal personhood 11 within the bounds of liberal modernity’s general enterprise of freedom.71 12 The Dying Negro answers in the affirmative Johnson’s question of 13 “whether there is a relation between the ‘first person’ (the grammatical 14 ‘I’) and the ‘constitutional person’ (the subject of rights).”72 However, 15 unlike the epitaph, through which Johnson draws her analysis, the suicide 16 note in verse reverses the ontological position implied by legal and literary 17 logics wherein personhood is negotiated on the related sites of anthro- 18 pomorphism and apostrophe. That is, both anthropomorphism and 19 apostrophe—and by extension, the epitaph—rely on positive relations to 20 aspects of personhood (and it is worth emphasizing that these aspects are 21 implicitly forged in positive relation to whiteness). Anthropomorphism 22 calls up or imposes “humanness” onto something nonhuman, while apos- 23 trophe makes live and implicitly present something or someone otherwise 24 absent or dead. Both shift absence into presence, death into life, nonbeing 25 into being. Suicide does precisely the opposite. The suicide note in verse, 26 then, poses a special kind of interpretive challenge. What are we to make 27 of the subjectivity and temporality of a lyric “I” whose very purpose in 28 coming into being is to herald its self-destruction? Moreover, how do we 29 read a poem that announces itself as an affirmation of black life but can 30 only see itself as achieving that affirmation by ventriloquizing (and thus 31 whitewashing) an African-identified person’s decision to die? These ques- 32 tions can only be addressed by reading against the grain of liberalism’s 33 relation to whiteness and social “life.” 34 35 Life After (Social) Death 36 37 The Dying Negro epitomizes what Moten calls the “elaboration of black- 38 ness as death-bound emanation,” which is “determined by incapacity or 39 refusal to think blackness as if it were neither bound by nor originated 40 in the white/nonwhite binary.”73 This association—between blackness 41 as “other” to whiteness, inhabiting a structural position of “death” to 42 Liberty and Death 43

whiteness as “life”—has strongly informed the study of transatlantic 1 slavery since (at least) Orlando Patterson’s 1982 study, Slavery and Social 2 Death, which names the condition of enslavement as fundamentally 3 and unchangeably exterior to those forms of social life that civil society 4 affords its subjects. Recently, social death has been criticized as an overly 5 simplistic abstraction that ignores the inner and interpersonal lives of 6 enslaved people and precludes considerations of black agency. As Vincent 7 Brown puts it, “Social death, so well suited to the tragic perspective, 8 stands in for the experience of enslavement.”74 While Brown and others 9 mean this critique in terms of how some contemporary scholars treat 10 the subject (and subjects) of transatlantic slavery, the same associations 11 are to be found in centuries of well-intentioned antislavery arguments. 12 The Dying Negro is one such text. Capitalizing as it does on the romance 13 of the speaker’s tragedy, it cannot see beyond its antiblack foundations. 14 Cleaved of personhood, separated from his love, and trafficked as a 15 commodity, the poem’s speaker is, in Patterson’s terms, socially dead. The 16 fact that the poem takes the form of a suicide note compounds this point 17 by indicating to readers that by the time they read his words, he is also 18 literally dead. Moreover, by choosing to kill himself, the speaker marks 19 himself as a particular kind of social outcast. In life, he is forbidden “the 20 rights of man to claim,” but one right remains inalienable to him, “The 21 gloomy privilege to die,” because, as he reminds his captors, “Not beyond 22 the grave, / Thy power extends.”75 As he looks at the ocean that will 23 be his final resting place, the speaker notes a “vast watry barrier, ‘twixt 24 thy world and me.”76 He sees death as a way to freedom because it is the 25 only way he can remove himself—that singular “me” whose assonance 26 rings out into the emptiness at the end of the line—from a society that 27 renders him “a thing without a name.”77 But the act of suicide doesn’t just 28 take him out of society; it erases his whole existence, ensuring that “no 29 pageant wreaths [will] deck an outcast’s tomb” and no epitaph will “mark 30 the friendless victim of despair.”78 Thus, although the poem presents the 31 speaker as freed from bondage, it leaves an uneasy reconciliation between 32 the struggle for freedom and the implications of achieving it by dying.79 33 If the speaker’s suicide signifies his capacity to reason through a 34 kind of self-ownership, the poem serves as a plea for the recognition 35 of these capacities in all enslaved people of African descent. A key 36 question raised by the poem, then, is how to bring an entire group of 37 people to (social) life from (social) death. There is no space here to 38 consider that the question itself is part of the system that condemns 39 African-identified people to death, social and otherwise, in the first 40 place. Moreover—or perhaps as a result of this first evasion—The Dying 41 42 44 DEATH RIGHTS

1 Negro cannot conceive of the possibility that social death within the 2 terms of liberal modernity does not preclude other forms of social 3 life. As Jared Sexton puts it, “Black social life does not negate black 4 social death by vitalizing it. A living death is a much a death as it is 5 a living.”80 Day and Bicknell assume that social life—those forms of 6 legibility established by liberalism’s schedules of rights and liberties— 7 is the categorical opposite of social death and, moreover, that social 8 life so defined must be everyone’s goal. And yet, per Sexton, “Black 9 life is not lived in the world that the world lives in . . . black life is not 10 social . . . black life is lived in social death.”81 11 Weheliye comes to this point another way. In contradistinction to 12 habeas corpus and its attendant implications about personhood, prop- 13 erty, and the body, Weheliye invents the term habeas viscus to account 14 for “the existence of alternative modes of life alongside the violence, 15 subjection, exploitation, and racialization” that underwrite liberal 16 modernity.82 Moving from “you shall have the body” to “you shall 17 have the flesh,” habeas viscus draws on Hortense Spillers’s foundational 18 argument that the systematic denial of the black body in (the afterlife 19 of) the era of transatlantic slavery produces a distinct ontological cate- 20 gory, the flesh.83 The abolitionist trope of the “suicidal slave” assumes 21 a desire to be recognized as a liberal subject—to be transformed from 22 flesh to body. But the flesh offers alternative modalities of thinking 23 and being. Habeas viscus exemplifies how those excluded from liberal 24 modernity’s sociopolitical constructs find modes of asserting them- 25 selves and acknowledging one another as full human beings. Crucially, 26 this occurs independently of liberalism’s social logics, and it always has: 27 as Holland has suggested, “Spillers’s idea of the flesh as ‘primary narra- 28 tive’ places ‘the body’ in the context of captive . . . and leaves ‘the flesh’ 29 in the place where ‘self’ resides.”84 To acknowledge the primacy of the 30 flesh is, for Weheliye, to authorize an epistemology that “sets the stage 31 for a general theory of humanity, and not its particular exception.”85 32 The Dying Negro offers no such alternatives, just as it cannot conceive 33 of the possibility that some people might not want to participate in 34 those systems that liberal modernity delimits and upholds as part of 35 social life. The Dying Negro turns on a belief that liberalism can be 36 a route to freedom. And thus, it exemplifies how liberal modernity’s 37 hostility toward blackness is maintained, in part, through the belief 38 and expectation that the state can be reformed to make room for those 39 it has historically excluded. 40 Following The Dying Negro, a staggering number of texts engaged 41 suicide to signal rational self-assertion through a kind of ownership 42 Liberty and Death 45 of one’s body: its self-imposed destruction. Suicide—particularly the 1 suicide of an enslaved person—was widely engaged in efforts to disrupt 2 hegemonic notions of the relationship between self-ownership, the 3 body, and personhood. However, as the remainder of this book will 4 show, even as it calls on the logic of liberal individualism to demon- 5 strate enslaved people’s capacity to reason, the ennobled figure of the 6 “suicidal slave” utterly fails at creating for African-identified people a 7 framework in which to actually live as free subjects. Moreover, recog- 8 nizing that this trope emerged in the same decade as Chatterton’s death 9 and the publication of The Sorrows of Young Werther calls on us to 10 ask whether romanticism’s interests in suicide can be divorced from 11 contemporaneous (re)considerations of liberalism through suicide. 12 By recasting The Dying Negro as a poem about paradoxes inherent in 13 the political structures and social logics of liberal modernity, Day and 14 Bicknell use the story of one enslaved man’s suicide to interrogate the 15 more general enterprise of freedom as predicated on legal definitions 16 and recognitions of personhood. If romantic literatures did not simply 17 forget the political questions associated with suicide, then what are 18 we to make of the continued distinction of white male suicides like 19 Werther and Chatterton and not their racialized counterparts? One 20 option is to recognize the romantic fetishization of suicide as an obfus- 21 cation of social realities that political narratives about suicide help to 22 reveal but that liberalism is fundamentally unequipped to address. 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

1 2 Chapter 2 3 4 5 Chained to Life and Misery 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 I cannot tell why, but death, under every form, appears to me like 15 something getting free to expand in I know not what element. . . . My 16 thoughts darted from earth to heaven, and I asked myself why I was 17 chained to life and its misery. 18 —Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters Written during a 19 Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark 20 21 22 My heart throbbed with grief and terror so violently, that I pressed 23 my hands quite tightly across my breast, but I could not keep it still, 24 and it continued to leap as though it would burst out of my body. 25 But who cared for that? Did one of the many by-standers, who were 26 looking at us so carelessly, think of the pain that wrung the hearts 27 of the negro woman and her young ones? No, no! They were not all 28 bad, I dare say, but slavery hardens white people’s hearts towards 29 the blacks. 30 —Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave 31 32 33 n the preceding chapter, we saw the black male body imaginatively 34 Isacrificed to a tenuous ideal of freedom. This chapter traces the even 35 more troubling fates of black women’s bodies in the liberal imagination. 36 Where The Dying Negro presents suicide as a path (albeit a paradoxical 37 one) toward legibility for black men, the texts examined here suggest 38 that when black women kill themselves, they remain illegible as candi- 39 dates for inclusion in liberal society. Stories of suicidal black women 40 abound at the turn of the nineteenth century, particularly in literary 41 42 47 48 DEATH RIGHTS

1 works by white women writers. Where these have sometimes been 2 read as signaling white women’s recognition of collective struggle “as 3 women,” in point of fact, the trope of suicide as a path to freedom for 4 black women is incompatible with white women’s efforts to establish 5 their own politico-ontological being in the world of “Man.” Whether 6 intentionally or as a function of liberalism’s grounding in ideologies 7 of dialectical differentiation, white women’s representations of black 8 women who kill themselves reveal not what women share across racial 9 divides but what white women share with those already recognized as 10 bearers of liberal rights and freedoms: whiteness. While this chapter 11 will emphasize representations of suicidal black women, as I indicate 12 toward the end, the same logic is also applied to women of other origins, 13 effectively creating distance between all nonwhite women and the rights 14 and freedoms sought by white women at the turn of the nineteenth 15 century. Building on a robust body of feminist scholarship on roman- 16 ticism’s suicidal women, this chapter foregrounds the largely overlooked 17 role of race in the era’s gendered discourses of feeling. 18 Most scholarship on suicide in nineteenth-century British literature 19 has focused on gender politics.1 As Margaret Higonnet first noted, 20 women writers drew from the era’s liberal political discourses to raise 21 questions about rational self-destruction and self-assertion, democracy, 22 and a woman’s right to own and control her body through the trope of 23 suicide. Drawing on the popularity of abolitionist texts like The Dying 24 Negro, white women writers drew comparisons between enslavement 25 and marriage as, legally speaking, comparable forms of oppression. In 26 so doing, they put pressure on the laws of coverture under which, in 27 the words of William Blackstone, “husband and wife are one person in 28 law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended 29 during the marriage, or at least incorporated and consolidated into 30 that of the husband.”2 In these terms, Kelly McGuire has shown how 31 the suicides of white women were read as tantamount to destruction 32 of property, while Michelle Faubert has discussed the ubiquity of the 33 marriage-enslavement analogy as part of liberal feminism’s intellectual 34 debt to writing by formerly enslaved people.3 Yet even where these and 35 other scholars acknowledge that white women conjured narratives of 36 enslaved and dispossessed people as proxies for discussing their own 37 oppressions, race remains subordinate to gender as a category of anal- 38 ysis in the literary history of suicide at the turn of the nineteenth 39 century. Racist tropes are overlooked in favor of reading death as a 40 democratic equalizer, or they are brushed aside as presentist concerns 41 42 Chained to Life and Misery 49

that are irrelevant to the study of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century 1 texts. Only Tricia Lootens has seriously addressed these elisions, and 2 she rightly notes that the conversation about white women’s discursive 3 appropriations of other forms and experiences of oppression is old hat 4 in disciplines with which nineteenth-century British literary studies has 5 not historically engaged. Where “the convergence of African American 6 literary studies with studies of nineteenth-century British literature may 7 feel like the overcoming of reticence maintained over generations,” this 8 is really only true from a British literary studies perspective. African 9 American literary studies has grappled for decades with the role played 10 by Anglo-European texts and contexts in the racialized construction of 11 modern gender categories.4 British literary studies is thus long overdue 12 for an honest reckoning such as the one begun in Lootens’s The Polit- 13 ical Poetess and, I hope, continued here. 14 Taking as central the ethical and political implications of white 15 women’s engagement with discourses of enslavement and disposses- 16 sion in early feminist writing about suicide, this chapter considers how 17 liberal calls for gender parity were also, in many cases, arguments against 18 racial parity. White women writers from across the political spectrum 19 drew on racialized discourses associated with suicide in service to 20 fantasies of gender parity grounded not only in white supremacy but 21 also, paradoxically, in patriarchy. In texts by Mary Robinson and Claire 22 de Duras, sentimental depictions of black women who choose to die 23 bring the already fraught politics of what we might today call postures 24 of cross-racial solidarity to bear on liberal debates about the rights 25 of white women. Felicia Hemans extends this to nonblack women 26 of color. Drawing on Mary Wollstonecraft’s foundational critique of 27 sensibility—which was, for many years after her death, inextricable 28 from her own vexed association with the topic of suicide—the writers 29 discussed here align nonwhite women with excess feelings that lead 30 to suicide, even as they work to distance their own political interests 31 from those same emotions. The chapter concludes with a reading of the 32 autobiography of a formerly enslaved woman, Mattie J. Jackson, whose 33 extraordinary narrative was published in the United States in 1866. The 34 Story of Mattie J. Jackson unequivocally refuses these tropes and works 35 to define womanhood beyond the bounds of whiteness. The spatio- 36 temporal leap from early nineteenth-century Britain to the postbellum 37 United States underscores the transatlantic reach of these tropes, while 38 the chapter as a whole endeavors to confront their continued manifes- 39 tation in some feminist discourses even today. 40 41 42 50 DEATH RIGHTS

1 Foundations: Mary Wollstonecraft, Suicide, 2 and the Critique of Sensibility 3 4 Mary Wollstonecraft is easily one of the most important figures in the 5 literary history of suicide. The tension in her legacy between suicide 6 (as, alternately, an act of passion or one of rational resistance to patriar- 7 chal oppression) and sensibility (as a tool of that oppression) established 8 the terms by which many subsequent thinkers would write about both 9 suicide and gender liberation. In her writing, suicide functioned “to 10 protest women’s lack of control over their own destinies.”5 Her emphasis 11 on suicide as a trope of rational feminist protest was sharply undercut 12 by William Godwin’s 1798 Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of 13 the Rights of Woman, which revealed details of Wollstonecraft’s love 14 affairs and actual suicide attempts. Godwin’s misguided representa- 15 tion of Wollstonecraft as a “female Werther” called into question her 16 efforts to liberate middle-class white women from what she saw as 17 their indoctrination by the culture of sensibility, and this negatively 18 impacted her reputation until well into the twentieth century.6 Even 19 so, Wollstonecraft had firmly established both suicide and sensibility as 20 key sites through which others would continue to negotiate moderni- 21 ty’s social hierarchies. Building on her work, subsequent thinkers drew 22 clear divisions between arguments for gender, class, and racial parity. 23 Reading the relationship between suicide and sensibility through later 24 nineteenth-century writers thus exposes cracks in liberal feminism’s 25 foundations that are considerably harder to reconcile than the revela- 26 tion that its “founding mother” was a complex woman. 27 In Wollstonecraft’s writing, “sensibility” signifies “cultivated emotion 28 or the capacity for it.”7 The culture of sensibility, she argues, teaches 29 middle-class white women to nurture their emotions at the expense of 30 their capacity to reason in order to mold them into frivolous beings and 31 sexual objects. One of her chief aims in A Vindication of the Rights of 32 Woman is “to convince [women] that the soft phrases, susceptibility of 33 heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synon- 34 ymous with epithets of weakness, and that those beings who are only 35 the objects of pity and that kind of love . . . will soon become objects of 36 contempt.”8 She advocates transforming these women’s educations to culti- 37 vate reason as a counterpoint to sensibility, which she argues traps women 38 in states of “perpetual childhood” and “slavish dependence” on men.9 39 Wollstonecraft’s unfinished final novel, The Wrongs of Woman, or 40 Maria, stages a confrontation between sensibility and rationality in 41 42 Chained to Life and Misery 51

the figures of its eponymous protagonist—a bourgeois white woman 1 who embodies what Wollstonecraft, in the Vindication, describes as 2 “unnatural delicacy of feeling”—and Jemima, a working-class woman 3 who offsets Maria’s unhinged sensibility with what the narrative pres- 4 ents as a near-excess of reason.10 Jemima undergirds Wollstonecraft’s 5 central point that sensibility is not the natural state of all women but a 6 tool used to control middle-class white women. Jemima lacks access to 7 the education that conditions Maria to indulge “that fire of the imagi- 8 nation, which produces active sensibility.”11 Instead, Jemima is aligned 9 with rationality, although as Janet Todd observes, her behavior does not 10 necessarily indicate that as a favorable alternative: “If excessive sensibility 11 without reason makes people romantic and vulnerable, excessive reason 12 without sensibility makes them coldly selfish.”12 The dynamic between 13 the two women rehearses Wollstonecraft’s call, in the Vindication, for 14 equilibrium as a step toward equality: “Let us endeavor to strengthen our 15 minds by reflection, till our heads become a balance for our hearts.”13 16 Maria is also significant in Wollstonecraft’s political thinking about 17 suicide. Although she died before she could finish the novel, Woll- 18 stonecraft drafted five possible endings, two of which frame suicide as 19 a reasonable response to the treatment of white women as property in 20 England’s social and legal codes. The most fully developed of the five 21 endings suggests that Wollstonecraft understood the importance of 22 attending to the intersection of gender and class, if not also race, in her 23 political vision. In this version, Maria, pregnant and abandoned by her 24 lover, swallows laudanum to end a lifetime of suffering at the hands of 25 men. Jemima finds her just in time and “restore[s her] to life.” The draft 26 concludes with Maria declaring, “The conflict is over! I will live for my 27 child!”14 This is the only ending in which Jemima, rather than Maria’s 28 erstwhile lover, Darnford, is central to the story’s resolution, and it is also 29 the only one that offers even a hint of future happiness. Wollstonecraft 30 emphasizes throughout the Vindication that her argument for educa- 31 tional reform is intended only for women of Maria’s social station. She 32 champions bourgeois white women’s rights in terms of the nation’s (and, 33 by extension, the empire’s) expectations that they will nurture the future 34 citizenry: “If children are to be educated to understand the true principle 35 of patriotism, their mother must be a patriot.”15 Jemima’s central role in 36 Maria, however, suggests a nascent critique of the class structures that 37 keep women in different social positions from relating to one another. 38 In the Vindication, Wollstonecraft casually brushes off the lower classes: 39 “though I consider that women in the common walks of life are called 40 41 42 52 DEATH RIGHTS

1 to fulfil the duties of wives and mothers . . . I cannot help lamenting that 2 women of a superior cast have not a road open by which they can pursue 3 more extensive plans of usefulness and independence.”16 The argument for 4 representation here is unambiguously an argument for the representation 5 of a larger portion of the middle class. In the hands of Wollstonecraft’s 6 “superior cast” of women, the call to “independence” is as much a call for 7 gender parity as it is an avowal of the consolidation of power in bourgeois 8 hands. Yet in the most complete version of Maria, the survival of the title 9 figure and her unborn child—and with them, England’s future—depends 10 on a servant. Following the Vindication’s logic that gender hierarchies are 11 constructed and thus open to interrogation, Jemima’s presence in Maria 12 suggests that ideologies naturalizing class difference may be challenged as 13 well. Todd ascribes Jemima’s extreme rationality to her class background, 14 positing that because she was forced to survive on her own from an early 15 age, she never had a chance to develop the capacity for sensibility.17 In this 16 way, the novel appears to suggest that social conditions, not nature, are 17 at the root of both men’s oppression of women and the class strata that 18 socially alienate women from one another. 19 While it is impossible to say definitively whether Wollstonecraft would 20 have pursued this nascent critique to its logical ends, or whether she might 21 have extended it to challenge other forms of inequality, I am inclined to 22 agree with Moira Ferguson’s assessment that it seems unlikely. Even as 23 Wollstonecraft was, according to Ferguson, “the first writer to raise issues 24 of colonial and gender relations so tellingly in tandem” by making analo- 25 gies between enslavement and white women’s oppressions, any potential 26 ethic of cross-racial sympathy is undercut by a “sociocultural myopia” that 27 flattens difference and subordinates all considerations of gender to an 28 implicitly white universal standard.18 This is on full display in the following 29 passage from the Vindication, in which Wollstonecraft excoriates a passage 30 from James Fordyce’s 1766 conduct book, Sermons to Young Women: 31 32 Is not the following portrait—the portrait of a house slave? “I am 33 astonished at the folly of many women, who are still reproaching their 34 husbands for leaving them alone, for preferring this or that company 35 to theirs, for treating them with this and the other mark of disre- 36 gard or indifference; when, to speak the truth, they have themselves 37 in a great measure to blame. Not that I would justify the men in any 38 thing wrong on their part. But had you behaved to them with more 39 respectful observance, and a more equal tenderness; studying their 40 humours, overlooking their mistakes, submitting to their opinions in 41 42 Chained to Life and Misery 53

matters indifferent, passing by little instances of unevenness, caprice, 1 or passion, giving soft answers to hasty words, complaining as seldom 2 as possible, and making it your daily care to relieve their anxieties and 3 prevent their wishes, to enliven the hour of dulness, and call up the 4 ideas of felicity: had you pursued this conduct, I doubt not but you 5 would have maintained and even increased their esteem, so far as to 6 have secured every degree of influence that could conduce to their 7 virtue, or your mutual satisfaction; and your house might at this day 8 have been the abode of domestic bliss.” Such a woman ought to be an 9 angel—or she is an ass—for I discern not a trace of the human char- 10 acter, neither reason nor passion in this domestic drudge, whose being 11 is absorbed in that of a tyrant’s.19 12 13 The rhetorical leap from domestic angel to “house slave” is a classic 14 example of what Lootens, extending the work of Elizabeth Spelman, 15 calls “‘changing the subject’ with a vengeance”—that is, invoking “terms 16 like freedom or slavery as if these could be fully detachable from histor- 17 ical corporeal referents.”20 By engaging rhetoric associated with racial 18 enslavement to describe paternalistic social expectations placed on bour- 19 geois white women, Wollstonecraft engenders a mode of forgetting about 20 the experiences of enslaved black women. Moreover, in framing the 21 scene of gendered frivolity within a comparison to an enslaved person, 22 her concluding judgment that the woman Fordyce describes has “not a 23 trace of the human character” takes on a distinctly racist overtone: the 24 “house slave” to whom this white woman is being pejoratively compared 25 is already assumed to be less than human. 26 The problem with such analogies, as Hazel V. Carby explains, is 27 that “the experience of black women does not enter the parameters 28 of parallelism. The fact that black women are subject to the simulta- 29 neous oppression of patriarchy, class and ‘race’ is the prime reason for 30 not employing parallels that render their position and experience not 31 only marginal but also invisible.”21 That Carby’s analysis is addressed to 32 contemporary readers highlights the endurance of these early patterns 33 and indicates the damage they continue to do to all women and to all 34 iterations of “feminism.” And while it’s true, as Faubert notes, that 35 progressive thinkers of Wollstonecraft’s era “did not have the benefit 36 of centuries of critical thinking based on rights-advocacy to gird their 37 discussions as we do today,” as scholars who choose the responsibility 38 of interpreting these figures now, we do have that benefit.22 Given the 39 ever-expanding breadth of womanist and feminist-of-color contributions 40 41 42 54 DEATH RIGHTS

1 to our knowledge of the British Empire, transatlantic enslavement, and 2 the social scripts of western modernity, it should no longer suffice to 3 suggest that scholars can look past racist logics because the authors we 4 write about were of a different time.23 Sara Ahmed reminds us that 5 “sexism and racism are reproduced by the techniques that justify the 6 reproduction. When [they] are dismissed, we are witnessing the defense 7 of the status quo: it is a way of saying, there is nothing wrong with this; 8 what is wrong is the judgment that there is something wrong.”24 Turning, 9 then, to the racialized legacy of Wollstonecraft’s critique of sensibility, 10 the sections that follow demonstrate that it is both possible and neces- 11 sary to attend to the interlocking relations between patriarchy and white 12 supremacy even though—or rather, precisely because—many of the texts 13 and authors we inherit from the past did not. 14 15 Racial Sensibility and the Bounds of “Woman” 16 in Mary Robinson and Claire de Duras 17 18 Mary Robinson’s 1799 Letter to the Women of England on the Injustice of 19 Mental Subordination echoes Wollstonecraft’s arguments against sensi- 20 bility. Referencing Wollstonecraft throughout, Robinson urges women 21 to “read, and profit, by the admonition of Reason . . . Be less the slaves of 22 vanity, and more the converts of Reflection.”25 Through interpretations 23 of well-known historical figures and Robinson’s own incisive reasoning, 24 the Letter unpacks the logical leaps and double standards that support 25 the idea that women are inferior to men. For example, Robinson lays 26 bare the absurdity in the notion that men, ostensibly “stronger-minded 27 creatures,” are said to “yield” to drunkenness while “woman resists its 28 power . . . because she is the weaker.”26 In similar fashion, she excoriates 29 the idea that women are inferior because they are physically weaker 30 against the expectation of physical labor in many aspects of domestic 31 work: “Why are women, in many parts of the kingdom, permitted to 32 follow the plough; to perform the laborious business of the dairy; to 33 work in our manufactories; to wash, to brew, and to bake . . . Are women 34 thus compelled to labour because they are of the weaker sex?”27 35 Moving beyond Wollstonecraft’s emphasis on the middle class, 36 Robinson appeals to women across class positions. However, as her title 37 indicates, she is only speaking to English women. Thus, even as she 38 raises the question of women’s labor, she does not consider those women 39 forced to do the most grueling physical work for the British Empire: 40 the enslaved. The text’s exclusionary racial politics are sometimes made 41 plain, as in Robinson’s comparison of the situation of English women to 42 Chained to Life and Misery 55

“those beyond the Ganges [where] wives are to be purchased like slaves, 1 and every man has as many as he pleases.”28 More often, however, they 2 emerge in her reliance on the twin discourses of liberalism and colo- 3 nialism, as in the following: “They [white women] will not be your slaves; 4 they will be your associates, your equals in the extensive scale of civilized 5 society; and in the indisputable rights of nature.”29 Robinson hinges 6 white women’s liberation on racial “others” against whom the suitability 7 to possess “the indisputable rights of nature” can be measured.30 This 8 comparison, then, advances white women’s—and only white women’s— 9 eligibility to be treated equally to those men already empowered “in the 10 extensive scale of civilized society.”31 In this way, her appeal for equality 11 between English men and women turns on maintaining white suprem- 12 acist racial hierarchies. 13 This logic is made even more explicit in Robinson’s revision of an early 14 periodical poem called “The Storm” into her better-known poem, “The 15 Negro Girl.” Both “The Storm,” published in London’s Morning Post and 16 Fashionable World in 1796, and “The Negro Girl,” which first appeared 17 in Robinson’s 1800 collection, Lyrical Tales, are sentimental narrative 18 poems about lovers torn apart as a direct result of Britain’s involvement 19 in the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans. In “The Storm,” the lovers 20 are William, a working-class crewmember on a slave ship wrecked by a 21 storm, and Nancy, who witnesses the disaster from the English coast and 22 decides to join the drowned William “in a WATRY GRAVE.”32 While 23 the trade in human beings is condemned, the focus of the condemnation 24 is its negative impact on the British working class. Robinson devotes two 25 of the poem’s ten stanzas to abolitionist-style expressions of sympathy 26 for enslaved Africans, and the storm is presented as cosmic retribution 27 for Britain’s participation in “the barb’rous toil.” However, the poem is 28 mainly interested in the trade’s fatal consequence for William and Nancy. 29 Nancy denounces the economic conditions that led to William’s employ- 30 ment on the ship; notably, however, she does not consider his agency in 31 accepting that work. She emphasizes distinctions between those “nurs’d 32 in lux’ry” who “sleep on beds of State” (i.e., those of the ruling class 33 who advocate for and control the laws governing the trade) from those 34 living in “Poverty and Woe” (i.e., those of the working class who carry 35 out the practices underwritten by those laws). When she does attend to 36 the fates of enslaved people, she does so only in the broadest terms: she 37 denounces the fate of “The SABLE Race” and “the ETHIOP” but makes 38 no mention of the actual people she presumably sees drowning alongside 39 William. The institution of slavery, then, is the backdrop against which 40 Nancy’s personal loss occurs. The target of the poem’s political scorn is 41 42 56 DEATH RIGHTS

1 its function as a source of conflict between the ruling class, which reaps 2 its rewards, and the working class that performs the tasks required to 3 maintain its daily operations. Thus, when the poem rails against the 4 trade, it is unclear—perhaps deliberately so—whether this is done in 5 support of the abolitionist cause as such or because, in a roundabout way, 6 Britain’s involvement with the institution of slavery endangers English 7 lives (signaled here by William’s death at sea and Nancy’s decision to kill 8 herself as a result). 9 In its later iteration as “The Negro Girl,” the poem more directly 10 condemns the institution of slavery. Between 1796 and 1800, Robinson 11 more than doubled the length of the poem and made several key alter- 12 ations to stanzas reproduced from “The Storm.” Chief among these 13 revisions, Robinson moves the setting to the African coast and rewrites 14 the lovers as Draco, an enslaved man on a ship bound for the Americas, 15 and Zelma, his lover who is left behind to serve a white man in Africa. 16 The main story elements—the storm that claims the lives of all on the 17 ship and the lover who sees it happen and decides to kill herself—remain 18 the same. Shelley Jones considers Robinson’s revision an act of “equal- 19 izing her characters” and “an indictment of imperialism” that underscores 20 “the commonality of the experience between the colonizer and the colo- 21 nized: that the slave trade is fatal for Britain as well as Africa.”33 Along 22 similar lines, Margaret Higonnet reads “the mutual figuration of race 23 and gender” as part of the poem’s utopian erasure of difference in the 24 “democratic” state of death.34 Perhaps. But considered within the terms 25 established by Robinson’s Letter, Zelma is aligned with precisely those 26 qualities that Robinson seeks to denaturalize in cultural attitudes toward 27 white women. While both versions of the poem present sentimental 28 stories of women who lose their lovers and choose death over life without 29 them, the way Robinson treats each woman’s capacity to reason accentu- 30 ates the differences between them. 31 Among Robinson’s major additions to “The Negro Girl” are several 32 stanzas in which Zelma recalls the education she received from her 33 enslaver. While an enslaved woman receiving a western education was 34 not completely unheard of in 1800—perhaps most famously, Phillis 35 Wheatley was taught to read and write by her enslavers and went on to 36 publish a popular volume of poems in England in 1773—on the whole, 37 enslaved people’s access to education was strictly policed. That Zelma is 38 taught not only to read but to reason is significant because this renders 39 her education in line with the sort advocated by Wollstonecraft. Yet the 40 poem curtails the possibility of reading this as a victory by emphasizing 41 that Zelma is not its appropriate recipient. Beginning as follows, the 42 Chained to Life and Misery 57 stanzas on Zelma’s education qualify her capacity to tell her own story 1 by throwing the strong emotions she displays throughout the poem into 2 relief against Nancy’s: 3 4 The Tyrant WHITE MAN taught my mind 5 The letter’d page to trace; 6 He taught me in the Soul to find 7 No tint, as in the face: 8 He bade my reason blossom like the tree— 9 But fond affection gave the ripen’d fruits to thee.35 10 11 In “The Storm,” Nancy similarly remarks, “Whate’er our Tints may be, 12 our SOULS are still the same.”36 Significantly, her ability to make such a 13 statement is never called into question. But Zelma’s ability to see shared 14 humanity beyond skin color is attributed to knowledges imparted to her 15 by her enslaver. At its most extreme, this might be taken to suggest that 16 Africans—not Europeans—adhere to and perpetuate the racist logics 17 invented by Europeans to justify their enslavement. At the very least, it 18 illuminates problems with liberal humanism’s tendency to erase differ- 19 ence. Those working to critique “race” in humanist terms, however well 20 intentioned, were doomed from the start. 21 Even as Robinson establishes Zelma’s ability to reason as a product of 22 her European education, in the last two lines quoted above, she implies 23 that the exercise of reason is less comfortable for Zelma than subservience 24 to her lover. That is, though she is freely (if improbably) given the tools 25 so eagerly sought by liberal white women, she wields them in ways that 26 undermine the liberating effects English feminists like Wollstonecraft 27 and Robinson had envisioned. Exemplifying the dangers of romantic 28 attachment, Zelma abandons reason to be subsumed—and ultimately 29 submerged—by love: 30 31 Swift, o’er the plain of burning Sand 32 My course I bent to thee; 33 And soon I reach’d the billowy strand 34 Which bounds the stormy Sea. 35 DRACO! My Love! Oh yet thy ZELMA’s soul 36 Springs ardently to thee; impatient of control.37 37 38 In view of the poem’s abolitionist politics, the phrase “impatient of 39 control” calls for both a literal and a figurative reading. Describing 40 Zelma’s physical escape from “the Tyrant WHITE MAN,” it also 41 42 58 DEATH RIGHTS

1 anticipates her departure from life by way of her suicide.38 At the same 2 time, it signals her abandonment of control over her emotions, and with 3 it, her abandonment of both sensibility and reason. Wollstonecraft and 4 Robinson both contend that it is incumbent on women to develop their 5 rational faculties to regulate and balance the “feminine” behaviors they 6 are trained for. The scenario presented in “The Negro Girl” underscores 7 that this argument is directed only to white women. Having been taught 8 to develop her rational faculties, Zelma makes what the poem frames as 9 an irrational choice to indulge her emotions without even the inhibitions 10 of cultivated sensibility, and this leads directly to her death. 11 Crucially, Zelma’s decision to die does not signify rational choice in 12 the way that suicide in Day and Bicknell’s The Dying Negro had done. In 13 that poem, the speaker’s decision to kill himself is offered as “proof” of 14 his ability to reason. The undeniable judiciousness of that choice func- 15 tions to highlight the pain that renders death preferable to life as an 16 enslaved person and thus the moral indefensibility of those who enable 17 that institution. Zelma’s suicide, on the other hand, is marked by its 18 fundamental irrationality. In this way, “The Negro Girl” makes visible a 19 core impasse of liberal feminism. The poem can only envisage one form 20 of freedom for black women: either from physical bondage or from the 21 patriarchal control that some white women called “mental enslavement” 22 but not both. In curtailing the sense of agency then associated with the 23 suicides of enslaved male figures, Robinson’s poem forecloses the possi- 24 bility of freedom from bondage for Zelma. And in denouncing Zelma’s 25 decision to die for love in terms strongly associated with liberal debates 26 about the rights of white women, the poem ensures that Zelma is ineli- 27 gible for those rights as well. 28 Of course, Nancy is also the kind of woman against whom Robinson 29 protests in the Letter. Defining herself solely as a lover, she chooses to die 30 because she can see no existence for herself without William. Not one 31 line after she witnesses his death, she is dead herself: “Poor NANCY saw 32 him buried by the wave, / And, with her heart’s true love, plung’d in a 33 WATRY GR AV E!”39 These lines remain virtually unchanged in “The 34 Negro Girl” except for the fact that the last two words are not capital- 35 ized (signaling, perhaps, that Zelma’s final resting place is less noteworthy 36 than Nancy’s). The main difference between these women’s decisions to 37 follow their lovers to the grave is that Nancy, as far as we know, is never 38 taught to think otherwise. In reality, of course, neither the working-class 39 Nancy nor the enslaved Zelma is likely to have had access to education. 40 But the fact that Robinson chooses to emphasize Zelma as the exception 41 fundamentally changes the meaning of her decision to choose love and, 42 Chained to Life and Misery 59 ultimately, death. The emotional excesses that lead Nancy to suicide can 1 be explained in social terms as a sign of women’s indoctrination by the 2 patriarchy. Zelma’s rejection of reason, however—a tool meant to resist 3 such indoctrination—is, at best, an indicator of personal failing; at worst, 4 it plays into racist stereotypes about African women’s emotional volatility 5 and unruly sexuality. 6 In either scenario, Robinson’s revision marks a clear distinction 7 between white and black women. While “The Negro Girl” critiques the 8 institution of slavery, Zelma’s inability or unwillingness to exercise the 9 faculty of reason ultimately presents black women as unfit to possess 10 the rights that Robinson and Wollstonecraft sought for white women. 11 By transferring the negative association between sensibility and white 12 womanhood to a black woman Robinson echoes the patriarchal argu- 13 ments that hold such forms and expressions of femininity to be at odds 14 with access to the rights of “Man.” In this way, Robinson reproduces the 15 same oppressive logics she decries in the Letter. 16 Claire de Duras’s 1823 novella, Ourika, one of the first European novels 17 to feature a black woman as the central protagonist, similarly emphasizes 18 the rationality of white women by displacing qualities traditionally asso- 19 ciated with white femininity onto a suicidal black woman. However, it 20 does so in a political context that is less committed to rights advocacy 21 drawn from liberalism. Written by an aristocrat forced to emigrate to 22 England during the French Revolution, Ourika is loosely inspired by 23 the true story of an African child who was purchased by the governor of 24 Senegal and given to his uncle, M. de Beauvau, in 1788. Baptized Char- 25 lotte Catherine Benezet Ourika, she died in 1800, aged between sixteen 26 and twenty. Little is known about her actual life. However, the popular 27 fictionalization by Duras inspired plays, poetry, and artwork that revised 28 and reimagined the aristocratic black heroine.40 29 In Duras’s text, as in Robinson’s, a white woman writes a black woman 30 whose emotional excess leads to a tragic end. Like Zelma, Ourika is 31 educated according to western epistemologies; however, unlike Zelma, 32 Ourika is reared by European nobility. The figure of the black aristo- 33 cratic heroine reflects, as Robin Mitchell has argued, ongoing anxieties 34 about national identity. As “the ‘other’ side of what it meant to partake in 35 French identity,” Ourika’s blackness and femaleness function to “[shore] 36 up Frenchness” by way of antithesis. Per Mitchell, “Ourika encapsulated 37 the problem of a woman educated out of race and class, with no real 38 place or space to call her own.”41 Thus, Ourika’s voice is doubly couched 39 in whiteness: before we hear her story in the first person, we meet her 40 through the frame narrative of a white male doctor summoned to the 41 42 60 DEATH RIGHTS

1 convent where she is, at the end of her short life, a nun. As Mitchell 2 points out, this structure is reminiscent of frameworks used to “validate 3 [the] authenticity” of enslaved people’s autobiographies.42 Ourika tells 4 the doctor that she wants to be cured of a “prolonged and acute melan- 5 cholia” that had made her suicidal.43 To help him understand its causes, 6 she shares her life story, which makes up the majority of the text. 7 The novella follows Ourika as she comes of age and struggles to 8 negotiate her marriage prospects against European racism. She tells the 9 doctor that as a child she never saw her blackness in negative terms: “I 10 didn’t regret being black. I was told I was an angel. There was nothing 11 to warn me that the color of my skin might be a disadvantage.”44 This 12 changes when, at age fifteen, she overhears a conversation between her 13 benefactress, Mme. de B., and an unnamed marquise about Ourika’s dim 14 prospects for integrating into French high society: “I see the poor girl 15 alone, always alone in the world.”45 Ourika internalizes this statement, 16 and her self-perception changes instantly: “Lightning does not strike 17 more swiftly. I comprehended all. I was black. Dependent, despised, 18 without fortune, without resource, without a single other being of my 19 kind to help me through life.”46 Her despondency grows over the course 20 of the novel, and she learns to associate her blackness with alienation. 21 This has been read as anticipating Frantz Fanon’s discussion of traumas 22 that undergird racial formation in colonized peoples.47 However, a closer 23 reading of the text reveals that Ourika’s suicidal depression stems less 24 from her budding racial consciousness than from her forbidden love for 25 her adoptive brother, Charles. Indeed, Ourika’s negotiation of her racial 26 identity is framed in terms that closely align her with rationality, even as 27 that faculty is gradually undercut by her secret desire for Charles. 28 Upon first overhearing the exchange between Mme. de B and the 29 Marquise, Ourika is overcome by strong emotions that she immedi- 30 ately converts into reasoned self-reflection: “But now my mind stood 31 back from these instinctive reactions . . . I became exacting. I analyzed 32 and criticized almost all that had previously satisfied me.”48 Yet over the 33 course of the text, Ourika’s rationality is eroded and blurred with her 34 despondency at the impossibility of her love. For instance, after Charles 35 marries a white woman, and Ourika takes the veil, Duras emphasizes 36 that the nun’s habit—a loaded signifier of her marital and sexual status— 37 became a comfort to Ourika. This was not, as we might expect, because 38 wearing the habit helped her to move past her heartbreak but because 39 it covered more of her skin than any of her other clothes had done. As 40 Adeline Koh has suggested, the novel’s pointed disavowal of marriage as 41 an option for Ourika signals its ambivalence toward seeing black women 42 Chained to Life and Misery 61

as equal to white women: “If Ourika were to marry, she would become 1 ‘white’: she would assimilate into French society.” Thus, Koh argues, 2 citing the fact that the overhead conversation follows closely after a scene 3 in which Ourika dances publicly with a white man, it is by no coinci- 4 dence that “Ourika’s first hints of her marriage potential coincide with 5 her racial trauma.”49 Though Duras sets up Ourika’s race consciousness 6 as the text’s driving conflict, her prohibited desire for Charles quickly 7 emerges as its actual focal point. By raising the possibility of miscege- 8 nation and summarily shutting it down, Duras reinforces the idea that 9 Ourika’s blackness precludes her from full assimilation. Thus, as Pratima 10 Prasad puts it, the unrequited love story “evacuate[s] the core question of 11 racial identity while simultaneously foregrounding it.”50 This is under- 12 written by Ourika’s transformation from a thoughtful, rational woman 13 to one who becomes hopelessly lost in her sadness. 14 Duras contrasts Ourika’s increasingly volatile emotions against 15 her white women characters’ carefully curated performances of sensi- 16 bility. In so doing, she echoes liberal feminist arguments about the 17 necessity of balancing feeling with reason. As Wollstonecraft warns in 18 Maria, “Indulged sorrow” will “blunt or sharpen the faculties to the 19 two opposite extremes; producing stupidity, the moping melancholy of 20 indolence; or the restless activity of a disturbed imagination.”51 Ourika 21 exhibits both extremes and never finds a way to overcome them on her 22 own. Though she eventually enlists the doctor’s help, he cannot cure 23 her either, and she dies while in his care. The only character the text 24 suggests who might have been able to curtail what Wollstonecraft calls 25 the “unnatural delicacy of feeling” is a white woman: the marquise whose 26 insistence on the inevitability of Ourika’s future isolation prompted her 27 distress in the first place.52 Reentering the novel’s orbit when Ourika is 28 at her most despondent—as she makes a “suicidal request” to God—the 29 marquise chastises Ourika for failing to “find a brighter side to things,” 30 to which Ourika responds, “intelligence only makes real misfortunes 31 seem worse.”53 Ourika reiterates what by this point she sees as an absolute 32 correlation between her blackness and her misery: “You know very well 33 what my problems are. My social situation. And the color of my skin.”54 34 The marquise reads her situation differently: “if you weren’t madly in 35 love with [Charles], you could come perfectly well to terms with being 36 black.”55 Ourika cedes to the marquise’s judgment without hesitation: 37 “she is right, I am guilty.”56 38 There are several problems with both the marquise’s diagnosis and the 39 ease with which Ourika accepts it. The marquise’s patronizing directive 40 to “find a brighter side to things” ignores the realities of racial prejudice 41 42 62 DEATH RIGHTS

1 that structure their society. Even if Ourika were to “come to terms” 2 with her blackness (whatever that might mean in the context of this 3 novel), the white supremacist culture she longs to have a place in would 4 not. While a suggestion is raised that she might be allowed to marry 5 someone below her station, she is categorically precluded from marrying 6 a member of the aristocracy and thus attaining equal status with white 7 women of her own class. The marquise’s flippant response further betrays 8 the extent to which her understanding of Ourika’s situation is based on 9 an implicitly white concept of womanhood. Ourika’s ready acceptance 10 of the marquise’s words, in turn, corroborates this point of view. What 11 Jemima is to Maria, the marquise appears to be to Ourika: a rational 12 woman whose chief function in the text is to mitigate the protagonist’s 13 emotional excess. However, because the marquise is also the same figure 14 who forecasts the role that racism will play in her life, it is telling that 15 she later brushes it off and blames Ourika’s suffering on her failure to 16 cultivate and perform sensibility. By framing Ourika as an “unreasoning 17 toy of instinct” who requires the help of white women to learn to control 18 her feelings, the marquise—and through her, the text itself—naturalizes 19 emotional excess in the black woman.57 Moreover, the scene between 20 them suggests that white women’s power to define themselves as rational 21 beings depends on maintaining existing racial hierarchies. 22 Ourika’s inability to control her emotions nullifies any possibility of 23 racial justice raised either by the figure of the black aristocratic heroine 24 or by the French and Haitian revolutions, which occur on the text’s 25 periphery. At the start of the revolution in France, Ourika is optimistic 26 about the potential of liberal principles to bring about racial equality: 27 “I sensed that at the end of this great chaos I might find my true place. 28 When personal destiny was turned upside down, all social caste over- 29 thrown, all prejudices had disappeared, a state of affairs might one day 30 come to pass where I would feel myself less exiled.”58 But she grows disil- 31 lusioned by “the ridiculousness of men who were trying to control the 32 course of events . . . I soon stopped being the dupe of their false notion 33 of fraternity. Realizing that people still found time, in all this adversity, 34 to despise me, I gave up hope.”59 She is also initially hopeful about aboli- 35 tion, though this is undercut by a profoundly antiblack perspective on 36 the Haitian Revolution: 37 38 About this time talk started of emancipating the Negroes . . . I still 39 cherished the illusion that at least somewhere else in the world there 40 were others like myself. . . . But alas, I soon learned my lesson. The 41 Santo Domingo massacres gave me cause for fresh and heartrending 42 Chained to Life and Misery 63

sadness. Till then I had regretted belonging to a race of outcasts. Now 1 I had the shame of belonging to a race of barbarous murderers.60 2 3 There are echoes here of Duras’s own vexed political allegiances. Born 4 into the aristocracy, her father, Guy de Coëtnempren, Count of Kersaint, 5 was an early supporter of the French Revolution; maintaining plantations 6 in Martinique put him in closer proximity to the economic interests of 7 the bourgeoisie than to the nobility. He was thus labeled a “traitor to 8 his class” and guillotined for publishing a pamphlet attacking inherited 9 privilege.61 Duras’s mother, a white woman from Martinique, inherited 10 her husband’s plantations, which were eventually passed to Duras herself. 11 She taught their daughters centrist values and was deeply disappointed 12 when one of them, Félicité, married into a royalist family.62 That Duras 13 wrote a novel about a relatively (for its time) complex black heroine has 14 sometimes led to the assumption that she supported abolition; however, 15 as the above passages illustrate, Ourika is far from an abolitionist text. 16 Moreover, although it reflects some liberal principles in its treatment 17 of white women, the novella is uninterested in advancing racial equity. 18 The fact that Ourika’s melancholy is finally assuaged by religion 19 echoes white supremacist logics whereby enslaved people were forcibly 20 “saved” by Christianity yet still not recognized as full human beings.63 21 Ourika joins the convent because she feels grateful to God for sparing 22 her the fate of other Africans: “He rescued me from savagery and igno- 23 rance. By a miracle of charity He stole me from the evils of slavery.”64 24 Throughout the text, she sees herself as unique among people of African 25 descent. But by having her embrace religion only because she cannot 26 adequately temper her emotions or exercise her capacity to reason, the 27 text drives home its point that existing racial hierarchies are immutable. 28 Religion can, in some sense, “save” her, but the embrace of Christianity 29 will not elevate her in the judgment of white society. Thus, even as the 30 figure of the black aristocratic heroine implicitly raises prescient ques- 31 tions about intersections between race, gender, and class, not a single 32 character in the text—including the heroine herself—is finally able to 33 view Ourika or her place in the world outside of logics associated with 34 white womanhood. 35 As a response to the failure of the French Revolution and the loss of 36 Haiti, Duras’s novella negotiates the shattered promises of liberalism 37 against a nostalgic desire to return to a social order that imagines the 38 categories of race, class, and gender as immutable. Where Robinson’s 39 poetry exemplifies myopias that limit the capacity of the era’s progres- 40 sive thinkers to surmount the whiteness at liberalism’s core, Ourika 41 42 64 DEATH RIGHTS

1 casts doubt on liberalism’s capacity to bring about a just society in its 2 failure to imagine a world in which its heroine might survive. Thus, 3 Ourika highlights how applications of liberal principles in vindications 4 of the rights of “women” remain dependent on existing hierarchies of 5 race and class. 6 The liberal fantasy of collective, cross-racial unity in “womanhood” 7 turns on the mutual acknowledgment of a shared condition of social 8 death. Yet as Wilderson has taught us, “structures of ontological suffering 9 stand in antagonistic . . . relation to one another (despite the fact that 10 antagonists themselves may not be aware of the ontological position 11 from which they speak).”65 For Wilderson, the politico-ontological posi- 12 tions that he signifies as “Black/Slave, Red/‘Savage’ and White/Human” 13 represent paradigms of power that precede the construction of particular 14 identities, including those informed by gender.66 The writers I have 15 been discussing here attempt not to transform but to more fully inhabit 16 the white/human position. To establish their own politico-ontological 17 status, these women emphasized what they held in common with the 18 fully authorized subject of rights—whiteness. In the process, they high- 19 lighted the political nonbeing of other(ed) women. As the next section 20 shows, this was not limited to stories of black women, even as black 21 women and men hold a singular relation to death in the racial imaginary 22 of the modern world. 23 24 Flickering Whiteness in Felicia Hemans’s Suicide Poems 25 26 Much of Felicia Hemans’s writing about suicide strikes distinctly 27 Wollstonecraftian notes in its emphasis on death as an escape from 28 patriarchal tyranny—what Susan Wolfson describes as “the fatal 29 binding of female freedom and female death.”67 Like Duras, Hemans 30 engages the trope of suicide after much of the optimism of revolu- 31 tionary rights discourses and abolition had dissipated. For Gary Kelly, 32 this results in a shift from the individual to the world-historical: “The 33 disappearance of individuals, nations, and empires into the abyss of 34 time and history [operate as] a sublation of the individual life in 35 the continuing life of a specific historical sociality, in particular the 36 modern liberal nation-state and empire.”68 Kelly is right to note that 37 many of Hemans’s dead and dying women serve to imaginatively “bring 38 about a future liberal state”; although liberalism’s lofty promises are 39 certainly bowed, for Hemans they are not broken.69 But suicide is a 40 special kind of death, necessarily individual, even as it can be made 41 to speak to broader issues of society and sociality. Thus, Hemans’s 42 Chained to Life and Misery 65

suicide poems remain uniquely focused on the question of individual 1 subjectivity, of who “counts” and who does not in social structures 2 that turn on casting women out. The world-historical dimension of 3 these poems is to be found in the fact that they concern women from 4 a range of cultures, eras, and ethnicities. Through repeated confron- 5 tations between whiteness and various iterations of what functionally 6 amounts to an undifferentiated sense of “otherness” in nonwhiteness, 7 the poems imagine a liberal (and decisively not liberated) global empire. 8 In this light, it pays to consider which women the poems themselves 9 cast out. Consider, for example, the “Indian Woman’s Death Song,” 10 which places the title figure at a distance from the narrator and reader, 11 never closing that gap. The poem begins as a canoe is swept up by a 12 powerful current. An unnamed speaker tells us that the canoe’s speed 13 is “fearful,” even as the woman within it sits “proudly, dauntlessly, and 14 all alone.”70 The description of the boat’s speed in emotive terms—that 15 is, as “fearful”—produces a feeling of distance, in part because it takes 16 seven lines before a figure capable of feeling such an emotion is intro- 17 duced. The first six lines, then, seem to suggest that this fear belongs 18 to someone else—perhaps the reader or the poem’s speaker but not the 19 woman at the poem’s center. Indeed, when the woman is finally intro- 20 duced, she is described as feeling a “strange gladness,” her hair waving 21 “as if triumphantly.”71 The fear remains suspended elsewhere, as the 22 woman’s affect does not correspond to the feelings that the poem tells 23 us are engendered by this scene. Compounding this estrangement, we are 24 initially told that she is “alone,” only to learn “that a babe lay sleeping at 25 her breast” in the next line.72 26 This sense of distance is underscored by a headnote and two 27 epigraphs. The headnote attributes Hemans’s knowledge of Native 28 American cultural practices to a travelogue, William Keating’s Narra- 29 tive of an Expedition to the Source of the St. Peter’s River . . . Under the 30 Command of S. H. Long, although there is not much cultural specificity 31 in the woman’s story. Rather, her tale more closely recalls sentiments 32 expressed in the poem’s epigraphs from Friedrich Schiller and James 33 Fenimore Cooper. The excerpt from Cooper, “Let not my child be a 34 girl, for very sad is the life of a woman,” is echoed in the poem when 35 the mother laments that her child was born for “woman’s weary lot” 36 and resolves to save them “from sorrow and decay” by killing them 37 both.73 Likewise, Schiller’s exaltation of a woman who would rather 38 die than live with a broken heart is echoed as the title figure reveals 39 that her lover has left her and that she cannot live without him. As 40 Ann Laura Stoler has shown, the regulatory discourses of romantic love 41 42 66 DEATH RIGHTS

1 and sexuality in nineteenth-century Europe were habitually “refracted 2 through the discourses of empire and its exigencies.”74 Thus, Hemans’s 3 poem is arguably best understood as an attempt to negotiate the social 4 situatedness of white women against a Native American woman’s 5 suicide. 6 Such a reading extends from Astrid Wind’s trenchant analysis of 7 representations of dead and dying Native Americans in terms of broader 8 efforts to fortify the dominance of liberalism against other ways of life: 9 10 Indians dying or dead became the major theme of literature dealing 11 with natives at the turn of the eighteenth century when Europeans 12 and Americans refused to understand them because the very under- 13 standing of the natives and their cultures would have eroded the 14 myths that rationalized the progress of white civilization at the cost 15 of native cultures. . . . In the context of the political and economical 16 demands of the time . . . the only Indian in [the] Anglo-American 17 imagination, who would not halt the progress of white civilization, 18 was a dead Indian. 75 19 20 To be clear, the discourses Wind describes here are not interchange- 21 able with those of black suicide that I emphasize in this book. Native 22 American death, as Wind notes above, signifies the overcoming of an 23 obstacle to white domination in the liberal imagination, whereas black 24 suicide, as I have been arguing, more often operates to diffuse white 25 anxieties about black freedom and social integration. What they share 26 in common, however, are two important effects. Both fail to attend 27 to the particularities of the cultures and peoples in whose voices they 28 speak. Moreover, both obscure racist structures of thought and feeling 29 by rendering sympathetically dying Native American figures (as noble 30 and/or close to nature) and dying enslaved African-identified figures 31 (as metaphysically liberated) while removing them from the discur- 32 sive frame. When these deaths are depicted as self-inflicted, they often 33 echo liberal rhetoric and can thus easily be (mis)taken for referenda 34 on natural rights—as expressions of the individual will, rationality, 35 and/or the capacity for inclusion. However, such readings often fail to 36 adequately contend with the suicidal figures’ a priori relations to civil 37 society and thus ultimately reinforce social logics that variously turn 38 on those figures’ exclusions. 39 While a full discussion of the differences between these and other 40 regimes of racialization in nineteenth-century British texts is beyond the 41 scope of this project, I raise the issue here to highlight the underlying 42 Chained to Life and Misery 67

exclusivity of bourgeois white women’s pursuit of “social life.” Though 1 its contexts and expressions vary, death is the sine qua non of the era’s 2 racial logics. Death by suicide, in turn, uniquely reinforces those logics 3 by alternately sanctioning and foreclosing representation in liberal society 4 depending on the framing of the suicidal figure in relation to the era’s 5 broader debates on individual rights, including the right to die. In this 6 way, much like the texts by Robinson and Duras discussed above, “Indian 7 Woman’s Death Song” is not an expression of cross-racial affinity or soli- 8 darity authorized by a “democratic realm of death.”76 The similarities 9 and differences between “Indian Woman’s Death Song” and Hemans’s 10 treatment of suicide in her poetry about white women highlight the racial 11 limits of such a democracy. Here, we see cultural differences leveled by 12 the willingness of women broadly marked as nonwhite to embrace literal 13 death, leaving only white womanhood alive.” 14 Hemans’s other suicide poems go out of their way to emphasize 15 the whiteness of the women they center—even when those figures do 16 not immediately lend themselves to being read as white. In the head- 17 note to “Properzia Rossi,” for example, Hemans writes that the poem 18 was inspired by a painting in which the title figure’s white breast is 19 the brightest spot in the image.77 Likewise, Hemans notes that “The 20 Last Song of Sappho” is styled after a painting by Richard Westma- 21 cott the younger, son of the neoclassical sculptor of the same name. 22 While the exact painting that Hemans looked at is not known, most 23 nineteenth-century depictions of Sappho’s leap follow the conven- 24 tions of neoclassical sculpture and emphasize the supposed whiteness 25 of Greek bodies.78 This emphasis on whiteness is somewhat compli- 26 cated in “The Bride of the Greek Isle” and “The Sicilian Captive.” In 27 these poems, Hemans highlights whiteness in her physical descriptions 28 of the suicidal women but marks them as not white when they choose 29 to die. The bride is described as having a “fair cheek’s hue,” yet at the 30 moment of her death, she is likened to “an Indian bride” (in this case, 31 Hemans presumably means South Asian, as the bride’s self-immolation 32 recalls the Hindu practice of sati).79 The bride regrets her decision to 33 die too late, and when she does, Hemans restores her whiteness: 34 35 Proudly she stands, like an Indian bride 36 On the pyre with the holy dead beside; 37 But a shriek from her mother hath caught her ear, 38 As the flames to her marriage-robe draw near, 39 And starting, she spreads her pale arms in vain 40 To the form they must never infold again.80 41 42 68 DEATH RIGHTS

1 “The Sicilian Captive” likewise insists on the whiteness of its central 2 figure, even as it, again, aligns her desire for death with nonwhiteness. 3 The poem describes the title figure as having a “proud pale brow” and 4 “marble cheek,” despite the fact that Sicilians would not have been 5 considered white.81 It is only in her decision to die, motivated by a desire 6 to return to her home country (echoing popular ideas about African 7 beliefs in transmigration), that she is rendered nonwhite:82 8 9 I may not thus depart–farewell! yet no, my country! no! 10 Is not love stronger than the grave? I feel it must be so! 11 My fleeting spirit shall o’ersweep the mountains and the main, 12 And in thy tender starlight rove, and thro’ thy woods again. 13 Its passion deepens—it prevails!—I break my chain—I come 14 To dwell a viewless thing, yet blest–in thy sweet air, my home!83 15 16 In both “The Sicilian Captive” and “The Bride of the Greek Isles,” life 17 is associated with whiteness, while death—specifically the decision to 18 choose death—is ascribed to those who are not white. 19 If self-destruction is a path to freedom for some, it is significant that 20 Hemans takes great care to distance white womanhood from the act of 21 suicide. In “Properzia Rossi” and “The Last Song of Sappho,” Hemans 22 emphasizes that she is re-creating other people’s stories, rendering in 23 poetic language what other artists had rendered visually. In “The Sicilian 24 Captive” and “The Bride of the Greek Isles,” the decision to kill oneself 25 is framed as the purview of darker-skinned women, while white woman- 26 hood is extricated from the act of voluntary self-destruction and thus 27 preserved. Thus, even as Hemans is critical of patriarchal structures writ 28 large, her particular critique of white women’s oppressions is sublimated 29 through the bodies of nonwhite women. White women elicit sympathy 30 because they are oppressed; however, they die as decidedly nonwhite. 31 That they are in fact the same person emphasizes the extent to which 32 the liberation of white women occurs at the expense of nonwhite women 33 and, more broadly, the extent to which liberalism turns on racialized 34 exclusions. Indeed, though rendered most obviously in Hemans’s work, 35 the mutable nature of whiteness, patriarchy, and the exclusions of both is 36 implicit in all of the texts discussed thus far. These varied representations 37 of suicide as, alternately, a signal of rationality and capacity for legibility 38 (in The Dying Negro) and one of irrationality that justifies some people’s 39 continued subjugation (in the texts discussed in this chapter) hearken to 40 important differences in how liberalism structures the marginalization 41 of enslaved, displaced, and colonized peoples, and women of each group. 42 Chained to Life and Misery 69

1 Revising Racial Sensibility in The Story of Mattie J. Jackson 2 This chapter has examined how liberal feminism turns on maintaining 3 notions of racial difference, emphasizing how efforts to expand the 4 bounds of liberalism to include white womanhood effectively also 5 reinforced white supremacist ideologies. Building on the critique of 6 sensibility made famous by Wollstonecraft, the white women writers 7 discussed here indiscriminately projected an essentialized incompati- 8 bility with reason on nonwhite women. Even as some adopted postures 9 of shared struggle, implicit in such postures is a structural relation of 10 dominance. Within the established logics of the day, laying imaginary 11 claim to the bodies of enslaved, displaced, and/or colonized women by 12 writing their suicides lent white women writers a kind of proximal access 13 to patriarchal authority. By way of conclusion, I want to emphasize that 14 none of this was lost on black women. 15 With some exceptions, suicide and the strong emotions associ- 16 ated with it tend to figure in more muted ways in much of the era’s 17 writing by people of African descent.84 As the next chapter explores 18 in greater detail, one way in which black authors engaged the literary 19 trope of suicide was to challenge European assumptions about why 20 black people kill themselves: assumptions made popular by abolition- 21 ists. The Story of Mattie J. Jackson registers the subject of suicide at 22 the level of form to challenge the transatlantic reach of the white 23 supremacist protofeminist logics I have been discussing in this chapter. 24 Jackson’s text is noteworthy for how robustly it centers black women. 25 The most important figure in Jackson’s life is her mother, Ellen Turner, 26 and much of the short narrative concentrates on their forced sepa- 27 rations and hard-won reunions, as well as each woman’s individual 28 journey to freedom. The narrative is also notable because it was 29 recorded by a black woman, Dr. L. S. Thompson, Jackson’s stepmother. 30 Thompson indicates her gender on the title page, identifying herself 31 as “formerly Mrs. Schuyler,” but she leaves the reader to discern that 32 she is of African descent when she appears as a figure in Jackson’s life 33 toward the end of the Story. These elements combine to make Jackson’s 34 autobiography one that, in Joycelyn Moody’s words, “‘tests’ readers’ 35 amenability to accepting the discursive authority of a nineteenth-cen- 36 tury black woman.”85 37 As in many other slave narratives, suicide registers as part of the 38 narrator’s lived reality but is not central to her story.86 In Jackson’s text, 39 suicide is mentioned twice, both times on the fringes of the principle 40 narrative. It is significant that both mentions of suicide are essentially 41 42 70 DEATH RIGHTS

1 apocryphal, having to do with people Jackson herself never met. The 2 first instance concerns a failed suicide attempt. Early in the narrative, 3 she relays a family legend about her grandfather, who had been eman- 4 cipated after thirty years of enslavement only to be forced back into 5 bondage. He tries to end his life “by perishing with cold and hunger” 6 but is thwarted by his enslaver.87 In Jackson’s telling, this leads to a 7 relatively positive turn: if he had not been found out, he would not 8 have met the woman who would become her grandmother, with whom 9 he “lived as happily as their circumstanced would permit.”88 Suicide is 10 not framed here as a heroic pathway to freedom. Instead, the fact that 11 he did not kill himself becomes quietly subversive in that it allows for 12 several generations of familial relations. This implicit rebellion against 13 what Patterson has termed natal alienation, a key factor in slaveholding 14 cultures’ ability to sustain institutions of enslavement, is made explicit 15 in the close relationship between Jackson and Turner, as well as in the 16 broader fact that Jackson attains what her grandparents could not and 17 goes on to tell their family’s story.89 18 The second suicide in Jackson’s text is not thwarted, and her account 19 of that suicide leads to a noteworthy break in the narrative. The poem 20 below is one of only a few episodes to openly broach the subject of feeling, 21 and it does so in reference to a figure well on the narrative’s periphery. 22 The poem, which is original to the Story, appears after Jackson mentions 23 her second stepfather’s first wife, who chose to die rather than live 24 without her children: 25 26 In agony close to her bosom she pressed, 27 The life of her heart, the child of her breast— 28 Oh love from its tenderness gathering might 29 Had strengthened her soul for declining age. 30 But she is free. Yes, she has gone from the land of the slave; 31 The hand of oppression must rest in the grave. 32 The blood hounds have missed the scent of her way, 33 The hunter is rifled and foiled of his prey.90 34 35 The poem’s indulgence of sentimental tropes stands in stark contrast to 36 the rest of the narrative. In prose, this history is articulated plainly, and 37 this echoes Jackson’s straightforward recollections of the many separa- 38 tions her own family endured. Although Jackson discusses losing family 39 and friends to death or forced separation, witnessing and surviving 40 countless physical and psychological abuses, and watching her mother 41 lose two husbands and several children, she rarely dwells on the strong 42 Chained to Life and Misery 71

emotions associated with these events. The poem thus shifts the text’s 1 tone dramatically, albeit momentarily. 2 The poem presents the unnamed woman as a grieving mother, a 3 pathetic victim who lacks all agency in life but finally finds freedom 4 in death. The woman’s lack of agency and the poem’s emphasis on her 5 overwhelming emotions recall Robinson’s Zelma and Duras’s Ourika, 6 both defined and ultimately undone by excessive feeling. Moreover, the 7 poem’s emphasis on the woman finding freedom in death links her to 8 the uneasy relationship between whiteness, femininity, and death in 9 Hemans’s suicide poems, as well as to abolitionist texts like The Dying 10 Negro, which valorize the self-destruction of black bodies even as they 11 claim interest in improving black lives. Thus, when she repeats this 12 woman’s story in decidedly unsentimental prose, Jackson rescues her 13 from the fates of real and fictional black women whose lives were—and 14 in many ways, still are—reduced to sentimental tropes and sacrificed on 15 the altar of white women’s rights. 16 By setting her story about the agency and self-determination of 17 multiple generations of black women against bourgeois liberal femi- 18 nist tropes, Jackson (as well as Thompson, her amanuensis) indicates 19 how far removed such representations actually are from the lived real- 20 ities of black women and men. In the starkness of its contrast to the 21 rest of Jackson’s narrative, the verse interlude points to the limits of 22 the white abolitionist imagination, as well as to problems in liberal 23 feminist applications of its tropes to define and police the whiteness 24 of “woman.” The Story of Mattie J. Jackson recognizes that true libera- 25 tion is not to be found by adhering to the logics of liberal modernity. 26 As the next chapter will show, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of 27 Olaudah Equiano presents an alternative. 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

1 2 Chapter 3 3 4 5 Writ in Water 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 At the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean there’s a 15 Railroad made of human bones. 16 Black ivory 17 Black ivory. 18 —Amiri Baraka, Wise, Why’s, Y’s: 19 The Griot’s Song (Djeli Ya) 20 21 22 Here lies one whose name was writ in water. 23 —Grave of John Keats 24 25 26 oward the end of Clotel; or, the President’s Daughter, the first 27 TEnglish-language novel by a writer of African descent (published in 28 London in 1853), William Wells Brown’s titular heroine, the illegitimate 29 daughter of Thomas Jefferson and an enslaved woman named Currer, 30 escapes capture by jumping into the Potomac River to her death. Brown 31 uses Clotel’s suicide to draw attention to the hypocrisy of a society that 32 prides itself on liberal values but that enslaves African-identified people 33 and refuses to acknowledge their humanity: 34 35 Had Clotel escaped from oppression in any other land . . . no honour 36 within the gift of the American people would have been too good to 37 have been heaped upon the heroic woman. But she was a slave, and 38 therefore out of the pale of their sympathy. They have tears to shed 39 over Greece and Poland; they have an abundance of sympathy for 40 “poor Ireland;” they can furnish a ship of war to convey the Hungarian 41 42 73 74 DEATH RIGHTS

1 refugees from a Turkish prison to the “land of the free and home of 2 the brave.” They boast that America is the “cradle of liberty;” if it is, 3 I fear they have rocked the child to death.1 4 5 The tragedy of Clotel’s death is not just the fact of her suicide but the 6 social conditions that necessitate it: had she been of almost any other 7 ethnicity, Brown suggests, these conditions would be challenged by the 8 liberal utopia that the United States claims to be. Addressing a culture 9 obsessed with spectacles of voluntary death, Brown insists that the 10 suicides of enslaved Africans are exceptional cases by reasserting, at the 11 moment that Clotel’s life ends, her blood ties to the president: “Thus 12 died Clotel, the daughter of Thomas Jefferson, a president of the United 13 States; a man distinguished as the author of the Declaration of Amer- 14 ican Independence, and one of the first statesmen of that country.”2 15 Clotel’s suicide bears a unique relationship to the bounds of liberalism. 16 While it’s true that much of her suffering had been caused by the inter- 17 locking structures of white supremacy and patriarchy, her death exceeds 18 the expressive capacity of liberal modernity. 19 Indeed, Clotel’s suicide literally destabilizes Brown’s novel, tempo- 20 rarily shifting its language from prose to poetry. In the poem that follows 21 her suicide, Brown turns from the social conditions that drove Clotel’s 22 decision to die to what she might have felt in her final seconds of life. 23 Where in the prose narrative Clotel’s corpse washes up onto the shore 24 and is unceremoniously buried, the poem lingers on her dying body: 25 26 The dark and the cold, yet merciful wave, 27 Receives to its bosom the form of the slave; 28 She rises—earth’s scenes on her dim vision gleam, 29 Yet she struggleth not with the strong rushing stream: 30 And low are the death-cries her woman’s heart gives, 31 As she floats adown the river, 32 Faint and more faint grows the drowning voice, 33 And her cries have ceased for ever! 34 35 A variety of frames associated with suicide converge in Clotel’s final 36 moments, and the point of their convergence is her death by water. 37 Clotel’s suicide evokes what by 1853 would have been familiar images of 38 enslaved people’s voluntary deaths (drawn from sources such as those I 39 have been discussing) as well as more generalized associations between 40 death, blackness, and the Atlantic Ocean. In Britain, this was galva- 41 nized by, among others, the 1781 Zong Massacre, in which enslavers 42 Writ in Water 75

alleging a shortage of drinking water threw 133 enslaved Africans 1 overboard in order to claim an insurance payout. As Ian Baucom has 2 discussed, responses to this case, both aesthetic and political, typify 3 how “late-romantic-period Britons were learning to observe, make sense 4 of, and screen themselves off from the greater violence of history.”3 5 Thus, for example, J. M. W. Turner’s painting Slavers Throwing Over- 6 board the Dead and Dying—Typhoon Coming Up, which was first 7 exhibited in 1840, presents “a scene of death to which the spectator 8 (in the role of liberal subject) is invited—to watch, sympathetically 9 suffer, and then depart.”4 Somewhat similarly, Brown’s poetic descrip- 10 tion of Clotel’s suicide conjures a transcendental imaginary reminiscent 11 of romanticism’s aesthetic ethos, which upon closer inspection reveals 12 itself to be rooted in liberalism. Baucom pointedly describes this as 13 “British romanticism dallying in the courts of idealism and speaking 14 the thoughts of liberalism.”5 15 If, as we see in the second epigraph to this chapter, romanticism is 16 fascinated with the posthumous haunting of authorial identity “writ 17 in water,” black writers offer a perspective on water as another kind 18 of haunting. As Amiri Baraka indicates in the first epigraph to this 19 chapter, the Middle Passage remains a living haunting for many writers 20 of African descent. Here, names and legacies are not preserved for the 21 ages but are violently stripped away.6 This chapter considers how roman- 22 ticism’s fascination with water—which Samuel Baker has discussed as 23 a moment “when a British literary elite saw the ocean as at once their 24 nation’s proper domain, the central geopolitical theater of their age, 25 and the main natural force shaping their world”—is heralded by the 26 literary (and literal) waters of the Middle Passage.7 The chapter traces 27 how Olaudah Equiano rewrites British representations of enslaved Afri- 28 cans seeking freedom in death by imagining, within the waters of the 29 Atlantic Ocean, an alternative discursive space for subjectivities that 30 do not depend on liberalism’s exclusionary logics—in Baraka’s terms, 31 an underwater railroad that leads not to freedom within the bounds 32 of liberalism but to life beyond those bounds. 33 By framing Equiano’s own moments of suicidal thinking against the 34 sentimentalism of The Dying Negro, The Interesting Narrative of the Life 35 of Olaudah Equiano resists liberal notions of suicide as a pathway to 36 freedom. Contrary to the condition of social death imposed on him by 37 agents of the institution of slavery, Equiano’s engagements with suicide 38 lead to a powerful affirmation of black life on its own terms. Within 39 the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, Equiano finds new frames for under- 40 standing what it means for him to choose, again and again, to stay alive. 41 42 76 DEATH RIGHTS

1 In so doing, he troubles the proverbial waters of liberal individualism by 2 asking what a project of freedom not oriented on “proving” one’s capacity 3 for legibility and integration might entail. Moving beyond discourses of 4 state-sanctioned rights and freedoms, this chapter reads forms of being 5 that exist outside of liberalism’s purview, shifting the field of analysis 6 from “the person” to “the human.” It concludes by reading John Keats’s 7 name—that is, his poetics of/and posthumous fame—writ through Equi- 8 ano’s conception of water. 9 10 (Im)possible Life: Blackness and Romanticism 11 12 Having grown up navigating the literal and figurative waters of the 13 Middle Passage, Equiano was part and parcel of the maritime economy 14 of interdependent cultural and political formations that Paul Gilroy 15 has famously called the Black Atlantic.8 Equiano’s subjectivity has been 16 discussed using terms like diasporic, compound, and hybrid: as Paul 17 Youngquist puts it, Equiano “shares with many sailors of the Black 18 Atlantic the inability to be in any authentic way African, or Amer- 19 ican, or British, or whatever . . . Citizen of the world, Equiano becomes 20 a multitude.”9 In exploring that multiplicity, The Interesting Narrative 21 foregrounds Equiano’s blackness. I precisely do not mean his African- 22 ness because, as Bryan Wagner reminds us, “Africa and its diaspora 23 are much older than blackness. Blackness does not come from Africa. 24 Rather, Africa and its diaspora become black at a particular stage of 25 their history.”10 An antithesis to enlightenment ontological categories 26 and epistemological frames, blackness is a constitutive (if, in many fields, 27 still largely underacknowledged) element of the formation of “the west” 28 and, by extension, liberal modernity.11 29 When he invokes The Dying Negro in chapter 5, Equiano positions 30 The Interesting Narrative against then-popular discourses about the 31 meaning and value of black life. Initially, Equiano asks death to “relieve 32 me from the horrors I felt and dreaded, that I might be in that place 33 ‘Where slaves are free, and men oppress no more.’”12 However, immedi- 34 ately following a nineteen-line excerpt from Day and Bicknell’s poem, 35 Equiano changes course: “The turbulence of my emotions . . . gave way 36 to calmer thoughts.”13 By distinguishing himself from his Anglo-Eu- 37 ropean interlocutors, he challenges the assumed political efficacy of 38 the strong emotions that underwrite Day and Bicknell’s sentimental 39 strategy. In this sense, although The Dying Negro and The Interesting 40 Narrative ostensibly mean to achieve similar political ends, Equiano 41 departs from the abolitionist modality of sensationalizing black death 42 Writ in Water 77

to spark outrage at the systematic exploitation and devaluation of 1 black life. Instead, he challenges the ease with which readers consumed 2 images of enslaved people’s suicides.14 Liberal strategies of “proving” 3 African-identified people’s capacity for social legibility and inclusion 4 through self-destruction brutally foreclose any possibilities for black 5 social existence apart from those sanctioned by the liberal state. If, as 6 Achille Mbembe has taught us, “the ultimate expression of sovereignty 7 resides . . . in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and 8 who must die,” then framing the suicide of an enslaved person as a 9 heroic affirmation of his social legibility only reproduces the sovereign 10 power that drives the fantasy of liberation in the first place.15 11 Rejecting the epistemological and ideological assumptions and tech- 12 nologies that produce this discursive violence, Equiano’s The Interesting 13 Narrative moves toward a more positive articulation of black life. And 14 while Equiano engages familiar abolitionist rhetoric to accomplish this, 15 he distances himself from many white abolitionists’ tendency toward 16 caricature and reductivism. For example, Equiano opens The Interesting 17 Narrative by claiming that he is “neither a saint, a hero, nor a tyrant.”16 18 This is a clear repudiation of the trope of the black martyr—which, as 19 we have seen, effectively naturalizes the relation between blackness and 20 death by dressing it up in descriptions of valor, courage, and sacrifice. 21 By refusing popular British conceptions of what it means for an enslaved 22 person to take his own life, Equiano makes the much more urgent state- 23 ment that black life matters in its own right—that it can and must be 24 disarticulated from Eurocentric ideologies that would define it in terms 25 of lack, absence, or negation. 26 He achieves this by drawing on racialized discourses then associated 27 with suicide to subvert Anglo-European ideas about why African-iden- 28 tified people kill themselves. Equiano first mentions suicide in chapter 29 2 when, having been taken from his family, he briefly escapes and hides 30 out in a nearby thicket. There, he imagines that he might find a way 31 home. His first thoughts of despair set in when he realizes that this will 32 never happen: recalling an overheard conversation between his captors, 33 he writes, “Most of them supposed I had fled towards home; but the 34 distance was so great, and the way so intricate, that they thought I could 35 never reach it, and that I should be lost in the woods. When I heard this 36 I was seized with a violent panic, and abandoned myself to despair.”17 37 Crucially, when he realizes he is never going home again, he expresses 38 despair but not, as he will do later, thoughts of suicide. As a narrative 39 strategy, this deflects from the already widespread idea that Africans were 40 driven to suicide by a shared belief in transmigration. Equiano distances 41 42 78 DEATH RIGHTS

1 himself from this belief in the first chapter: “I do not remember to have 2 ever heard of it: some however believe in the transmigration of souls 3 in a certain degree.”18 He underscores that distancing in the thicket 4 by avoiding what to many European readers would have seemed like a 5 natural connection between suicide and returning home. 6 The first time that he does articulate a desire to die, Equiano like- 7 wise undermines European conceptions about African peoples, this time 8 concerning how they were presumed to kill themselves. Having gone days 9 without food or water, Equiano writes, “I at length quitted the thicket, 10 very faint and hungry, for I had not eaten or drank any thing all the 11 day; and crept to my master’s kitchen . . . and laid myself down in the 12 ashes with an anxious wish for death to relieve me from all my pains.”19 13 Though he wants death to relieve his suffering from hunger, he does not 14 act to kill himself; and indeed, underscores that point by commenting, 15 in the next paragraph, on his new enslaver’s suicidality following the 16 death of his wife. This is contrary to the widespread notion among 17 Europeans that Africans (especially the Igbo, Equiano’s stated ethnicity 18 of origin) favored starvation as a means of inflicting their own deaths. 19 As Terri Snyder has shown, popular representations of the methods 20 used to complete suicide reveal “notions of temperamental, ethnic, and 21 racial characteristics that distinguished cultural outsiders . . . from Euro- 22 peans.”20 According to Snyder, firearms were primarily associated with 23 elite European men, hanging or drowning was attributed to white labor- 24 ing-class men and white women of all social classes, and starvation or 25 geophagy (eating dirt) became associated with enslaved Africans. In 26 1798, the English physician George Davidson described geophagy, which 27 was then medically termed Cachexia Africana, as a particular “malady 28 of West Indian slaves.”21 Davidson’s description recalls George Cheyne’s 29 The English Malady, which set forth a theory of suicide as a particularly 30 British penchant. Differentiating between Africans’ and Europeans’ 31 methods of killing themselves thus enabled a way of distinguishing and 32 maintaining perceived hierarchies between two supposedly suicide-prone 33 cultures. Tellingly, Europeans did not acknowledge enslavement as a 34 factor in why people of African descent killed themselves in such large 35 numbers; rather, a common argument was that Africans were “ethni- 36 cally predisposed to suicide.”22 Ironically, then, Anglo-Europeans came 37 to rely on the same link between suicide and culture to demonstrate 38 African peoples’ “fitness” for enslavement, which earlier in the century 39 had been considered part and parcel of English identity. Equiano’s rejec- 40 tion of transmigration as motive and starvation as method undercuts 41 both stereotypes. 42 Writ in Water 79

Yet even as The Interesting Narrative begins to subvert European 1 stereotypes about African minds, Equiano cannot escape the assaults on 2 his own mind and body during his first voyage across the Atlantic. Twice 3 repeating that he had “never experienced anything of the kind before,” 4 Equiano emphasizes the strangeness of these assaults: 5 6 I was soon put down under the decks, and there I received such a salu- 7 tation in my nostrils as I had never experienced in my life; so that, with 8 the loathsomeness of the stench, and crying together, I became so sick 9 and low that I was not able to eat, nor had I the least desire to taste 10 anything. I now wished for the last friend, Death, to relieve me; but 11 soon, to my grief, two of the white men offered me eatables; and, on 12 my refusing to eat, one of them held me fast by the hands, and laid me 13 across, I think, the windlass, and tied my feet, while the other flogged 14 me severely. I had never experience anything of the kind before.23 15 16 In spite of the fact that he is, at this point in his life, still afraid of water 17 (“I naturally feared that element the first time I saw it”24), he insists 18 that he “would have jumped over the side” if not for an even bigger fear 19 of being caught and whipped for the attempt.25 Even if he had made 20 the attempt, it likely would have been prevented by antisuicide nets 21 commonly installed on slave ships (and in this way, enslaved people’s 22 capacity to choose whether to live or die was increasingly determined 23 by enslavers and the environments they constructed). Shortly after this 24 episode, when he witnesses the callous burial at sea of a white sail- 25 or—“they tossed him over the side as they would have done a brute”—his 26 thoughts of suicide begin to evolve.26 27 In the following passage, Equiano reiterates, nearly verbatim, his first 28 survey of the ship, describing again many of the same abject conditions he 29 illustrated just four pages earlier (in the original 1789 printing; in most 30 modern editions, these passages appear even closer together): 31 32 The stench of the hold while we were on the coast was so intolerably 33 loathsome, that it was dangerous to remain there for any time, and 34 some of us had been permitted to stay on the deck for the fresh air; 35 but now that the whole ship’s cargo were confined together, it became 36 almost pestilential. The closeness of the place, and the heat of the 37 climate, added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that 38 each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. . . . The 39 shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying, rendered the whole 40 a scene of horror almost inconceivable. Happily perhaps for myself I 41 42 80 DEATH RIGHTS

1 was soon reduced so low here that it was thought necessary to keep me 2 almost always on deck; and from my extreme youth, I was not put in 3 fetters. In this situation, I expected every hour to share the fate of my 4 companions, some of whom were almost daily brought upon deck at 5 the point of death, which I began to hope would soon put an end to my 6 miseries. Often did I think many of the inhabitants of the deep much 7 more happy than myself; I envied them the freedom they enjoyed, and 8 as often wished I could change my condition for theirs.27 9 10 Here, Equiano find himself wishing for death again, but rather than 11 feeling powerless against the ship’s various technologies of control, his 12 suicidal longing leads him to reckon with the (im)possibility of black 13 futurity. In this register, his reference to the “inhabitants of the deep” is 14 a profoundly interesting turn of phrase, paying homage to African folk- 15 tales of transatlantic flight while maintaining his self-professed disbelief 16 in the transmigration of souls.28 17 Folktales of transatlantic flight abound among disparate peoples of 18 the African diaspora. They tell of humans having access to magical 19 powers that allow them to fly or, in some versions, walk over water 20 back to Africa. One event informed by these beliefs, which has since 21 also come to be strongly associated with suicide, occurred in 1803 on 22 Georgia’s St. Simon’s Island, widely known today as Igbo Landing. 23 This event was recalled by several formerly enslaved people interviewed 24 for the Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s. One interviewee, “Uncle 25 Jonah” Sunbury, remembers “a boatload” of enslaved people “tak[ing] 26 wing and fly[ing] back home.”29 The event at Igbo Landing, wherein 27 thirteen enslaved people drowned themselves, is widely read as a form 28 of rebellion by collective suicide. However, as Floyd White, another 29 Federal Writers’ Project interviewee contends, if this was a rebellion, 30 it failed: the people drowned.30 Suicide, then, is not necessarily the 31 right framework through which to interpret flying African legends, 32 not least because it presumes a freely made choice. As Snyder argues, 33 “to the extent that suicide was conscious and deliberate, it was selected 34 from an egregiously narrow range of possibilities. . . . To say that slaves, 35 ironically, chose [suicide] in order to die autonomously or to argue that 36 slave self-destruction was an index of their humanity ignores both the 37 chillingly fatal cost of slaves’ self-destructive acts—they died—and 38 the meanings of those deaths.”31 Flying African legends thus present 39 discursive and epistemological possibilities that unsettle the differential 40 logics through which Anglo-Europeans understood acts of voluntary 41 death among enslaved peoples.32 42 Writ in Water 81

Thus, even as Equiano, writing as a converted Christian, distances 1 himself from African beliefs, his reference to the “inhabitants of the 2 deep” nevertheless registers and pays them homage. Looking into the 3 water during a moment of particular anguish, the phrase may well refer 4 to the countless dead at the bottom of the ocean where, in this moment, 5 he wishes to be. Yet this imagined communion with the dead is not 6 sentimentalized as it inevitably would have been in contemporaneous 7 abolitionist texts. Having already distanced himself from transmigra- 8 tion, we know it is not freedom in Africa that Equiano imagines when 9 he stares into that water. Nor does Equiano frame freedom in death as 10 a form of resistance, although as he makes clear elsewhere in The Inter- 11 esting Narrative, he does not foreclose resistance as a motivating factor 12 for others.33 Equiano himself found other ways of resisting including, 13 as Marcus Rediker has argued, by learning the workings of the ship 14 and becoming indispensable to the crew.34 Certainly, becoming a sailor 15 offered a way for Equiano to stay alive. But in challenging racialized 16 conceptions of why and how African people kill themselves so early in 17 The Interesting Narrative, Equiano sets up the rest of the text to explore 18 what it means for him to live. And so, when Equiano stares into the 19 water, staring back at him is the very futurity that the politics and poli- 20 cies of enslavement—of denying a human being his claim to humanity, 21 of turning his body into a commodity—mean to preclude. 22 Equiano’s revision of popular ideas about enslaved people’s suicides 23 is, moreover, a radical recuperation of the flesh, as defined by Hort- 24 ense Spillers, from liberalism’s dichotomy between body and no body. 25 When he stares into the water and doesn’t jump, he demands that 26 Anglo-European readers confront what it means that someone they 27 have deprived of social life would keep choosing to live. By centering 28 the flesh, Equiano anticipates Weheliye’s critique of the primacy of 29 the body in western notions of the legal and ontological construction 30 of both personhood and the human. As discussed in this book’s first 31 chapter, Weheliye asks what a conception of the human might look 32 like as an ontological totality: “a relational assemblage exterior to the 33 jurisdiction of law given that the law . . . does not possess the authority 34 to nullify the politics and poetics of the flesh found in the traditions 35 of the oppressed.”35 Contrary to the body, on which so many of liberal 36 modernity’s social logics turn, the flesh offers Equiano a completely 37 different basis for defining what it is to be human. The apparent 38 impossibility, then, of Equiano’s vision of life within the ocean’s mortal 39 depths registers how the violence of antiblackness produces, even as it 40 means to negate, black social existence. 41 42 82 DEATH RIGHTS

1 Within a western frame, “black life” has been rendered nearly as 2 impossible a configuration as “inhabiting the deep.” To reconcile black 3 social existence with humanity demands the complete disordering of 4 the social world as we know it. As Wilderson has argued, “One would 5 have to lose one’s Human coordinates and become Black. Which is to 6 say, one would have to die.”36 Likewise, The Interesting Narrative high- 7 lights how asserting the value of black lives in a liberal frame conscripts 8 those lives to the very dialectic that necessitates their status as black in 9 the first place, thereby ensuring that “black lives” never attain “black 10 life.” For Wilderson, the epistemological borders between black and 11 nonblack are impermeable within the terms of liberal modernity. To 12 move beyond them requires the absolute destruction and reconstruction 13 of society as we know it. The Interesting Narrative understands this 14 intractability; however, in Equiano’s hands, the singularity of the flesh 15 signals possibilities beyond these bounds. This is why, in the waters of 16 the Atlantic Ocean, a space of so much death, Equiano still manages 17 to find life. But to articulate what he sees there in a framework not 18 bound to liberal notions of humanity—defined as such contra (black) 19 nonhumanity—Equiano must first distance himself from “the human” 20 altogether. And thus, his reference to the “inhabitants of the deep” may 21 also be quite literal. 22 23 Equiano’s Black Ecology 24 25 Throughout the early chapters of The Interesting Narrative, Equiano is 26 fascinated by the aquatic creatures that he encounters on the ship. These 27 other life forms allow him to access an alternative ontological imagi- 28 nary; thus, they offer a reprieve from the real and figurative encounters 29 with death that structure so much of his existence on the ship. Building 30 from the existing category confusion of the human with the nonhuman 31 that drove the institution of slavery (i.e., turning human beings into 32 nonhuman objects), Equiano’s growing interest in aquatic life opens 33 his text to the possibility of reading human being through an ethic and 34 praxis of relation. Equiano thus transforms the enslaved African into 35 what we might call an ecological subject—a subject that stands open to 36 and is defined by the complexity of interrelations between the worlds 37 of human and nonhuman beings. 38 Pseudoscientific racist discourses have authorized and dissemi- 39 nated the bestialization of blackness so much so that thinking about 40 them together necessitates certain caveats. As Sharon Patricia Holland 41 writes, “in the vocabularies of vulnerability applied to black agents, we 42 Writ in Water 83

can recognize a constant worry about the descent into animality.”37 1 However, Holland challenges this negative relation, showing that “there 2 are narratives that place black being, black-ness in direct relation to 3 the animal in modes of consideration, relation, and mutual observation 4 that do not always already follow a prescription for violent trespass, 5 possible descent or . . . negative mimetic relation.”38 I would suggest 6 that Equiano’s is one such narrative—a reclamation of a fuller scope 7 of humanity than what is allowed by “enlightened” delimitations of 8 blackness as antithetical to human being, achieved by attending to 9 forms of nonhuman life. To be clear, Equiano does not actually equate 10 blackness with animality. Rather, he engages the logics of categoriza- 11 tion that undergird the era’s pseudosciences of race to trouble the lines 12 that within these logics demarcate who does and who does not “count” 13 as human. 14 This begins with Equiano’s recognition of the ocean as a life-sus- 15 taining force. Even as it is a mass grave for countless human beings, the 16 ocean also provides sustenance to humans in the form of food and exists 17 as a vast ecosystem unto itself. In this sense, Equiano’s mode of thinking 18 blackness ecologically also prefigures contemporary scientific findings 19 that, as Christina Sharpe has discussed, indicate the continued atomic 20 presence of enslaved people’s bodies as part of the ocean’s ecologies: 21 22 The atoms of those people who were thrown overboard are out there 23 in the ocean even today. They were eaten, organisms processed them, 24 and those organisms were in turn eaten and processed, and the cycle 25 continues. . . . The amount of time it takes for a substance to enter the 26 ocean and leave the ocean is called residence time. Human blood is 27 salty, and sodium . . . has a residence time of 260 million years. And 28 what happens to the energy that it produced in the waters? It continues 29 cycling like atoms in residence time. We, Black people, exist in the 30 residence time of the wake.39 31 32 When Equiano encounters fish as a child on the first of many trans- 33 atlantic voyages, he registers them as food: “One day they had taken a 34 number of fishes; and when they had killed and satisfied themselves with 35 as many as they thought fit, to our astonishment who were on the deck, 36 rather than give any of them to us to eat as we expected, they tossed the 37 remaining fish into the sea again, although we begged and prayed for 38 some as well as we could, but in vain.”40 As the narrative progresses he 39 begins to define his own life in terms of the lives of the fish he observes: 40 the fish are also captured and discarded at the whims of European 41 42 84 DEATH RIGHTS

1 enslavers. Indeed, like many newly captured Africans, Equiano initially 2 assumes that he has been captured and brought on board the ship to be 3 eaten like the fish.41 4 Nor is this slippage between animal and human limited to Equiano’s 5 personal reflections. Ocean life also serves an important biopolitical 6 function for the enslavers. In keeping enslaved people from eating the fish 7 caught on the deck, white sailors mark their authority and delineate the 8 captives as other than human and less than human (if not, at this point, 9 altogether nonhuman). Monique Allewaert has developed a framework 10 for reading the disciplining of enslaved bodies in terms of what she calls 11 the parahuman, “an interstitial form of life that could be exploited for 12 labor power in the way animals were . . . a perversion of the category of 13 the human.”42 While eighteenth-century taxonomies of nature commonly 14 categorized Africans simply as animals, Allewaert introduces the para- 15 human to recover the complex ways in which enslaved peoples negotiated 16 their own humanity against European classificatory logics. Thus, she 17 posits that the era of slavery introduced a new, if largely unacknowledged, 18 understanding of the human that “loosens subjective identifications with 19 either human or animal forms of being” and enables “an articulation of 20 equality in diversity on a species level.”43 The Interesting Narrative hear- 21 kens toward such an understanding of a double suicide, which Equiano 22 witnesses just after the episode in which the starving captives are denied 23 fish to eat: 24 25 Some of my countrymen, being pressed by hunger, took an oppor- 26 tunity, when they thought no one saw them, of trying to get a little 27 privately; but they were discovered, and the attempt procured them 28 some very severe floggings. One day . . . two of my wearied countrymen 29 who were chained together (I was near them at the time), preferring 30 death to such a life of misery, somehow made through the nettings and 31 jumped into the sea: immediately another quite dejected fellow, who, 32 on account of his illness, was suffered to be out of irons, also followed 33 their example; and I believe many more would very soon have done 34 the same if they had not been prevented by the ship’s crew, who were 35 instantly alarmed.44 36 37 The enslavers’ deliberate category confusion between human being and 38 object is underscored by the taxonomies used to justify racial enslave- 39 ment. These logics are challenged when the starving captives move to 40 steal the fish, unequivocally asserting their humanity. The flogging they 41 receive is meant to discipline them from human being to object, but the 42 Writ in Water 85

three people who choose to die instead undermine that process. What is 1 so precisely alarming about these suicides for the sailors is the enslaved 2 men’s refusal to be disciplined as objects. Two of the three men complete 3 their refusals and drown; one is pulled back and “flogged . . . unmerci- 4 fully for thus attempting to prefer death to slavery.”45 5 Following the double suicide and thwarted third attempt, Equiano 6 starts to register the full strangeness of his circumstances, including his 7 status as parahuman. This transition is marked by his evolving views 8 on fish, from food that sustains human life to forms of life worthy of 9 recognition as such in their own right: “I first saw flying fishes, which 10 surprised me very much: they used frequently to fly across the ship, 11 and many of them fell on the deck . . . I was now more persuaded than 12 ever that I was in another world, and that every thing about me was 13 magic.”46 Ocean life increasingly inspires flights of fancy in Equiano, 14 and through these, he imagines alternatives to enslavement and its 15 underlying ideologies. At one point, he regards orcas as akin to gods: 16 “I believed them to be the rulers of the sea . . . the wind just then died 17 away, and a calm ensued, and in consequence of it the ship stopped 18 going. I supposed that the fish had performed this.”47 This marks a 19 departure from his sense, just a few passages earlier, of himself as inter- 20 changeable with a captured and abused shark.48 And it also suggests 21 another reference point for Equiano: in addition to human beings 22 who died on the Middle Passage and aquatic animals that alternately 23 sustain (in multiple senses) and inspire him, Equiano’s invocation of 24 the “inhabitants of the deep” also calls forth the Afrodiasporic water 25 spirit Mami Wata. 26 Though water deities are common in many African cultures, Mami 27 Wata belongs, uniquely, to the African diaspora. There is some dispute 28 regarding her exact origins, but most scholars agree that Mami Wata 29 stories developed in West Africa in the fifteenth century, roughly conter- 30 minously with the beginnings of large-scale European exploitation of 31 African peoples and resources. Mami Wata stories modify earlier tropes 32 of water spirits as embodied in aquatic creatures by incorporating Euro- 33 pean water-related mythical imagery such as mermaids.49 Even the spirit’s 34 name is said, by some, to be a pidgin English for “Mother of Water.” 35 In this sense, Mami Wata registers the variety of prediasporic African 36 beliefs while also delineating a new cultural imaginary that exceeds their 37 national bounds. However, as a number of critics stress, she is not, herself, 38 “a pidgin phenomenon.”50 Though undeniably linked to and influenced 39 by non-African cultures, Mami Wata stories and practices of worship 40 did not develop for foreign consumption. Rather, she offers a window 41 42 86 DEATH RIGHTS

1 into how Africans understood their early encounter with Europeans.51 2 Mami Wata registers perspectives that tend to get lost in Eurocentric 3 accounts of African peoples and their histories. Insofar as she developed 4 from African recalibrations of European cultural tropes—not the other 5 way around—Mami Wata is an important symbol of African agency over 6 European cultural imports. At the same time, she is a manifestation of 7 the necessarily intercultural multiplicity that buttresses Afrodiasporic 8 ontologies and epistemologies. 9 Exactly how Mami Wata registers relations between Africa and Europe 10 varies considerably. In coastal Ghana, stories of Mami Wata’s influence 11 over inclement weather phenomena are registered as vengeance for the 12 trade in enslaved Africans.52 Elsewhere, Mami Wata embodies western 13 obsessions with luxury, wealth, and power; in these stories, she represents 14 values quite antithetical to those of precolonial Africans.53 She has 15 also been linked to versions of flying African folktales, as Michelle D. 16 Commander explains below: 17 18 During the slave trade, a group of Igbo Africans who, though shackled 19 together on a slave ship, called on Mami Wata to “carry” them back 20 home to Africa, a plea that she granted, endowing them with the 21 needed strength to leap into the ocean. Their screams, the clinking 22 of metal shackles against the body of the ship, and their impassioned 23 entreaties to Mami Wata are thus fabled to endure in the Atlantic’s 24 sonic atmosphere, offering a radical, haunting reverberation.54 25 26 Equiano’s thoughts of dying during his spiritual encounter with the 27 “inhabitants of the deep” mark a moment of resistance, a stance against 28 defining himself according to liberal principles. Though he does not 29 name her, the spirit of Mami Wata propels him toward renewed agency 30 and self-identification that proceeds from a position of encounter with, 31 not as, the other. Calling on Mami Wata destabilizes his natal alien- 32 ation. The spirits that Equiano encounters in the water return him, if 33 not specifically to his Igbo roots, then to a broader Afrodiasporic heri- 34 tage. Thus, they reestablish a component of the social life that the system 35 of chattel slavery means to deny him—a life now neither wholly western 36 nor wholly African but precisely diasporic. Part human and part fish, 37 Mami Wata is likewise “a transcendent, transformative, transcultural, 38 transnational, transgendered, trans-Atlantic being.”55 Acknowledging his 39 own multiplicity enables Equiano to reconceptualize the human as rela- 40 tional and mediated through encounter not only with political subjects 41 (as created by and understood within the liberal imaginary) but also 42 Writ in Water 87 with the panoply of intra- and interspecies nonsubjects (against which 1 liberalism defines itself). 2 Bearing this relation to natural and supernatural aquatic life in mind, 3 I return to the critical moment when Equiano looks into the water and 4 sees freedom: 5 6 I expected every hour to share the fate of my companions, some of 7 whom were almost daily brought upon deck at the point of death, 8 which I began to hope would soon put an end to my miseries. Often 9 did I think many of the inhabitants of the deep much more happy than 10 myself. I envied them the freedom they enjoyed, and as often wished I 11 could change my condition for theirs.56 12 13 If this begins as a solipsistic moment, it evolves into a radically hopeful 14 denial of the ontological impossibility of black life wrought by liberal 15 modernity’s association of blackness with (social) death. Whatever or 16 whomever the “inhabitants” represent, Equiano’s experience with “the 17 deep” moves his narrative toward extra- or superhuman intimacy and 18 agency. This encounter thus functions to bring into Equiano’s purview 19 the political efficacy of relation. Born(e) from the particular traumas 20 of African enslavement, relation in this sense is diametrically opposed 21 to the structures of exclusionary individualism, as Édouard Glissant 22 explains: 23 24 Straight from the belly of the slave ship into the violent belly of 25 the ocean depths they went. But their ordeal did not die. . . .The 26 unconscious memory of the abyss served as the alluvium for these 27 metamorphoses. The populations that then formed, despite having 28 forgotten the chasm, despite being unable to imagine the passion of 29 those who foundered there, nonetheless wove this sail (a veil). They 30 did not use it to return to the Former Land but rose up on this unex- 31 pected, dumbfounded land. They met the first inhabitants, who had 32 also been deported by permanent havoc; or perhaps they only caught 33 a whiff of the ravaged train of these people. . . .Thus, the absolute 34 unknown, projected by the abyss . . . in the end became knowledge. 35 Not just a specific knowledge . . . but knowledge of the Whole, greater 36 from having been at the abyss and freeing knowledge of Relation 37 within the Whole.57 38 39 Although Glissant recognizes the slave ship as a site of devastation, he 40 also sees in it a generative quality, frequently referring to it as a womb. 41 42 88 DEATH RIGHTS

1 As in Gilroy’s framework of the Black Atlantic, Glissant frames the 2 slave ship as a source of unanimity that through shared suffering joined 3 multilingual and initially disconnected peoples. The abyss—the vast 4 ocean of anguish endured and remembered by peoples of the African 5 diaspora—enables not only the development of a unique set of identities 6 but also points of entry into establishing connections with other subju- 7 gated peoples. This, in turn, enables more capacious forms of knowledge, 8 “not just a specific knowledge, appetite, suffering, and delight of one 9 particular people.”58 The abyss thus informs epistemologies beyond the 10 western world’s self-sanctioned, self-disseminated, and self-policed narra- 11 tives of enlightened modernity. 12 What Glissant describes as “the Whole” or totality may just as well 13 be discussed using the term ecology, based, as it is, in recognition of 14 the interconnectedness of all human and nonhuman beings. Glissant’s 15 notion of relation shares deep affinities with the sense of interrelation 16 between beings posited by ecological thinking. Equiano’s emphasis on 17 representing nonhuman beings as, by turns, metaphors and analogues 18 for his own experience draws our attention to ecological spaces marked 19 and sustained by mutually coexisting forms of life. It is toward such an 20 ecology that Equiano himself drives in likening his experience on the 21 ship with those that inhabit the deep. Thus, Equiano’s conception of 22 his own identities as African, English, diasporic, multiple—as well as his 23 broader interrogation of the western project of “the human”—emerges 24 from a pattern of interactions (an ecological relation) between the alien 25 lives of nonhuman animals and superhuman spirits and the alienation 26 of enslavement. Equiano’s narrative positions itself against the individ- 27 ualism of “Man” and the false promises of liberal humanism, moving 28 toward something akin to Glissant’s notion of relation. 29 Yet contrary to Glissant’s reclamation of the slave ship as a generative 30 space, for Equiano, the ship remains a space of death. While one can 31 argue that his experiences as a sailor eventually lead him to social inte- 32 gration and legibility, the life that he finds there—not to mention at the 33 conclusion of the narrative when he marries a white woman and estab- 34 lishes himself as a member of English society—is only “life” according 35 to liberal modernity’s terms. The slave-ship-as-womb analogy may thus, 36 at best, be read as a metaphor for what Jared Sexton describes as stalled 37 birth, an endlessly “unbearable blackness” that creates the condition of 38 possibility for the human, even as it is decidedly not human itself: “Racial 39 blackness as the sine qua non of enslavement is devolved into a form of 40 prenatal animation—‘stuff floating’ . . . in amniotic fluid somewhere 41 between the embryonic and the fetal, between swelling and sucking, 42 Writ in Water 89

[akin to what Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek discuss as] ‘a terrifying 1 excess which, although it negates what we understand as ‘humanity,’ is 2 inherent to being-human.’”59 Thus, it is precisely not on the ship but 3 in the ocean, through the human dead, nonhuman animals, and super- 4 human water spirits, that Equiano envisages black futurity and survival. 5 6 Black Optimism and Equiano’s Poetic Turn 7 8 At its most radical, The Interesting Narrative invites readers to embrace 9 the deep. I see this move as anticipating Moten’s emphasis on “life 10 and optimism” over and against Afropessimism’s emphasis on death 11 (even as Moten agrees with Sexton’s appraisal of the two projects as, in 12 terms of their larger political, ethical, and intellectual commitments, 13 “not but nothing other than one another”).60 Where both projects 14 understand blackness as ontologically exterior to civil society, Moten 15 recalibrates the focus: rather than accepting blackness as the by-product 16 of liberalism’s imposition of social death on those against whom its 17 subjects define themselves as living, Moten emphasizes that “black life 18 is lived . . . in the burial ground of the subject by those who, insofar 19 as they are not subjects, are also not . . . ‘death-bound.’”61 Which 20 is to say, black life is not the condition of possibility for someone 21 else’s humanity. Rather, if we shift our epistemological grounding to 22 recognize liberal modernity itself as the domain and dominion of 23 death, social and otherwise, then “(the thinking and study of ) black- 24 ness . . . bears the potential to end this funereal reign with an animative 25 breath . . . [to] produce the absolute overturning, the absolute turning 26 of this motherfucker out.”62 Thus, though he ultimately accedes (at 27 least superficially) to the bounds of liberalism, Equiano’s turn to the 28 deep is cause for celebration “not because celebration is supposed to 29 make us feel good or make us better, though there would be nothing 30 wrong with that. It is, rather, because the cause for celebration turns out 31 to be the condition of possibility of black thought. . . . Celebration is 32 the essence of black thought, the animation of black operations, which 33 are, in the first instance, our undercommon, underground, submarine 34 sociality.”63 By the end of The Interesting Narrative, we might say that 35 Equiano surfaces to become a respected member of English society 36 (and this, perhaps, is its own kind of suicide, even as it facilitates his 37 survival). But even where he accepts certain structures of whiteness 38 to authorize his legibility in England and the British Atlantic world, 39 he does so without completely abandoning his interrogation of those 40 structures. 41 42 90 DEATH RIGHTS

1 Although it occasionally includes excerpts from popular poetry, The 2 Interesting Narrative itself is composed in prose with one significant 3 exception: a long poem in the middle of chapter 10 entitled “Miscella- 4 neous Verses; or, Reflections on the State of My Mind during My First 5 Convictions of the Necessity of Believing the Truth, and of Experiencing 6 the Inestimable Benefits of Christianity.” Here, Equiano’s negotiation 7 of his conversion to Christianity irrupts from prose into lyrical verse 8 and, much like the poetry of his close contemporary Phillis Wheatley, 9 Equiano’s is rife with double meanings. The poem embedded late in The 10 Interesting Narrative revisits the autobiography’s earlier engagement with 11 the subject of suicide. Though it announces itself as a poem about reli- 12 gious awakening, Equiano’s references to suicide continue to challenge 13 the bounds of “Man,” even as he appears to integrate and capitulate to 14 western social norms. 15 Echoing reasons he had already given for why he chose to stay alive— 16 namely, the antisuicide devices installed on slave ships and his disbelief in 17 transmigration—Equiano recalls his life in bondage as one of perpetual 18 melancholy with no agency: 19 20 Prevented, that I could not die, 21 Nor could to one sure refuge fly; 22 An orphan state I had to mourn,– 23 Forsook by all, and left forlorn.64 24 25 Importantly, he distances the mental state he describes here from the 26 suicidal melancholy depicted by abolitionist poetry, declaring that spec- 27 tators “by appearance could not know / The troubles that I waded 28 through.”65 Further, Equiano ascribes his decision not to kill himself 29 to the Christian deity: “I wish’d for death, but check’d the word, / 30 And often pray’d unto the Lord.”66 If this refers to the moments of 31 suicidality he had discussed in Part 1, then this is a revisionist moment 32 and one of self-contradiction; but I read it as part of another rhetor- 33 ical strategy. The following stanza suggests an explanation for why he 34 chooses life that does not contradict what Equiano had established in 35 Part 1: 36 37 Unhappy, more than some on earth, 38 I thought the place that gave me birth— 39 Strange thoughts oppress’d—while I replied 40 ‘Why not in Ethiopia died?’67 41 42 Writ in Water 91

Here, Equiano credits Africa, not Christianity or the west, with keeping 1 him from killing himself. The dashes in the second and third lines above 2 break up the grammar of the stanza, highlighting that it is “the place 3 that gave me birth” that finally curbs his “strange thoughts” of suicide. 4 The stanza thus gives an Afrocentric reason for his choosing to stay alive. 5 The strained grammar of this stanza, particularly in the final question 6 lacking a clear subject, suggests that African life and thought cannot be 7 fully expressed by the rules of the English language. As such, it begs the 8 question of whether the life Equiano leads and the identities he inhabits 9 as he writes these words can be mapped onto the organizing structures 10 of liberal modernity. If, in the context of the society that sanctions his 11 publication, to be English is to be fully human, then of course it tracks 12 that he would have his mostly white readers believe that a formerly 13 enslaved African can become an English subject. Still, he continues to 14 push against the bounds of this framework of the human as he had done 15 earlier—by turning to the nonhuman animal. 16 Echoing his earlier communion with aquatic beings, Equiano now 17 considers the freedom of aerial ones: 18 19 Oft times I mus’d, and nigh despair, 20 While birds melodious fill’d the air; 21 ‘Thrice happy songsters, ever free,’ 22 How blest were they, compared to me!68 23 24 Where, in his encounter with the inhabitants of the deep, Equiano saw 25 blackness in the water, here he locates it in the air, as “sable clouds began 26 to rise.” This is interrupted as “The English nation [calls him] to leave.”69 27 In framing England as a nation at a distance—not, for example, as “my” 28 nation—Equiano underscores that his imagination remains independent 29 of the dominating ideologies of the west. Thus, Equiano’s engagement 30 with the idea of suicide demands to be read not in terms of the liberal 31 imaginary to which he addresses his autobiography but instead through 32 the human dead, the nonhuman animals, and the superhuman spirits 33 with and through whom he seems to be writing. 34 The transcendental capacity that Equiano finds in his communion 35 with these figures helps him to revise well-meaning but ultimately 36 ill-conceived sentiments that would reduce his life to a legal abstrac- 37 tion—a “slave” always already devoid of civic or social life—rather than 38 a human being whose enslavement is naturalized by the society that 39 takes it upon itself to write the terms of his liberation. In this sense, 40 41 42 92 DEATH RIGHTS

1 Equiano’s “inhabitants of the deep” function somewhat similarly to 2 romantic notions about the capacity of the poetic imagination to tran- 3 scend the material boundedness of being human. Equiano embraces the 4 sea to open his reader’s gaze beyond the limits that liberal modernity 5 places on his humanity. I wonder whether and how twenty-first-cen- 6 tury engagements with romanticism might follow that gaze further into 7 the deep: to account for and allow black epistemologies to reorient the 8 stories we tell about romanticism and to bring forward new possibilities 9 for reading romanticism in expanded political and historical contexts. 10 By way of conclusion, I would like to reframe one foundational example 11 of romantic thought through the contra- or parahuman heuristics I have 12 been discussing here. 13 14 Keats’s Posthumous Life 15 16 Much has been made of John Keats’s self-authored epitaph: “Here lies 17 one whose name was writ in water.” Recollections of the poet who 18 claimed to be “in love with easeful death” have fed the association 19 between artistic genius and what I have been calling romantic suicide, 20 even as Keats’s penchant for thinking about his own death is not, as 21 some have argued, easily reducible to suicidality.70 In his final letter, 22 written to Charles Brown on November 30, 1820, Keats complains that 23 the intensity of his illness has caused him to lead an already “posthu- 24 mous existence.”71 Along similar lines, Joseph Severn later recalls that 25 Keats would weep when he awoke and found himself still living.72 Thus, 26 Keats’s ready embrace of death at the end of his short life, combined 27 with his well-documented anxiety about his literary legacy (“I have left 28 no immortal work behind me—nothing to make my friends proud of 29 my memory”), animates a familiar narrative of Keats as the quintessen- 30 tial tortured artist who only came to be appreciated after his death.73 31 Keats’s reputation as a frail, misunderstood genius who was finally 32 undone by bad reviews persists as an organizing myth of British roman- 33 ticism, and thus, to be “writ in water” has come to signal an ethereal 34 literary legacy. This is coincidentally compounded by Percy Shelley’s 35 death by drowning and his own epitaph, “Nothing of him that doth 36 fade, but doth suffer a sea-change, into something rich and strange,” 37 from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The metonymic relation between the 38 trope of water—as a symbol of fluidity, atemporality, mutability—and 39 the early death of a particular sort of poet blurs the line between the 40 poetry and the men who wrote it. But what about those people whose 41 lives and deaths are not recalled in books or marked by gravestones? 42 Writ in Water 93

Reframed through Equiano’s discussion of the inhabitants of the deep, 1 to be writ in water opens a different critical register within which to 2 read canonical romanticism. If the black ecological gaze enables alter- 3 natives to western conceptualizations of the human, it does so not 4 only for people of African descent but also, necessarily, for Europeans. 5 Such recalibrations are necessary for all of us who live in the after- 6 life of Atlantic slavery. Keats’s rejection of the material world and his 7 desire to transcend the boundedness of his humanity shares something 8 in common with Equiano’s (re)vision of the human. Indeed, though 9 Keats invokes it as the archaic form of “written,” the word “writ” also 10 recalls the language of law and the primacy that liberal modernity 11 places on the body. In this framework, Keats’s appeal to immanence 12 might be taken as an attempt to reconceptualize the human rather 13 than to keep alive the restrictive and exclusionary ideal of tragic white 14 masculinity. 15 In his most explicitly suicidal work, “Ode to a Nightingale,” Keats 16 rejects the human in the same manner as Equiano had done: by appealing 17 to nonhuman animals. Keats’s association of the nightingale with “the 18 viewless wings of Poesy,” coupled with his emphasis on her immortality, 19 suggests that he is also calling up something extra- or superhuman. 20 Equiano’s turn to Mami Wata gives way to, in Keats, the Greek myth 21 of Philomela in an asymptotically related effort to revise and open new 22 understandings of the human. Sometimes named, but more often troped 23 as a nightingale, robin, thrush, or some other singing bird, Philomela 24 is enshrined in Anglo-European poetics as a symbol of that which is 25 perpetually present but defies straightforward expression, thereby calling 26 forth the necessity of poetry. Twentieth-century poet and critic Allen 27 Grossman has argued that the western poetic tradition is founded on the 28 complementary myths of Philomela and Orpheus. Orpheus becomes the 29 emblematic poet of “humanity” after he loses everything that defines him 30 as a man: his wife dies, mad women tear him apart (in many versions of 31 the story, castrating him), and still he sings on. Implicitly, the Orphean 32 paradigm turns on an understanding of humanity in terms of western 33 male subjectivity. But as Grossman tells us, Philomela precedes this para- 34 digm. Ovid’s Metamorphoses introduces Philomela as a noble woman 35 raped by the king Tereus, her sister’s husband. To silence her, Tereus cuts 36 out her tongue, but Philomela finds a way to tell her story by weaving it 37 into a tapestry. Ultimately, Philomela is transformed into a nightingale 38 and sings in perpetuity. Grossman points to a key moment in Virgil’s 39 Georgics when Orpheus encounters Philomela already in her nightin- 40 gale form: 41 42 94 DEATH RIGHTS

1 Month in, month out, seven whole months, men say beneath a lofty 2 cliff by lonely Strymon’s shore [Orpheus] wept, and deep in icy caverns, 3 unfolding this his tale, charming tigers, and making the oaks attend 4 his strain; even as the nightingale, mourning beneath the poplar’s 5 shade, bewails the loss of her brood, that a churlish ploughman hath 6 espied and torn unfledged from the nest: but she weeps all night long 7 and, perched on a spray, renews her piteous strain, filling the region 8 with sad laments.74 9 10 This episode suggests that Philomela is older than Orpheus. Her songs 11 presuppose and announce his, but he is unable to recognize hers. In her 12 transformation to a nightingale, she is freed from human being, and thus 13 she sings from beyond it. This is the freedom that Keats seeks when he 14 imagines that he might “drink, and leave the world unseen / And with 15 [the nightingale] fade away into the forest dim.”75 16 Unlike many contemporaneous engagements with the nightin- 17 gale—wherein she is either held up as an abstract ideal (as in Charlotte 18 Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets) or made to speak in a language that isn’t hers 19 (as in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Nightingale: A Conversation 20 Poem”)—Keats speaks not about or as but to the nightingale. The poem 21 begins in a heavily enjambed first person that seems to teeter, by the 22 third and fourth lines, on the edge of the third person: “My heart 23 aches, and a drowsy numbness pains / my sense, as though of hemlock 24 I had drunk, / Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains / One minute 25 past, and Lethe wards had sunk.”76 It is not until the fifth line that the 26 speaker addresses the nightingale directly, and even here, the address 27 functions only to establish an audience for him to continue his own 28 narrative of self-searching: “Tis not through envy of thy happy lot / 29 But being too happy in thine happiness, / That thou. . . . Singest of 30 summer in full-throated ease.”77 In the first stanza, the enjambment 31 undergirds dizzying shifts between points of view, from the introspec- 32 tive lyricism of the opening, to the narrative mode in the middle, and 33 finally to the outward-facing address of the stanza’s conclusion. The 34 poem carries on in this fashion, changing quickly and unexpectedly, 35 without the ordering mechanisms of end-line or stanza breaks to mark 36 shifts in perspective, temporality, and address, even as it is otherwise 37 heavily structured through rhyme. Thus, the only consistently iden- 38 tifiable perspective becomes the reader’s own. But even this is called 39 into question when, in appealing to the nightingale, the speaker also 40 reaches out to the reader. 41 In this way, Keats locates the reader in the position of the extrahuman 42 Writ in Water 95

subject, even as he precludes any reader’s full identification with the 1 mythic bird by reminding us of her immortality: “Thou wast not born for 2 death, immortal Bird! / No hungry generations tread thee down; / The 3 voice I hear this passing night was heard / In ancient days by emperor and 4 clown.”78 For Helen Vendler, this moment suggests “a democratic diffu- 5 sion: the song is audible to all alike.”79 However, there is also something 6 decidedly undemocratic in the fact that the reader cannot but identify 7 with the speaker, the inescapably human subject whose humanity is 8 marked by the reason for his invocation of the nightingale in the first 9 place, his increasingly debilitated body: 10 11 The weariness, the fever, and the fret 12 Here, where men sit and hear each other groan; 13 Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs, 14 Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies; 15 Where but to think is to be full of sorrow 16 And leaden-eyed despairs; 17 Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes, 18 Or new love pine at them beyond to-morrow.80 19 20 Against these physical limitations, the speaker imagines flying “on the 21 viewless wings of poesy.”81 In giving himself wings, the speaker seeks to 22 become the nightingale. However, by virtue of the form of his address, 23 any communion with the nightingale is also an appeal to the reader. And 24 thus, our position within the poem is perplexed again, as we are forced to 25 consider how to move from that which seems to define some and preclude 26 others from being seen as fully human—our variously aged, gendered, 27 racialized bodies—to something quite beyond them. Keats’s nightingale 28 thus signals the possibility but also the difficulty of thinking beyond 29 the western frame of the human; thus, the poem ends with the speaker’s 30 return to the humanity he knows, which is to say, his own, relegating any 31 possibilities opened by the nightingale to “a vision, or a waking dream,”82 32 a figment of the imagination. 33 In the black radical tradition of which Equiano is a key progenitor, 34 the imagination is strongly and sometimes singularly associated with 35 freedom. Among other things, the imagination holds within it the poten- 36 tiality of revising or dismantling the social logics that define blackness as 37 negation. As Moten writes, “The imagination [and] the black . . . partake 38 of the ‘lawless freedom’” that exists against, and as an effect of, the logics 39 of liberal modernity.83 Phillis Wheatley espouses a similar idea in terms 40 that at first blush may appear to be paradigmatically romantic: 41 42 96 DEATH RIGHTS

1 Imagination! who can sing thy force? 2 Or who describe the swiftness of thy course? 3 Soaring through air to find the bright abode, 4 Th’ empyreal palace of the thund’ring God, 5 We on thy pinions can surpass the wind, 6 And leave the rolling universe behind: 7 From star to star the mental optics rove, 8 Measure the skies, and range the realms above. 9 There in one view we grasp the mighty whole, 10 Or with new worlds amaze th’ unbounded soul.84 11 12 Wheatley ascribes to the imagination the power to remake the world, 13 not merely to escape it. The imagination enables her to write herself on 14 her own terms rather than those ascribed to her by a white supremacist 15 society. But I don’t mean to suggest that either Wheatley or Equiano 16 should be read as protoromantics. Even as Keats’s affect and language 17 may be comparable, in certain ways, to Equiano’s or Wheatley’s, when 18 Keats returns to his embodied reality at the end of “Ode to a Nightin- 19 gale,” he returns to a social world in which his humanity is recognized 20 and affirmed as such. And here, blackness and romanticism diverge in 21 ways that are ultimately and fundamentally irreconcilable: to have the 22 luxury of romanticizing suicide, the suicidal subject must first be legible 23 as fully human.85 24 British romantic writers never did evacuate liberal epistemologies of 25 the human, even as many of romanticism’s most deeply held ideals about 26 a world beyond material and political boundaries developed in implicit 27 opposition to the same human(ism)s challenged by the black radical 28 tradition. My point is not that the projects are similar but that the places 29 where they diverge can illuminate both. Why don’t we read the waters of 30 the Middle Passage in the phrase “writ in water”? What if Keats’s wish 31 to be remembered through an act of erasure recalled Equiano’s “inhabi- 32 tants of the deep,” who had no say in the matter? In their thinking about 33 suicide, both authors reject fantasies of epistemological closure and onto- 34 logical self-containment. How deeply ironic, then, that the liberal subject 35 should so ardently court death (and here, I’m speaking not of Keats 36 himself but of the culture that sanctions his literary authority), even as 37 it holds nonsubjects in constant relation to it. In the next chapter, we’ll 38 see why liberal modernity can’t have it both ways. 39 40 41 42 1 2 Chapter 4 3 4 5 In Sympathy 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 Look at the backflips people will do to find humanity in 15 [Frankenstein’s] monster. 16 But when they saw a boy like mine, they had no love to spare. 17 —Victor LaValle, Destroyer 18 19 20 y focus in this book so far has been on how literary representa- 21 Mtions of suicide at the turn of the nineteenth century functioned 22 to authorize racialized political ontologies. I have examined how the 23 trope of suicide was used to signal and police notions of political “being” 24 and social “life” drawn from liberal rights discourses and how this 25 is reflected in the consolidation of an anxious and untenable rela- 26 tion between blackness and death in the liberal imaginary. Black men 27 were imaginatively called upon by white writers to prove their fitness 28 for freedom by dying, while black women, whether framed as lovers, 29 mothers, enslaved persons, or aristocrats, likewise ended their fictional 30 lives through self-destruction. I have also shown how black writers, 31 both in the nineteenth century and those currently working in the crit- 32 ical idioms of Afropessimism and black optimism, resist these tropes 33 and pursue modalities of living in and beyond those imaginaries that 34 delimit blackness through/to death. This chapter takes a broader, more 35 speculative look at the relationship between racialization and suicide in 36 liberal modernity. 37 In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, liberalism seems to lead to suicide 38 one way or another. On the one hand, suicide can be understood as the 39 apotheosis of liberal individualism, such as we saw in David Hume’s 40 On Suicide and as we’ll see again in Victor Frankenstein. On the other 41 42 97 98 DEATH RIGHTS

1 hand, suicide is the only logical end that the novel can offer the crea- 2 ture because of its investment in what I will argue is a flawed ethic 3 of interracial sympathy. After establishing the relevance of suicide to 4 Frankenstein through Mary Shelley’s biography, this chapter routes 5 the novel’s reflections on liberal subjectivity and its racialized exclu- 6 sions through theories of sympathy from Hume, Adam Smith, and 7 most centrally, Percy Shelley. The chapter then examines how Fran- 8 kenstein yokes the discourses of suicide and sympathy together in 9 articulating an integrationist fantasy in which “monsters” may be 10 “humanized” or “civilized” through appeals to sympathy. This fantasy, 11 as deployed in Frankenstein, illuminates how the politico-ontolog- 12 ical relation between blackness and death is produced by the liberal 13 subject’s own death drive. The chapter closes with a reading of Victor 14 LaValle’s Destroyer, a contemporary sequel of sorts to Frankenstein 15 that I read as a response to the limitations of the original text’s liberal 16 grounding in its treatment of the interconnected issues of sympathy 17 for the creature, Frankenstein’s ill-fated individualism, and both char- 18 acters’ desires for death. 19 20 Frankenstein and the Suicide Debates 21 22 That suicide was a topic of interest for Shelley in the years leading 23 up to her writing Frankenstein is evident from her journals. Her first 24 mention of suicide appears on August 25, 1814, when she and Percy “hear 25 of Patricksons [sic] killing himself . . . another of those cold blooded 26 murders that like Maria Schooning we may put down to the world.”1 27 Patrickson was a protégé of Godwin’s who killed himself on August 28 10, 1814. As Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert explain, “Maria 29 Schooning” likely refers to Maria Eleonora Schöning, the protagonist 30 of a “harrowing story of female misfortune,” written and published by 31 Samuel Taylor Coleridge in The Friend in 1810: 32 33 Maria is first raped as she sits weeping over her father’s grave, and then 34 befriended by a poor woman, Harlin. Maria persuades Harlin to join 35 with her in a false confession of infanticide, so that she and Harlin 36 can be executed, thus avoiding the sin of suicide, and Harlin’s children 37 can then be cared for by charity and not die of starvation. Overcome 38 by remorse, Maria confesses the truth before her execution, but the 39 magistrates do not believe her; Harlin is executed and Maria expires 40 on the scaffold.2 41 42 In Sympathy 99

Shelley’s recollection of this narrative in her entry on Patrickson’s suicide 1 suggests that she affirms the opinion of her mother who, as discussed 2 in this book’s second chapter, famously wrote about suicide as an act of 3 political resistance. In referencing Maria Schöning, a heroine not unlike 4 the suicidal women of Wollstonecraft’s fiction, Shelley seems to validate 5 Patrickson’s decision to end his life. 6 The specific way in which Shelley references Maria Schöning also 7 highlights her interest in the socioeconomic dimension of the suicide 8 debates. When Maria convinces Harlin to be executed instead of killing 9 herself, she does so to ensure that Harlin’s children are cared for. In 10 the early nineteenth century, when a coroner deemed a person who 11 committed suicide a felo-de-se (literally “felon to himself”), that person’s 12 property was forfeited to the state. This policy of forfeiture was notori- 13 ously corrupt, as wealthy people regularly swayed coroners against issuing 14 felo-de-se verdicts to preserve family titles and fortunes. Shelley was soon 15 to become entangled in an example of this corruption when in December 16 1816, the body of Harriet Shelley, Percy’s first wife, washed up on the 17 banks of the Thames. As local historian Henry George Davis would 18 recall in his 1859 Memorials of Hamlet of Knightsbridge, the entire affair 19 “bears the marks of outside influence.”3 When the coroner’s inquest was 20 held—itself a “hushed up procedure”—“a verdict [was] returned, which 21 saved her the revolting burial then awarded to the suicide.”4 The offi- 22 cial verdict noted only that Harriet was “found dead in the Serpentine 23 River,” making no mention of her pregnancy by another man.5 Moreover, 24 no account of the inquest was given to the local newspapers, although it 25 was common to report at least that an inquest had taken place, regardless 26 of its outcome.6 Percy’s note to Mary five days after the inquest confirms 27 that Harriet’s death was in fact the result of suicide: “It seems that this 28 poor woman—the most innocent of her abhorred and unnatural family— 29 was driven from her father’s house, & descended the steps of prostitution 30 until she lived with a groom of the name of Smith, who deserting her, she 31 killed herself.”7 No one was fooled by the attempted cover-up: as late as 32 1859, Davis still derides the actions of the Westbrook and Shelley fami- 33 lies by invoking Thomas Hood’s “The Bridge of Sighs,” a poem about the 34 suicide of a prostitute, to suggest that the local community was uncon- 35 vinced by their efforts to conceal the fact of Harriet’s suicide.8 36 Harriet’s death brought Mary back to the topic of suicide in yet another 37 way. The body was taken to the Fox and Bull Inn, then a receiving 38 house of the Royal Humane Society. Founded in 1774, the Society 39 worked to help prevent drowning deaths by disseminating information 40 41 42 100 DEATH RIGHTS

1 about resuscitative methods. Although not unique in its interests—Tim 2 Marshall has described Europe at the end of the eighteenth century as a 3 “resurrectionist culture” obsessed with the limits of biological life—the 4 Royal Humane Society is uniquely pertinent to Shelley’s novel.9 Much 5 of the science employed by Victor Frankenstein is similar to that used by 6 the Society. Among their methods of resuscitation, the Society engaged 7 turn-of-the-century interests in the animating potential of electricity 8 as elucidated in, for example, the work of Luigi Galvani, John Hunter, 9 and Ben Franklin (whose famous kite experiment Frankenstein cites in 10 the first chapter of his narrative as an early inspiration of his interest 11 in science).10 Moreover, the Society actively promoted practices and 12 techniques to revive people who attempted suicide by drowning.11 By 13 the time Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, the Society was considered 14 a leader in efforts to curb what was then widely known as England’s 15 suicide problem.12 In 1805, the physician Samuel Jackson Pratt reported 16 that “more than five hundred suicides have been providentially restored 17 by the medical assistants of the Humane Society.”13 Mary Wollstonecraft 18 was one among this number. 19 Wollstonecraft was famously displeased with the Society’s interfer- 20 ence in her asserting, in Humean fashion, her right to die—a fact that 21 haunted Mary Shelley all her life. Carolyn Williams has shown that 22 Wollstonecraft’s second suicide attempt (her first was earlier that year 23 via an overdose of laudanum) was tinged, both in her planning and 24 response to its failure, with what she saw as the intrusive work of the 25 Royal Humane Society: 26 27 When she set out to commit suicide, she expressed fears lest attempts 28 be made to restore her to life. In October 1795, she wrote to Gilbert 29 Imlay, “I go to find comfort, and my only fear is, that my poor body 30 will be insulted by an endeavor to recall my hated existence. But I shall 31 plunge into the Thames where there is the least chance of my being 32 snatched from the death I seek”. . . She jumped into the Thames off 33 Putney Bridge, and lost consciousness before she was pulled out of 34 the water. Her next letter expresses a coolly defiant refusal to endorse 35 conventional responses to her situation: “I have only to lament, that, 36 when the bitterness of death was past, I was inhumanly brought back 37 to life and misery. . . . If I am condemned to live longer, it is a living 38 death.”14 39 40 Inevitably also in Shelley’s purview was the suicide of her half-sister, 41 Wollstonecraft’s other daughter, Fanny Imlay, who died of an intentional 42 In Sympathy 101

laudanum overdose on October 9, 1816. In her suicide note, which was 1 published on October 12, 1816, in Welsh newspaper The Cambrian, 2 Imlay writes: 3 4 I have long determined that the best thing I could do was to put an end 5 to the existence of a being whose birth was unfortunate, and whose 6 life has only been a series of pain to those persons who have hurt their 7 health in endeavoring to promote her welfare. Perhaps to hear of my 8 death will give you pain, but you will soon have the blessing of forget- 9 ting that such a creature ever existed.15 10 11 Scholars have speculated widely about the note’s missing signature, but 12 few have noted how closely Fanny’s description of herself as a being 13 of “unfortunate” birth whose life brings “a series of pain” is echoed 14 throughout Frankenstein.16 Indeed, given Shelley’s deep familiarity with 15 the topic, it is surprising that the role of suicide in her most famous novel 16 is not more widely discussed.17 17 The novel concludes with the creature declaring his intention to kill 18 himself, although importantly, we never find out if he does: 19 20 “But soon,” he cried, with sad and solemn enthusiasm, “I shall die, and 21 what I now feel be no longer felt. Soon these burning miseries will be 22 extinct. I shall ascend my funeral pile triumphantly, and exult in the 23 agony of the torturing flames. The light of that conflagration will fade 24 away; my ashes will be swept into the sea by the winds. My spirit will 25 sleep in peace; or if it thinks, it will not surely think thus. Farewell.”18 26 27 Insofar as the novel corroborates the creature’s nonbelonging, it neces- 28 sitates his expulsion from the social field: he has to die physically to 29 underscore the absoluteness of his social death. At the same time, Mary 30 Shelley was well versed in how authors of her day mobilized suicide 31 to open the bounds of liberalism.19 Read from this perspective, it is 32 equally plausible that the creature’s decision to kill himself signals his 33 capacity for inclusion. That she leaves the completion of his suicide 34 an open question renders both options possible depending on, among 35 other things, whether one chooses to believe that he kills himself. In 36 this sense, the novel becomes a litmus test for the reader’s own politics, 37 giving further credence to Rachel Feder’s assertion that “you’re never 38 more yourself than when you’re reading Frankenstein.”20 Complicating 39 matters, however, is the fact that the creature is not the novel’s only 40 suicidal character. 41 42 102 DEATH RIGHTS

1 Victor Frankenstein also repeatedly declares his intention to end his 2 life: “I often endeavored to put an end to the existence I loathed and 3 it required unceasing attendance and vigilance to restrain me from 4 committing some dreadful act of violence.”21 While we never see Fran- 5 kenstein attempt to end his life directly, he is only too eager to catch up 6 to the creature so they can kill each other. Their pursuit of one another 7 becomes, by the end of the novel, his only reason for staying alive: 8 9 I had formed in my own heart a resolution to pursue my destroyer to 10 death; and this purpose quieted my agony, and provisionally recon- 11 ciled me to life. . . . I confess that is it the devouring and only passion 12 of my soul . . . I devote myself, either in my life or death, to his destruc- 13 tion. . . . How I have lived I hardly know; many times have I stretched 14 my failing limbs upon the sandy plain, and prayed for death. But . . . I 15 dared not die.22 16 17 As the sections that follow demonstrate, the creature’s and Franken- 18 stein’s suicidal desires are not separate impulses but are fundamentally 19 linked. Read together, these discrete desires point to an irresolvable 20 duality at the heart of liberalism: even as the liberal subject defines 21 himself as socially “alive” against the politico-ontological and literal 22 deaths of those he deems nonsubjects, suicide is the logical apotheosis 23 of the rights and entitlements that define his own subjectivity and sanc- 24 tion his politico-ontological “life.” Put another way, Frankenstein stages 25 how the libidinal economy that overdetermines blackness as thanato- 26 logical abjection in liberal modernity’s social unconscious contains the 27 possibility of its own destruction. To get here, Mary Shelley interpolates 28 Percy Shelley’s writings on love from 1815–1816, which draw heavily from 29 eighteenth-century philosophies of sympathy. 30 31 The Social Function of Sympathy 32 33 Most of the action of Frankenstein is motivated by a thwarted desire 34 for sympathy and love. In the background of Frankenstein are at least 35 two unpublished essays by Percy Shelley, “Speculations on Morals” (ca. 36 1815) and “On Love” (1815).23 At this early stage of Percy’s career, “love” 37 is not yet the philosophical doctrine of eternal human goodness that it 38 would later become.24 In 1815–16, Percy uses “love” to rethink theories 39 of sympathy posited by eighteenth-century moral philosophers, focusing 40 particularly on Hume and, to a lesser extent, Adam Smith.25 For Hume, 41 sympathy constitutes a mode of moral attunement. The dilemma of such 42 In Sympathy 103

attunement is that “the sentiment of others can never affect us, but by 1 becoming, in some measure, our own.”26 Hence, sympathy can only teach 2 a person to act morally by framing the object of sympathy in terms of the 3 sympathizing self. Likewise, for Smith, sympathy is necessarily a fiction, 4 for “our senses will never inform us of what [the other] suffers. They 5 never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by 6 the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his 7 sensations.”27 Like Hume, Smith emphasizes that the impetus toward 8 sympathy derives from a benevolent desire to know others, even as the 9 endeavor is ultimately a path back to the self. 10 No matter how well-intended, sympathy cannot but be filtered 11 through the self and its attendant prejudices. David Marshall observes 12 how the good intentions that drive people to want to sympathize may 13 be used against them, leading people to be “deceived by hypocrites 14 [who] know how to imitate the exterior signs and symptoms of feel- 15 ings. . . . In reading or beholding the characters of others, one risks not 16 only being misled but also being placed in the position of distance, 17 difference, and isolation that sympathy is supposed to deny.”28 Saidiya 18 Hartman extends this critique by emphasizing how the power differen- 19 tials, inherent in any relation of sympathy, are particularly magnified 20 in the attempted identification of subjects with those people positioned 21 as non-/anti-/antesubjects: “The fungibility of the commodity makes 22 the captive body an abstract and empty vessel vulnerable to the projec- 23 tion of others’ feelings, ideas, desires, and values.”29 For Hartman, even 24 when it is geared toward establishing parity, sympathy—like sentimen- 25 talism and sensibility, as discussed in previous chapters—underlines 26 the fungibility of blackness in the liberal imaginary: the unconscious 27 belief that the black body, whether enslaved or free, is always open to 28 white possession and occupation. I bring this up here not to suggest 29 that Mary Shelley analogizes the creature’s existence to blackness, 30 although there is much that could be said about the fungibility of the 31 creature’s corporeal form: a literal assemblage of other people’s bodies. 32 Rather, I raise Hartman’s critique of cross-racial sympathy alongside 33 Marshall’s critique of sympathy as an indicator of moral attune- 34 ment to highlight the inherent limitations of political engagements 35 of sympathy in appeals for social recognition or integration. Indeed, 36 as Manu Samriti Chander has demonstrated, “the British Romantic 37 ideology of sympathy is founded on certain ineradicable antipathies.”30 38 Thus, when Percy Shelley extends Humean and Smithean theories of 39 sympathy to put forward his own theory of subject production, he does 40 so in unmistakably racist terms. 41 42 104 DEATH RIGHTS

1 Following Hume and Smith, Percy takes the capacity for sympathy 2 as an indication of the sympathizer’s benevolence. A great deal of his 3 “Speculations on Morals” recapitulates Hume’s emphasis on sympathy 4 as mediated through the imagination. For Hume, the imagination is a 5 broad faculty of mind that reproduces “faint, languid” copies of impres- 6 sions that in the experience of sympathy makes possible “the sentiments 7 of others [to seem] our own.” 31 For Percy, too, “Imagination or mind 8 employed in prophetically imaging forth its objects, is that faculty of 9 human nature on which every gradation of its progress . . . depends.” 10 However, in Percy’s hands, sympathy also informs a theory of subject 11 production that depends on an inherently racist program of so-called 12 civilization. In “Speculations on Morals,” he discusses the process of 13 becoming attuned to that capacity as the province of the “civilized”: 14 15 The inhabitant of a highly civilized community will more acutely 16 sympathize with the sufferings and enjoyments of others, than the 17 inhabitant of a society of a less degree of civilization. He who shall 18 have cultivated his intellectual powers by familiarity with the highest 19 specimens of poetry and philosophy, will usually sympathize more 20 than one engaged in the less refined functions of manual labour.32 21 22 More specifically, Percy is interested in how sympathy shapes subjects 23 through texts. For him, the process by which one is constituted a sympa- 24 thetic and thus not only a moral but a “civilized” being is tied to the 25 reading of certain kinds of texts. According to this logic, where some 26 strains of poetry and philosophy are the products of a universalist human 27 ingenuity, so too are virtue and morality: 28 29 The only distinction between the selfish man and the virtuous man 30 is, that the imagination of the former is confined within a narrow 31 limit, whilst that of the latter embraces a comprehensive circumfer- 32 ence. . . . Virtue is thus intirely [sic] a refinement of civilized life; a 33 creation of the human mind or, rather, a combination which it has 34 made, according to elementary rules contained within itself, of the 35 feelings suggested by the relations established between man and man.33 36 37 Percy maintains throughout “Speculations” that all people may possess 38 the capacity for goodness, but as he notes above, goodness is developed 39 socially. 40 These ideas are renegotiated by Mary Shelley in the creature’s various 41 (non-)experiences with sympathy—not only his perpetually thwarted 42 In Sympathy 105

desire for it but also his apparently innate capacity to freely extend it. 1 For example, the creature’s early interest in humans is sincere and naïve. 2 He foregrounds how his presence in someone’s life might benefit them 3 rather than (as we will see in Frankenstein’s actions) how that relation- 4 ship would serve him: “I longed to discover the motives and feelings of 5 these lovely creatures . . . I thought (foolish wretch!) that it might be in 6 my power to restore happiness to these deserving people.”34 Observing 7 the De Lacey family, the creature endeavors to exercise what we might 8 call true or disinterested sympathy, feeling only as they feel: “When 9 they were unhappy, I felt depressed; when they rejoiced, I sympathized 10 with their joys.”35 Yet as we have seen, pure sympathy is impossible. For 11 Hume, Smith, and Percy Shelley, sympathy is at most an aspirational 12 ideal. The creature, however, believes that he sympathizes with others 13 without regard for himself, and more importantly, he wants to connect 14 with others in this way. 15 Ironically, it is the creature’s interest in others that motivates him 16 to share, as it were, in Safie’s education, which ultimately dampens his 17 capacity for fellow feeling and makes him suicidal: “I found that these 18 people possessed a method of communicating their experience and feel- 19 ings to one another by articulate sounds. I perceived that the words 20 they spoke sometimes produced pleasure or pain, smiles or sadness, in 21 the minds and countenances of the hearers.”36 In learning the “godlike 22 science” of language, the creature is introduced to a liberal framework 23 into which he cannot assimilate, and once that is clear to him, the only 24 source of alleviation he can see is his own death: 25 26 The words [of Volney’s Ruins] induced me to turn towards myself. I 27 learned that the possessions most esteemed by your fellow-creatures 28 were high and unsullied descent united by riches. A man might be 29 respected with only one of these acquisitions; but without either he 30 was considered, except in rare instances, as a vagabond and a slave, 31 doomed to waste his powers for the profit of the chosen few. And 32 what was I? Of my creation and creator I was absolutely ignorant; but 33 I knew that I possessed no money, no friends, no kind of property. I 34 was, besides, endowed with a figure hideously deformed and loath- 35 some; I was not even of the same nature as man. I was more agile than 36 they, and could subsist upon coarser diet; I bore the extremes of heat 37 and cold with less injury to my frame; my stature far exceeded their’s. 38 When I looked around, I saw and heard of none like me. Was I then 39 a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled, and whom 40 all men disowned?37 41 42 106 DEATH RIGHTS

1 By all indications, the creature is, at least physically, superior to human 2 beings—he is larger, faster, stronger, and more resilient. But he learns to 3 hate himself because he is taught that subjectivity is constituted through 4 recognition and that recognition is regulated by social institutions. The 5 single most important lesson that the creature gleans from his education, 6 then, is that he does not fit into the structures that govern social life, 7 and because of this, he believes he has no choice but to die: “I learned 8 that there was but one means to overcome the sensation of pain, and 9 that was death.”38 In coming to grips with what it means to be a subject 10 and the fact that he cannot become one, the creature becomes suicidal. 11 Shelley is clear about the fact that the creature’s death drive is socially 12 conditioned. Before his “education,” he strove to live: “Life, although it 13 may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend 14 it.”39 But as his mind is colonized by liberal modernity, he becomes aware 15 that he can die, and this awareness grows into the conviction that he 16 must. This is especially clear when he reads Goethe’s Werther: 17 18 As I read . . . I applied much personally to my own feelings and condi- 19 tion. I found myself similar, yet at the same time strangely unlike the 20 beings concerning whom I read, and to whose conversation I was a 21 listener. I sympathized with, and partly understood them, but I was 22 uninformed in mind; I was dependent on none, and related to none. 23 The path of my departure was free; and there was none to lament my 24 annihilation. My person was hideous, and my stature gigantic: what 25 did this mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What 26 was my destination? These questions continually recurred, but I was 27 unable to solve them.40 28 29 The creature’s experience of reading Werther suggests that in order for 30 Goethe’s text to be understood, the appropriate reader must be there to 31 understand it.41 In the creature’s case, instead of cultivating the subject 32 of liberal modernity, his education brings into sharp focus the fact that 33 he is not one, and this impels him to seek a way out of a world that, he 34 is taught, he was never meant to inhabit. The great irony, of course, is 35 that to anyone who cannot see him, he might have passed, as implied 36 in De Lacey’s assumption that the creature is not only European but 37 French like him, “my countryman.”42 By thus highlighting inclusion as 38 ultimately dependent on factors that cannot be conditioned, Shelley’s 39 text exposes the lie at the heart of the integrationist fantasy. In this sense 40 it is a trenchant critique of liberalism. At the same time, Frankenstein 41 is unable to imagine an option other than death for those marked as 42 In Sympathy 107

“nonsubjects” by liberal modernity. In this way, the text reinscribes the 1 very logics it so brilliantly critiques. 2 When he asks for a mate, the creature explains that he wants to 3 “excite the sympathy of some existing thing.”43 In so doing, he registers 4 a desire for recognition. Frankenstein’s destruction of the mate, in turn, 5 indicates his refusal to grant him that possibility, either from him or 6 anyone else. Frankenstein’s destruction of the second creature has been 7 read as motivated by a Malthusian worry that the two creatures would 8 spawn a new species, but it is arguably better read as an example of 9 liberal modernity’s exclusionary logics. As Maureen McLane notes, it is 10 not clear that the creature and his mate can reproduce; indeed, it seems 11 reasonable to assume that if this were a real fear for Frankenstein, he 12 could engineer the female creature in such a way as to render repro- 13 duction impossible.44 Even more than he fears the creatures getting 14 along, then, Frankenstein worries that the mate will reject the original 15 creature in favor of “the superior beauty of man.”45 What the crea- 16 ture desires is the community they might form through their shared 17 exclusion. But Frankenstein imagines that the second creature—for no 18 discernible reason other than the fact that she is, ostensibly, female— 19 would see the first creature as he does and would attempt, instead, to 20 join mankind (never mind the fact that mankind would surely reject 21 her). The myopia here is almost unimaginable except that we see it all 22 the time: people in power unable to register positionalities that do not 23 follow neatly from their own experiences. 24 The real issue, then, is not population but liberalism. Frankenstein’s 25 inability to step outside of himself, his failure to understand either crea- 26 ture for what they are or could become, register his absolute lack of 27 sympathy. And crucially, as the novel’s early emphasis on Frankenstein’s 28 schooling suggests, this myopia is cultivated at least partly by his educa- 29 tion. As the next section will show, Frankenstein’s individualism leaves 30 no space for sympathy. How, then, can liberal modernity be expected to 31 shape others through sympathy when its own subjects are closed to it? 32 Shelley pursues this problem through another of Percy’s 1815 essays, “On 33 Love,” which extends the questions raised in “Speculations on Morals” by 34 considering what happens when the project of shaping subjects goes awry. 35 36 Friendly Antipathies 37 38 Percy develops his theory of “love” as a corollary to sympathy. In “On 39 Love,” the figure of the writer, the supposedly moral force who can 40 shape the world through sympathy, also requires it from others; but the 41 42 108 DEATH RIGHTS

1 writer’s attempt to find it reveals how little ordinary people understand 2 each other, and worse still, how little the writer himself is understood: 3 4 I know not the internal constitution of other men, nor even thine, 5 whom I now address. I see that in some external attributes they 6 resemble me, but when, misled by that appearance, I have thought to 7 appeal to something in common, and unburthen my inmost soul to 8 them, I have found my language misunderstood, like one in a distant 9 and savage land. The more opportunities they have afforded me for 10 experience, the wider has appeared the interval between us, and to a 11 greater distance have the points of sympathy been withdrawn. With a 12 spirit ill fitted to sustain such proof, trembling and feeble through its 13 tenderness, I have everywhere sought sympathy, and have found only 14 repulse and disappointment.46 15 16 It is, of course, easy to hear Frankenstein’s creature here. But it is not 17 just the creature who wishes to have someone understand his “inmost 18 soul.” The entirety of Frankenstein is driven by lonely people’s desires 19 for sympathy and recognition. 20 In the novel’s opening pages, Walton admits to his intended reader, 21 his sister Margaret, the same anxiety that Percy betrays in “On Love” 22 about having one’s feelings misunderstood in the medium of writing: 23 “I have no friend, Margaret . . . I shall commit my thoughts to paper, 24 it is true; but that is a poor medium for the communication of feeling. 25 I desire the company of a man who could sympathize with me; whose 26 eyes would reply to mine.”47 What Walton describes, and what will 27 emerge even more profoundly when he meets Frankenstein, is the desire 28 for what Percy calls “a miniature of our entire self . . . a soul within our 29 own soul that describes a circle around its proper Paradise, which pain 30 and sorrow and evil dare not overleap.”48 For Percy, love is not reading 31 the other (i.e., sympathy) but finding someone who can properly read 32 one’s own self: 33 34 [Love] is that powerful attraction towards all we conceive, or fear, or 35 hope beyond ourselves, when we find within our own thoughts the 36 chasm of an insufficient void, and seek to awaken in all things that are, 37 a community with what we experience within ourselves. If we reason, 38 we would be understood; if we imagine, we would that the airy chil- 39 dren of our brain were born anew within another’s; if we feel, we would 40 that another’s nerves should vibrate to our own, that the beams of their 41 eyes should kindle at once and mix and melt into our own; that lips 42 In Sympathy 109

of motionless ice should not reply to lips quivering and burning with 1 the heart’s best blood. This is Love.49 2 3 Love—which Walton will call friendship—is tantamount not to under- 4 standing but to being understood. Not coincidentally, in describing his 5 loneliness to his sister, Walton recalls his background as a poet. In his 6 second letter to Margaret, he relates that before he was an explorer he 7 was “a poet, and for one year lived in a Paradise of my own creation; I 8 imagined that I also might obtain a niche in the temple where the names 9 of Homer and Shakespeare are consecrated. You are well acquainted with 10 my failure, and how heavily I bore the disappointment.”50 Dejected by 11 his inability to write, Walton wishes for a friend, hoping to be “read” in 12 life if not in verse. And thus, when he meets Frankenstein, he believes 13 him to be the friend he had sought. 14 Like Walton, Frankenstein’s first education is in literature. And in 15 a certain sense, so is the creature’s. Before his initiation into language 16 in the De Lacey cottage, the creature describes how he “tried to imitate 17 the pleasant songs of the birds, but was unable. Sometimes I wished to 18 express my sensations in my own mode, but the uncouth and inarticulate 19 sounds which broke from me frightened me into silence again.”51 Walton, 20 Victor, and the creature are all, in some sense, erstwhile poets. Shelley 21 highlights that her central characters are all authors and readers such that 22 even as he narrates his story to Walton, who in turn writes it down for 23 Margaret (and enables our reading of it), Frankenstein positions the crea- 24 ture as the author of the narrative’s end: the creature leaves literal textual 25 traces, “marks in writing on the barks of trees, or cut in stone” to guide 26 Frankenstein.52 In their desire to die by each other’s hand—depicted 27 explicitly in terms of reading—they enter into exactly the relationship 28 that Percy desires to have with his readers in “On Love” and that Walton 29 seeks in Frankenstein. But who is writing whom into (non-)being here 30 and to what end? Is not the creature, the abject “other,” the author of 31 Frankenstein’s death just as surely as Frankenstein, the liberal subject, is 32 the author of the creature’s? 33 If we understand the relationship between Frankenstein and his crea- 34 ture through the dynamics of textual exchange—imagined by Percy as 35 part of the social work of western poetry and philosophy—then Shelley’s 36 portrait is one of reading and writing gone awry. As discussed in this 37 book’s introduction, one of the most potent tools that liberal moder- 38 nity has used to maintain its axes of power has been literary education. 39 Almost as if to instrumentalize Percy’s conception of perfect sympathy, 40 literary texts have been deployed to cultivate “civilized” subjects without 41 42 110 DEATH RIGHTS

1 regard for what such a developmental model privileges and what (or 2 whom) it leaves out. Shelley illustrates this in her novel by framing each 3 narrator—Frankenstein, the creature, and Walton—in variously unre- 4 ciprocated relations of textual exchange, thereby putting pressure on 5 the positive link between sympathy and “civilization” asserted by her 6 husband. Texts are at their most dangerous, she suggests, when authors 7 claim to cover the entirety of the social field. 8 The novel’s opening pages also link its exploration of love/friendship 9 to the topic of suicide. When Walton finds Frankenstein on the brink of 10 death, he describes how he and his crew “restored him to animation.”53 11 This not only anticipates the creation scene but also directly echoes 12 Wollstonecraft’s restoration by the Royal Humane Society. Frankenstein 13 reiterates this language, thanking Walton for “benevolently restor[ing] 14 me to life.”54 Walton is charmed by Frankenstein’s gratitude, which he 15 sees as indicative of deeper qualities of “benevolence and sweetness.”55 16 However, what most clearly emerges about Frankenstein’s character 17 over the course of the novel is his capriciousness and self-involvement. 18 At no point in the novel does Frankenstein demonstrate the goodness 19 that Walton projects onto him. Even Frankenstein’s apparent gratitude 20 is a misreading on Walton’s part—by this point in the novel, Franken- 21 stein’s only desire is to kill the creature and to die himself. He admits to 22 Walton that the only reason he made himself visible to the crew was on 23 the off chance that the ship was headed south so that he could continue 24 his pursuit; he is dismayed to learn they are northbound. When he is 25 well enough, Frankenstein explains that he cannot be the friend Walton 26 seeks because of this mission: 27 28 I enjoyed friends, dear not only through habit and association, but 29 from their own merits; and wherever I am, the soothing voice of my 30 Elizabeth, and the conversation of Clerval, will be ever whispered 31 in my ear. They are dead; and but one feeling in such a solitude can 32 persuade me to preserve my life. If I were engaged in any high under- 33 taking or design, fraught with extensive utility to my fellow-creatures, 34 then could I live to fulfill it. But such is not my destiny; I must pursue 35 and destroy the being to whom I gave existence; then my lot on earth 36 will be fulfilled, and I may die.56 37 38 Thus, if Frankenstein is grateful to Walton for anything, it is for 39 prolonging his life so that he may die as he intended: along with, and 40 by the hand of, the creature. 41 42 In Sympathy 111

To put a finer point on Frankenstein’s self-involvement, it is worth 1 pausing to appreciate the irony of Frankenstein’s naming Elizabeth and 2 Clerval to justify his obsession with the creature. While their deaths 3 ostensibly serve to propel Frankenstein’s revenge plot—and while Eliza- 4 beth and Clerval may well have been good friends to him—he was never 5 a good friend to them. Frankenstein’s relationships are motivated by a 6 mix of self-interest and denial of his need for other people. For example, 7 he admits to ignoring his responsibilities to Clerval and his family while 8 in the throes of his research: 9 10 The same feelings which made me neglect the scenes around me caused 11 me also to forget those friends who were so many miles absent, and 12 whom I had not seen for so long a time. I knew my silence disquieted 13 them . . . but I could not tear my thoughts from my employment. . . . I 14 wished, as it were, to procrastinate all that related to my feelings of 15 affection.57 16 17 By “procrastinating” his social affections, Frankenstein posits feelings— 18 at least those feelings relating to friendship and love—as mechanisms 19 that can be turned off or ignored. However, when frightened by his 20 own success, Frankenstein regains himself through his friendship with 21 Clerval: 22 23 Study had before secluded me from the intercourse of my fellow-crea- 24 tures, and rendered me unsocial; but Clerval called forth the better 25 feelings of my heart; he again taught me to love the aspect of nature, 26 and the cheerful faces of children. Excellent friend! How sincerely did 27 you love me, and endeavor to elevate my mind . . . A selfish pursuit had 28 cramped and narrowed me, until your gentleness and affection warmed 29 and opened my senses.58 30 31 Later, Frankenstein admits his miscalculation to Walton: “If the study 32 to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affec- 33 tions . . . then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting 34 the human mind.”59 In this declaration, Shelley underscores the novel’s 35 interest in social dynamics of reciprocity and the possibilities of rela- 36 tion between the self-contained, autonomous liberal subject and those 37 through and against whom he defines himself. 38 If Frankenstein’s isolation in the name of scientific progress is, by 39 his own admission, his downfall, then the liberal individualist fantasy 40 41 42 112 DEATH RIGHTS

1 is called into question. Pondering the effects of his isolation, he spec- 2 ulates that “if no man allowed any pursuit whatsoever to interfere 3 with the tranquility of his domestic affections, Greece had not been 4 enslaved; Caesar would have spared his country; America would have 5 been discovered more gradually; and the empires of Mexico and Peru 6 had not been destroyed.”60 Here, crucially, the narrative breaks: “But 7 I forget that I am moralizing in the most interesting part of my tale; 8 and your looks remind me to proceed.”61 Thus, even as he attempts to 9 convey a narrative of progress, Frankenstein cannot help but become 10 aware of his story as a story, thereby inviting reflection on these grander 11 narratives. Would it have been so bad if Greece were not enslaved, or 12 the empires of Mexico and Peru not destroyed? How might it have 13 altered the course of history if Europeans had occupied the territories 14 they call “the Americas” more gradually, or not at all? In this moment, 15 Shelley dares her readers to dream of a less self-interested world, one 16 that the novel itself ultimately cannot imagine. 17 Thus, Frankenstein’s friendships remain self-centered—he has friends 18 when he needs them, but when he is occupied, he ignores them. Even his 19 betrothal to Elizabeth is self-interested: he decides to marry her not only 20 (nor even primarily) for love but rather to hasten his plan to die. When 21 the creature promises to be with Frankenstein on his wedding night, 22 Frankenstein assumes that the threat is directed at him and thus reasons 23 that marrying Elizabeth would lure the creature to him: “The remem- 24 brance of the threat returned. . . . But death was no evil to me . . . and I 25 therefore, with a contented and even cheerful countenance, agreed with 26 my father, that if my cousin would consent, the ceremony should take 27 place in ten days, and thus put, as I imagined, the seal to my fate.”62 Thus, 28 when he agrees to the marriage, he thinks it is a step toward suicide: 29 “When I thought that I prepared only my own death, I hastened that 30 of a far dearer victim.”63 His decision is guided by a death wish that he 31 frames as altruistic (to save his loved ones from being murdered by the 32 creature), even knowing it would leave them bereft. But when Elizabeth 33 and the others are gone, that ostensibly selfless motivation turns inward, 34 and Frankenstein’s life begins to revolve around a death wish motivated 35 by self-loathing and despair. 36 In certain ways, the creature’s suicidal motivations echo Fran- 37 kenstein’s. By the time he kills Elizabeth, the creature has vowed to 38 ruin Frankenstein’s life by severing his ties to his family and friends. 39 However, even at his most destructive, the creature attributes more to 40 those relationships than Frankenstein ever does. While Frankenstein 41 occasionally loves his relations, that he also cavalierly forgets them in 42 In Sympathy 113

pursuit of “progress” suggests that sympathy and love do not motivate 1 his life as strongly as they do the creature’s. For even as the creature 2 is, like Frankenstein, ultimately driven to suicide, his suicidality is 3 informed by his perpetually thwarted desire for relation. Still, until 4 the very end, he never stops seeking it. Despite the unceasing rejec- 5 tion he experiences, the creature is the only character in the novel who 6 attempts to sympathize with others in addition to trying to get others 7 to sympathize with (or, in Percy’s terms, to love) him. It is deeply signif- 8 icant, then, that when Frankenstein dies, the creature tells Walton, 9 “I seek not a fellow-feeling in my misery.”64 When he lived, even as 10 the creature “destroyed [Frankenstein’s] hopes” he “still desired love 11 and fellowship.”65 But in rejecting Walton’s invitation to stay, Shelley 12 suggests that the love the creature sought was, ironically, borne out in 13 the relationship he had with his creator. Their mutual commitment 14 to each other’s destruction is the expression of what Percy laments his 15 inability to find in “On Love”: a “soul within our own soul.”66 16 By depicting both actors’ suicides as the end result of the social func- 17 tions of love and sympathy, Frankenstein exposes the rot at the heart 18 of liberal modernity. In part, the novel highlights what Hartman iden- 19 tifies as “the facile intimacy” that drives the idea that liberalism can 20 be revised to include those whom it has historically excluded through 21 something like fellow feeling.67 We see this in the fact that the creature 22 becomes suicidal as a result of liberal society’s refusal to “read” him 23 (i.e., to sympathize with him), which in turn forecloses its willingness 24 to “write” him in its image (i.e., to grant him the rights and entitle- 25 ments that would authorize his inclusion). But crucially, sympathy for 26 the creature is not Shelley’s endgame. By linking the fates of creature 27 and creator, Shelley also shows how those in possession of liberalism’s 28 entitlements are led to suicide in another way. If the creature is Fran- 29 kenstein’s undoing, he is also the triumph of the highest aspirations of 30 liberal modernity—“progress,” domination of the natural world, and 31 through these the imagined substantiation of the supremacy of the 32 white male individual. Thus, in a way, Frankenstein upholds the logical 33 extension of Hume’s “On Suicide”—that the apotheosis of liberal indi- 34 vidualism is expressed in its self-destruction. 35 36 Blackness and the End(s) of Liberalism 37 38 Though I have called on Hartman’s critique of liberalism, I have inten- 39 tionally avoided analogizing the creature to blackness. Certainly, there 40 is ample evidence to support comparisons of the creature to enslaved and 41 42 114 DEATH RIGHTS

1 emancipated people of African descent, as Jared Hickman, Debbie Lee, 2 H. L. Malchow, Marie Mulvey-Roberts, Alan Lloyd Smith, and others 3 have shown.68 Nor is this a recent intervention: as Elizabeth Young has 4 taught us, Frankensteinian imagery was widely deployed to both anti- 5 black and antislavery ends in the nineteenth century.69 In the terms 6 outlined by these scholars, I might have delimited my discussion of 7 suicide to Afropessimist debates about the ontological relation between 8 blackness and death. But the creature has also been persuasively read 9 in terms of other racial and ethnic discourses.70 Where readings of the 10 creature as an analogue of people of African, Asian, or Jewish descent 11 are immensely valuable for what they teach us about nineteenth-century 12 European notions about race and ethnicity, their sheer variety also high- 13 lights the fact that the creature exceeds any single framework of racial 14 or ethnic identity. Thus, when Victor LaValle reimagines Frankenstein 15 in his 2017 comic book series, Destroyer, in which an African American 16 woman brings her son back to life, it is deeply significant that he does 17 not conflate the creature with the reanimated child. In this way, LaValle 18 also invites a timely reexamination of the original text’s interest in “race.” 19 Destroyer revels in the romantic contexts that produced Frankenstein: 20 its characters have names like Percy and Byron, and the protagonist (the 21 also brilliantly named Dr. Josephine Baker) is a descendent of Victor 22 Frankenstein and a textbook Byronic hero. But as we see in the epigraph 23 to this chapter, LaValle draws an important distinction between anti- 24 blackness and the social exclusion experienced by the creature. Dr. Baker 25 builds on Frankenstein’s dream of conquering death by reanimating her 26 twelve-year-old son, Akai, who was murdered by police while walking 27 home from a Little League game. But unlike Frankenstein’s creature, who 28 is flesh and bone, the reanimated Akai is part machine, designed such 29 that the machine parts will eventually take over. LaValle carefully lays 30 out the implications of this difference: the creature was built in Franken- 31 stein’s image—which is to say, in the image of western dreams of progress 32 and white perfectibility—and as such, the creature, as Dr. Baker puts it, 33 “is only human.”71 Akai is intentionally engineered as a counterpoint, 34 enabling LaValle to do what Shelley implies but can’t quite bring herself 35 to do: by the end of Destroyer, every human, including Frankenstein’s 36 creature, is dead. Akai is the only character left, and he has the ability 37 to reproduce himself to create a new world. 38 LaValle’s distinction between antiblackness and social exclusion high- 39 lights the former not as an event or series of events but, as Christina 40 Sharpe puts it, “total climate” produced not only by the “containment, 41 regulation, punishment, capture, and captivity” of African-identified 42 In Sympathy 115

people in modern history but also by the persistence of cultural representa- 1 tions of blackness as “the symbol, par excellence, for the less-than-human 2 being condemned to death,” such as we saw in the abolitionist and 3 proto-feminist texts discussed in previous chapters.72 In their orien- 4 tation toward black life outside the bounds of liberal modernity—the 5 world as we know it—LaValle’s and Sharpe’s works parallel one another: 6 (re)born of gratuitous violence, Akai is whole and, crucially, not human. 7 Destroyer is not interested in garnering sympathy for the oppressed, nor 8 is it exactly a story about black resistance. It is, instead, an optimistic 9 vision on the order of Sharpe’s notion of black being “in the wake”—of 10 “inhabiting a blackened consciousness that would rupture the structural 11 silences produced and facilitated by, and that produce and facilitate, 12 Black social and physical death.”73 Akai’s decision to destroy humanity 13 as we know it also echoes Wilderson’s emphasis on “the unbridgeable gap 14 between Black being and Human life,” as well as his insistence on the 15 need for “a new language of abstraction to explain this horror [because 16 the] explanatory power of Humanist discourse is bankrupt in the face 17 of the Black.”74 Ultimately, then, LaValle reaches back to Frantz Fanon’s 18 declaration that to “change the order of the world” will finally require 19 “an agenda for total disorder.”75 20 Shelley’s critique of liberalism is profoundly nuanced in ways that, in 21 my view, far exceed the limits of much abolitionist and protofeminist 22 thinking of the late eighteenth century, but it nevertheless remains teth- 23 ered to humanist logics. More to the point, Shelley’s text is not interested 24 in blackness as such. A product of western social and scientific episte- 25 mologies, Frankenstein operates in the service of improving “humanity” 26 while also ensuring its homogeneity. Thus, his refusal to sympathize with 27 the creature inscribes the latter’s alterity, marking his outcast status as 28 permanent. And while it may be tempting to read this as indicative of the 29 ontological relation between blackness and social death illuminated by 30 Afropessimist thought, what it more precisely reveals is the related fact 31 of how whiteness operates: how it thrives on and maintains its power 32 through exclusion. As a result, the creature, along with whatever or 33 whomever he represents, is rendered without agency. For instance, even 34 after he demonstrates his ability to reason (a path to “liberation” only 35 insofar as liberation depends on entry into liberal society), the creature 36 remains dependent on his creator’s access to European knowledges, as we 37 see in his request for the mate. In showing the product of western inge- 38 nuity, the creature, talking back to his creator, Shelley critiques the social 39 logics that enable Frankenstein and the culture he represents to main- 40 tain power by first creating and then endlessly modifying the categories 41 42 116 DEATH RIGHTS

1 and conditions that mark some as human and turn others into monsters. 2 However, in the creature’s turn to suicide, she also forecloses the possi- 3 bility of life outside these logics. At best, we might read the fact that 4 we don’t actually see the creature kill himself as leaving space for that 5 possibility, which LaValle picks up and carries to its logical conclusion. 6 The ontological relation between blackness and death, which is a 7 structuring modality of liberal modernity, is not the same as the relation 8 I have outlined between the creature and suicide: the latter relation is a 9 response to that structure. Leaning too hard on the comparison veers into 10 antiblackness just as surely as it may believe itself to be oriented toward 11 antiracism. Following Wilderson, analogizing Frankenstein’s creature 12 to black people “erroneously locates Blacks in the world—a place where 13 they have not been since the dawning of Blackness. This attempt to 14 position the Black in the world by way of analogy is not only a mystifi- 15 cation . . . but simultaneously also a provision for civil society, promising 16 an enabling modality for Human ethical dilemmas.”76 In other words, 17 the radicalism of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European emanci- 18 patory discourses is necessarily underwritten by irreconcilable structural 19 antagonisms that cannot be overturned or corrected by liberal appeals 20 to sympathy or integration. Moreover, as the next and final chapter will 21 show, more conventional “romantic” ideas about suicide also turn on 22 these racialized discourses of social death and ontological negation. 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 1 2 Chapter 5 3 4 5 Marvelous Boys 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 Ah, how poets sing and die! 15 Make one song and Heaven takes it; 16 Have one heart and Beauty breaks it; 17 Chatterton, Shelley, Keats and I— 18 Ah, how poets sing and die! 19 —Anne Spencer, “Dunbar” 20 21 22 hen the Harlem Renaissance poet Anne Spencer invokes the 23 WBritish romantics, she rehearses the idea that these poets’ early 24 deaths contributed to their literary longevity. Listing herself among their 25 ranks, Spencer ostensibly signals her desire to achieve the same exalted 26 status.1 Yet her choice of poets is peculiar: all three died young, but the 27 death and legacy of one differs markedly from the others. While Percy 28 Shelley and John Keats are remembered for their poetry, Thomas Chat- 29 terton is known primarily for killing himself. As early as 1818, William 30 Hazlitt summed up the allure of the idea of Chatterton in precisely 31 these terms: 32 33 I never heard any one speak of any one of his works as if it were an 34 old well-known favourite, and had become a faith and a religion in 35 his mind. It is his name, his youth, and what he might have lived 36 to have done, that excite our wonder and admiration. He has the 37 same sort of posthumous fame that an actor of the last age has—an 38 abstracted reputation which is independent of anything we know of 39 his works.2 40 41 42 117 118 DEATH RIGHTS

1 While the idea of his suicide haunts the work of many romantic and 2 postromantic artists, Chatterton’s poetry is not widely read or esteemed 3 now, nor was it at the time that Spencer wrote. Chatterton’s notoriety is 4 tied, rather, to the myth of romantic suicide as a marker of literary genius. 5 By definition, the genius is unlike the majority, and thus it follows 6 that he is unlikely to be widely understood or appreciated in his own 7 time. Andrew Bennett has suggested that in emphasizing their own and 8 one another’s so-called genius, romantic poets effectively constructed 9 the standards of taste by which subsequent generations would judge 10 them. In so doing, they helped to shape the romantic canon as we have 11 inherited it. The implied singularity of genius, Bennett argues, requires 12 “deferred reception” because the original work of art “is both new and 13 before its time” and as such, the poet who produces this work can only 14 be understood in the future, usually posthumously.3 Bennett is absolutely 15 correct in his assessment of how certain white male poets’ obsessions with 16 their literary afterlives helped to create the romantic canon. However, 17 the question of Chatterton’s relevance to this canon remains: why is a 18 preromantic poet, whose poetry is usually beside the point, so endur- 19 ingly associated with romanticism? In one respect, the answer is fairly 20 obvious: Chatterton was a convenient canvas onto which romantic poets 21 projected fantasies about their own posthumous fame. But the idea of 22 Chatterton also served—and continues to serve—an ideological function. 23 The myth of romantic suicide reproduces fantasies of the posterity 24 and invulnerability, even in death, of bourgeois white masculinity. Thus, 25 as this chapter argues, the figure of the singular genius has really been 26 a representative man: an ideological symbol through which liberalism’s 27 social, epistemic, and ontological frameworks are reaffirmed and threats 28 to their cohesion evacuated. The preceding chapters have shown that 29 late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British literary culture 30 was replete with stories of suicide. These were not limited to, nor even 31 centrally focused on, the voluntary deaths of brilliant white men. Yet as 32 the following will show, popular and scholarly recollections of this era 33 isolate the figure of the suicidal genius from the wider social contexts 34 discussed in this book and give him special status, thereby maintaining the 35 exclusionary logics that the era’s other representations of suicide precisely 36 sought to challenge. This chapter revisits the evolution of the romantic 37 suicide myth and considers how recent artistic interventions explode its 38 underlying racial codes. Thus, understood in the frame developed here 39 and throughout this book, Spencer’s catalogue—“Chatterton, Shelley, 40 Keats, and I”—is not an exaltation of a literary tradition to which she 41 aspires to belong; it is an indictment of the logics that keep her out of it. Marvelous Boys 119

The Mythic Structure of Romantic Suicide 1 2 Throughout this book, I have referred to romantic suicide as a myth. 3 This is no incidental turn of phrase. Myths produce and reinforce social 4 structures and beliefs, yet their role in doing so is usually concealed from 5 the general consciousness.4 In this sense, the coveted status that Chat- 6 terton and figures like him hold in the western collective consciousness 7 is nothing short of mythic. Chatterton has been described by scholars as 8 “the most enduring image of Romanticism” and “a symbol of a fearless 9 spirit that triumphed over death.”5 Across the western world, artists and 10 critics have paid homage to the ideal of Chatterton as a tragic ingénue 11 who lost a fatal struggle for acceptance by a society incapable of compre- 12 hending his genius. In the British romantic canon, Chatterton’s suicide is 13 recalled in Keats’s Endymion and Shelley’s Adonais, while Samuel Taylor 14 Coleridge spent much of his adult life revising his “Monody on the Death 15 of Thomas Chatterton.” This chapter takes its title from William Word- 16 sworth’s description of Chatterton as “the marvellous boy [sic] / The 17 sleepless Soul that perished in his pride”—two short lines in the twen- 18 ty-stanza “Resolution and Independence” that have yielded arguably the 19 most recognizable language associated with the dead poet.6 He is also 20 the subject of Alfred de Vigny’s Chatterton, a drama heralded alongside 21 Victor Hugo’s Hernani as a crowning achievement of French romantic 22 theater.7 Throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, 23 Chatterton’s suicide has inspired poetry, novels, drama and music in 24 ways that have led scholars to view his literary afterlife as a blueprint of 25 sorts for the posthumous reputations of later popular figures who died 26 by suicide, including Ian Curtis, Robin Williams, and Kurt Cobain, to 27 whom I turn later in this chapter; the posthumous legacy of Alexander 28 McQueen, with whom this book opened, falls in line with these other 29 icons.8 Without exception, these works characterize Chatterton as the 30 quintessentially romantic artist whose suicide was the ultimate extension 31 of his “genius.” In so doing, these narratives ensure the continued vener- 32 ation of that elite cadre of white male “geniuses,” the British romantics, 33 with whom the idea of Chatterton’s suicide remains intractably associated. 34 However, even a peripheral glance at the circumstances surrounding 35 Chatterton’s death should cast some doubt on the assumption that 36 suicide was his intention. That this is not more widely acknowledged 37 reflects the extent to which canonical British romanticism hinges on the 38 myth of his suicide. As Michelle Faubert explains, Chatterton died from 39 an overdose of arsenic, which was widely used for medicinal purposes 40 at the time. Just four months earlier, Chatterton left a fake suicide 41 120 DEATH RIGHTS

1 note for his employer as part of a scheme to manipulate his way out of 2 debt. But no suicide note was found at the scene of his death. It is thus 3 entirely plausible that Chatterton died by accident. And yet, as Faubert 4 asserts, generation after generation adheres to the received wisdom that 5 he killed himself deliberately because “if Chatterton was not a suicide, 6 then he ceases to be a mascot for romanticism.”9 This is to say, the idea 7 of his suicide sustains a host of cultural fantasies that ground a privileged 8 artistic and intellectual tradition. 9 The quintessential representation of Chatterton as the romantic 10 suicide par excellence is Henry Wallis’s 1856 oil painting, in which the 11 novelist George Meredith poses as the dead poet (Figure 5.1). According 12 to Andrew Radford and Mark Sandy, this painting “achieved iconic status 13 for the poet and set the seal on the image which, in some sense, had been 14 struggling to manifest itself since the poet’s suicide in 1770.”10 Indeed, 15 earlier representations of Chatterton’s death differ markedly from this 16 paradigmatic image. According to William L. Pressly, Wallis took some 17 inspiration from a 1794 illustration by Henry Singleton, engraved for 18 circulation by Edward Orme. Without disputing that Singleton’s work 19 exerted some influence on Wallis, it is worth noting that the Singleton 20 image arguably shares more in common with another representation 21 of Chatterton, produced in 1801 by Raphael Lamar West and engraved 22 by Francesco Bartolozzi.11 Taken together, these three images suggest a 23 shift in how Chatterton’s death was imagined and represented between 24 the end of the eighteenth century and the mid-nineteenth century. 25 In the Wallis painting, though his eyes are closed, Chatterton faces 26 the viewer. However, in the earlier illustrations by Singleton and West, 27 Chatterton’s eyes are open, and he looks away from the viewer, rendering 28 unclear whether he is already dead or in the process of dying. Wallis 29 depicts Chatterton as clearly dead; however, the orientation of his body 30 toward the viewer, compounded by the painting’s vivid colors, renders his 31 suicide with a vibrancy that seems incongruous with its subject matter. 32 It is not Chatterton eliciting this liveliness; the painting makes it clear 33 that he is gone. Insofar as viewers are oriented toward the corpse, then, 34 it is death itself that gives the painting its ironic vitality. By comparison, 35 in Singleton’s illustration it is unclear whether Chatterton is even the 36 focus. He lays prostrate on the right side of the page, while on the left, 37 a woman and child are entering his garret. The presence of these other 38 characters suggests a drama to the scene beyond just that of the poet’s 39 death. Similarly, while Chatterton is the only figure in West’s illustration, 40 it is the light shining through the window and falling on Chatterton, 41 rather than Chatterton himself, that emerges most prominently out of the otherwise heavily shaded image. The heavy-handed symbolism of Marvelous Boys 121

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 Figure 5.1. The Death of Chatterton by Henry Wallis, ca. 1856. Source: Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 21 22 23 that light, drawing the eye to Chatterton’s heart, functions much like 24 the woman and child in Singleton’s illustration, compelling the viewer 25 to focus on something—anything—other than the fact of Chatterton’s 26 death. Moreover, because Chatterton faces away from the viewer in both 27 illustrations, the viewer’s focus is diffused rather than directed specifi- 28 cally toward the poet. In Wallis’s painting, however, it is only the tragic 29 fact of the poet’s suicide that faces the viewer, both literally and meta- 30 phorically; every other detail is secondary to the titular subject whose 31 lifeless body sprawls across the canvas. Thus, to paraphrase art historian 32 Ron Brown, the Singleton and West images read more as memento vivere 33 than Wallis’s memento mori.12 34 Indeed, according to Brown, the first known image of Chatterton’s 35 suicide, John Flaxman’s 1775 ink drawing Thomas Chatterton Taking 36 the Bowl of Poison from the Spirit of Despair, completely circumvents 37 his actual death. Flaxman’s allegorical image of “a youth in a nightdress 38 offered the cup by a crouching swarthy spirit and then being taken up 39 by a goddess in a chariot” depicts Chatterton as “bypassing death to 40 become immortal.”13 Thus, between the work by Flaxman in 1775 and 41 Wallis’s 1856 painting, there is a clear progression in emphasis from the 122 DEATH RIGHTS

1 drama of Chatterton’s final moments to the reality of his death. Flaxman, 2 Singleton, and West variously consider, without centering, what would 3 become the aesthetic allure of the young poet’s suicide. This thoroughly 4 romantic position is presented in earnest by Wallis and echoed in the 5 writings of his Victorian contemporaries. 6 One of Wallis’s most ardent admirers, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 7 inscribes Chatterton’s position in the romantic canon in his 1881 sonnet 8 sequence, Five English Poets. The sequence exalts Chatterton, Blake, 9 Coleridge, Keats, and Percy Shelley as representative of the moment in 10 literary history we now inherit as British romanticism. Rossetti’s sonnet 11 on Chatterton is the first in the sequence and emphasizes his youth 12 and the idea of his genius. Chatterton also appears in another poem by 13 Rossetti, “Tiber, Niles, and Thames,” which analogizes his suicide to the 14 silencing of historically significant rulers.14 Likewise, as Joseph Bristow 15 and Rebecca N. Marshall discuss in their excellent book on the subject, 16 Oscar Wilde hailed Chatterton as “the father of the Romantic movement 17 in literature, the precursor of Blake, Coleridge and Keats, the greatest 18 poet of his time”—a claim that, as Bristow and Marshall explain, had 19 far more to do with the early politics of literary periodization than with 20 the substance of Chatterton’s relevance to those poets who were being 21 labeled “romantic” in the late nineteenth century.15 22 All this is to say that while the canonical romantic poets’ interest 23 in Chatterton is indisputable, it was arguably these later artists, poets, 24 and critics who developed the myth of Chatterton as paradigmatic of 25 romantic suicide and, by extension, of romanticism itself. Romantic 26 suicide was most thoroughly romanticized in the late nineteenth century. 27 As Radford and Sandy explain, “Romantic myths of the artist as a soli- 28 tary genius . . . were bequeathed to the Victorians as much as they were 29 reinforced, even initiated, by Victorian editors and biographers.” Victo- 30 rians inscribed the “mythology and hagiography of Romantic authors” by 31 consolidating facets of the bourgeois white male–focused art and culture 32 they wanted future generations to remember through, among other 33 things, the idea of Chatterton’s suicide.16 As a result, even today Chat- 34 terton remains, for some, “a glorious martyrdom to Europe’s artists.”17 35 The trouble with this well-worn narrative is that martyrs die for their 36 beliefs. What exactly were Chatterton’s beliefs? Do we know? Does 37 it matter? Nick Groom has posited that Chatterton’s exalted status 38 in the history of English literature makes it difficult for scholars to 39 properly analyze the poet’s work on its own terms: “For the critic, Chat- 40 terton is too mercurial, too confusing: perpetually challenging the genres 41 of writing, mixing national histories, national fictions, and national myths in a great post-Enlightenment creation of the past . . . Chatterton’s Marvelous Boys 123

iconicity has eclipsed his very work as a writer.”18 I would like to suggest 1 something different. If Chatterton’s iconicity has made it difficult for 2 critics to read him, it is because we have our terms wrong. Chatterton is 3 not a martyr; he is a sacrifice. 4 In his work on the social function of myths, René Girard theorizes 5 that myths are founded on acts of sacrificial violence meant to strengthen 6 a social order that feels itself disintegrating. The sacrificial object serves 7 to “reinforce the social fabric.”19 In the construction and circulation of 8 the myth of romantic suicide since the nineteenth century, Chatterton 9 has operated as precisely such an object: 10 11 [A] substitute for all the members of the community, offered up by the 12 members themselves. The sacrifice serves to protect the entire commu- 13 nity from its own violence. . . . The elements of dissension scattered 14 throughout the community are drawn to the person of the sacrificial 15 victim and eliminated, at least temporarily, by its sacrifice.20 16 17 The mythology that now attends Chatterton and, by extension, romantic 18 suicide more broadly, emerged to consolidate the authority of the bour- 19 geois white male subject at a moment when that authority was being 20 questioned by competing liberal projects, including abolition and 21 protofeminism. Moreover, as the next section demonstrates, Chat- 22 tertonian figures of tortured, singular genius continue to circulate as 23 mechanisms through which liberalism’s rights and entitlements are 24 policed and reinforced as the exclusive province of “Man.” 25 At the turn of the nineteenth century, the hegemony of “Man” 26 was threatened by writers who drew on liberal principles to render 27 suicide a challenge to the authority of white male individualism. Stories 28 about self-destruction produced in the era within and against which 29 romanticism developed sought to challenge (even as they more often 30 functionally maintained) the authority of “Man.” That Chatterton was 31 made (and continues to be) synonymous with romanticism, the most 32 privileged western cultural category to emerge from that era, is argu- 33 ably best explained by Girard’s notion that the sacrifice “dies so that 34 the entire community, threatened by the same fate, can be reborn in 35 a new or renewed cultural order.”21 Thus, I would like to suggest that 36 romantic suicide epitomizes a defensive ideology wherein the deifica- 37 tion of white male solipsism reproduces an isolationist and exclusionary 38 status quo.22 And while it emerged from the nineteenth century, the 39 myth of romantic suicide continues to circulate to strikingly similar 40 ends today. 41 124 DEATH RIGHTS

1 Conclusion: Black Lives and Dead White Guys 2 3 In my lifetime, no suicide has been so thoroughly romanticized as that 4 of Kurt Cobain. That is, in the popular treatment of Cobain’s life, and 5 especially of his death, we see a clear recirculation of romantic literary 6 tropes. One day after his body was found on April 8, 1994, the New 7 York Times described him as the “hesitant poet of ‘grunge rock,’” and 8 the Guardian labeled him an “icon of alienation.”23 Newsweek recircu- 9 lated this language as recently as 2018, with a headline memorializing 10 him as “the poet of alienation” on the anniversary of his death.24 In 11 June of 1994, Rolling Stone took readers inside “Kurt Cobain’s Down- 12 ward Spiral: The Last Days of Nirvana’s Leader,” a subject revisited by 13 Gus Van Sant in his 2005 film Last Days, a fictionalized portrayal of 14 the events leading up to the death of a Cobain look-alike named, not 15 incidentally, Blake.25 Many news reports, particularly those from 1994, 16 also articulated concerns about “copycat” suicides, echoing the eigh- 17 teenth-century panic over Goethe’s Werther, though studies have since 18 demonstrated a decrease in suicides in the months following Cobain’s 19 death.26 But the pièce de résistance is American artist Sandow Birk’s 20 1994 painting, The Death of Kurt Cobain, which is modeled after 21 Wallis’s The Death of Chatterton. In Birk’s depiction, Cobain’s body 22 is dressed and posed almost identically to Chatterton’s, but his head is 23 blown to bloody bits. A halo hovers above where his face would have 24 been—a gruesome, pointed send-up of the mythology that mystifies the 25 complexities of both writers’ deaths, as well as their lives.27 Since the 26 day the world learned of Cobain’s death, his work has been mediated 27 and remediated through the narrative of romantic suicide. As a result, 28 the art for which he was hailed the voice of his generation is now nearly 29 impossible to disentangle from the much-publicized final line of his 30 suicide note: “It’s better to burn out than to fade away.”28 31 It is worth noting, too, how well Cobain himself is now said to 32 have understood the social script associated with romantic suicide. 33 Charles Cross, Cobain’s foremost biographer, quotes friends’ and family 34 members’ recollections of Cobain expressing, from an early age, senti- 35 ments such as, “I’m going to become a superstar musician, kill myself, 36 and go out in a flame of glory.”29 I would emphasize, as Cross does, that 37 how much of this is truth and how much simply reflects the pervasive- 38 ness of romantic archetypes in his posthumous reputation is anyone’s 39 guess. It is true that Cobain’s journals are rife with such sentiments, but 40 these are often self-consciously tempered, as in the following: “To be 41 positive at all times is to ignore all that is important, sacred or valuable. Marvelous Boys 125

To be negative at all times is to be threatened by rediculousness [sic] 1 and instant discredibility [sic].”30 The reality of suicide is complicated; 2 romantic suicide is decidedly less so. Thus, I would argue that romantic 3 suicide killed Kurt Cobain, but I don’t mean Cobain the man. I have 4 no right to speculate on why he chose to end his life, and it’s not my 5 intention to do that here. I’m talking about Cobain the legend: the 6 posterchild for unruly brilliance and unbearable pain. It is the myth of 7 romantic suicide, the very one I’ve been discussing in these pages, that 8 keeps him locked inside this box even now, more than a quarter of a 9 century after the traumatic moment of his passing. 10 If, as I have been arguing, the ideological function of romantic suicide 11 has been to reinforce the dominance of the liberal subject, it is deeply 12 ironic that Cobain should now be associated with this tradition. Cobain 13 was no representative man. His appeal lay precisely in his subversion of 14 hegemonic norms. He spoke out against rape culture, reflected publicly 15 on his fluid sexuality, performed in drag and, long before it was fashion- 16 able in white progressive circles, he was writing about systemic racism 17 and intersectionality.31 In the liner notes to Incesticide, the collection 18 of B-sides released shortly after Nevermind made Nirvana a household 19 name, Cobain urged fans espousing homophobic, racist, or misogynistic 20 views to “leave us the fuck alone. Don’t come to our shows and don’t 21 buy our records.”32 Even so, the most commonly circulated facts about 22 Cobain remain his drug use and suicide.33 23 However, at least one popular domain remembers him differently. 24 Socially conscious hip-hop artists consistently see through the teen angst 25 narratives that render Cobain’s rage situational rather than what it was: 26 a response to deeply rooted structural problems that keep our society 27 unjust, unreasonable, and for many, fundamentally unlivable. Writing 28 in 2014, Cross finds fifty-five hip-hop songs that sample Nirvana and 29 dozens more that reference Cobain.34 From established heavyweights like 30 Jay-Z, Kendrick Lamar, Kool Keith, and Talib Kweli, to newer artists like 31 the late Lil Peep, Trippie Redd, and Marcus Gloster, who performs under 32 the moniker “Black Cobain,” hip-hop’s interest in Cobain runs deeper 33 than, as some have claimed, the fact that his name conveniently rhymes 34 with cocaine.35 One particularly trenchant example is Denzel Curry’s 35 “Clout Cobain.” The song is about fame and the entertainment indus- 36 try’s exploitation of young artists, and in this sense, it rehearses a familiar 37 story. But the music video takes it somewhere else entirely. 38 Directed by Zev Deans, the video for “Clout Cobain” radiates deep 39 respect for the late musician and was made in part to call attention to 40 troubling ways in which his death is romanticized: “they glorify him 41 126 DEATH RIGHTS

1 for the wrong reasons,” Curry told Billboard shortly after the video 2 premiered in July of 2018.36 But the video is also an indictment of the 3 racial politics that undergird whose deaths get romanticized within the 4 liberal imaginary and why. The video centers on Curry performing as 5 part of a circus act. He wears a striped shirt reminiscent of the one worn 6 by Cobain at the 1993 MTV Video Music Awards. His face is painted 7 clown-white with an exaggerated smile and dark circle around his left 8 eye, and thus the striped shirt also frames him as a mime or clown figure. 9 Entering the stage on camelback, Curry is escorted by a man wearing 10 a white shirt covered in frowning faces (a nod to Nirvana’s smiley face 11 logo, designed by Cobain in 1991). Shots of the audience, mostly young 12 adults, recall the high school mosh pit in Nirvana’s video for “Smells Like 13 Teen Spirit.” Audience members and fellow performers wear Cobain’s 14 iconic white oval sunglasses (which are in fashion again thanks in part 15 to Curry’s rebranding them “Clout Goggles”).37 16 For most of its four minutes and nineteen seconds, the video explores 17 themes now typically associated with Cobain: the ringleader steals 18 money from Curry’s pockets, industry workers promote drug use, and 19 fans mindlessly absorb the latest trends. Though most of the video 20 is in black and white, Deans employs selective color effects to make 21 certain hues pop at key moments. The camera lingers on several fans 22 wincing in pain as they get tattoos, which bleed bright red against 23 the otherwise colorless scene. The raw feeling registered on their faces 24 contrasts sharply with close-ups of other audience members, stone faced 25 and apparently unimpressed with Curry’s increasingly manic perfor- 26 mance. These glimpses of people in pain join two other brief but 27 significant shots from earlier in the video, which likewise punctuate 28 what could otherwise be taken as another cautionary tale of drugs, 29 fame, and empty consumerism. 30 At 0:36, we see Curry, a black man, in chains, being yanked onstage 31 by the white ringleader. Then, at 2:17, the video cuts to an intertitle 32 card that reads “Dance!!!” Curry begins to move in ways that recall 33 conventions of minstrel performance. The racist iconography of the 34 past then gives way to a more recent visual form. Beginning at 3:14, 35 Curry is shown in the vertical frame of a cellphone video, waving a gun 36 while livestreaming. Looking at this, it’s hard not to connect the dots 37 to the endless stream of cellphone recordings that show the fatal results 38 of state-sanctioned violence disproportionately directed at African 39 Americans. As his in-house audience roars with laugher and his digital 40 audience floods his cellphone screen with “likes” (represented here by 41 the Nirvana smileys), Curry stops, rolls his eyes, and drops the act. The Marvelous Boys 127

camera pulls in on his face as he smears his makeup; the circle around 1 his eye, which had appeared black, is revealed to be red, a bullseye. 2 Curry renders his frustration increasingly palpable until, at 3:45, he 3 raises the gun to his temple. The audience continues to cheer and laugh 4 while the ringleader glares at the rogue performer. At 3:54, Curry pulls 5 the trigger. With a spurt of dark red blood, his body falls out of the 6 frame, and we watch the audience register what they’ve just witnessed. 7 Following a protracted collective gasp, the camera pans slowly over 8 Curry’s body, up to his face, and then across to the blood pooling from 9 his temple. Adding insult to fatality, there’s popcorn in the blood. 10 Cobain functions here as a touchstone through which the video brings 11 into focus the incongruities of a culture inured to the sight of bloodied 12 and dying black bodies, which has yet to redress (or even really acknowl- 13 edge) the lethal impacts of the war on drugs on communities of color, 14 but insists on maintaining the romance of a white man’s drug addic- 15 tion and violent death by suicide. It achieves this by showing in brutal, 16 graphic detail a version of what some Nirvana fans have been demanding 17 for years. Since Cobain’s death in 1994, the Seattle police department 18 has received regular requests to release photos of his body. These come 19 mostly from conspiracy theorists who believe the photos will prove that 20 Cobain was murdered. In 2014, the twenty-year anniversary of his death, 21 the Seattle police department reviewed the case, reaffirmed that it was 22 a suicide, and released thirty-five photos taken at the scene. Two years 23 later, photos of the shotgun Cobain used to kill himself were made public 24 for the first time.38 Both sets of photos were picked up by nearly every 25 major news outlet and are now widely available online. Though not espe- 26 cially graphic—they don’t show his face or head—they are nevertheless 27 disturbing. Moreover, precisely because of what they do not show, they 28 have done nothing to assuage conspiracy theorists.39 So why release them 29 at all? One detective associated with the case had the following to say 30 when asked why they chose not to release the more graphic images: “What 31 are people going to gain from seeing pictures of Kurt Cobain laying on 32 the ground with his hair blown back, with blood coming out of his nose 33 and trauma to his eyes from a penetrating shotgun wound? How’s that 34 going to benefit anybody?”40 Indeed, it would benefit absolutely no one. 35 What it would do, as Birk’s painting of Cobain-as-Chatterton captures so 36 incisively, is unravel the mythology that surrounds his suicide. It is signif- 37 icant, then, that Curry’s video gives us precisely such a visual. 38 Of course, Curry’s suicide in “Clout Cobain” is fictional, rendering 39 this an admittedly imperfect comparison. Nevertheless, the lingering 40 attention to his bloodied face and head in the context of a work that 41 128 DEATH RIGHTS

1 intentionally calls up Cobain speaks volumes about the racial logics of 2 death in our modernity. A contemporary emblem of romantic suicide, 3 Cobain is inscribed in cultural memory as more myth than man. Curry 4 explodes that myth by calling attention to its inherently exclusionary 5 presumptions. Dressed in one of Cobain’s signature outfits, we might 6 take Curry to stand in for Cobain, a “slave” to fame, even as the image 7 of Curry in chains hearkens to the actual history of African enslave- 8 ment and its afterlives. Thus, “Clout Cobain” links the mythmaking 9 that renders Cobain immortal to the social logics that underwrite 10 and turn on the daily (non)event of black death. In so doing, Curry 11 demands that we consider why the death of a white man a quarter of 12 a century ago continues to matter more than black lives do today. By 13 the same token, some 250 years after Chatterton’s death, his home city 14 of Bristol, once a key hub of the trade in enslaved Africans, remains 15 enraptured with its “poet genius” even as it is only recently beginning to 16 reckon seriously with the far more death-driven contexts in which Chat- 17 terton and his contemporaries lived.41 While conventional wisdom may 18 complain that dead white “geniuses” have little to do with the afterlives 19 of African enslavement, as this book has shown, that is simply not true. 20 By looking beyond romantic narratives of suicide, this book has endeav- 21 ored to critique efforts to reckon with a wider set of meanings associated 22 with suicide, as well as with the exclusionary ideologies that buttress 23 liberal modernity’s notions of who “counts” as a person, a subject, a citizen, 24 and a human being. The urgency of thinking through these questions 25 has never been more clearly spelled out. In late 2019, the US Congres- 26 sional Black Caucus published a report on a striking rise in suicide among 27 African American youth. Suicide is now the second leading cause of 28 death among African Americans between the ages of ten and nineteen.42 29 The report urges us to consider suicide a direct consequence of systemic 30 racism. It is, of course, not wrong in its conclusions: suicide is, and has 31 been since at least the eighteenth century, clearly connected to racial 32 injustice. But while private pain cannot and should not be disarticulated 33 from the social contexts in which it is experienced, as Wilderson reminds 34 us, “The violence that saturates Black life isn’t threatened with elimina- 35 tion just because it is exposed.”43 At their best, liberal legislators, poets, 36 revolutionaries, and scholars imagine that the world as we know it can be 37 transformed. But what worlds are possible beyond liberalism’s bounds? 38 39 40 41 1 2 3 4 5 Notes 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 Introduction 16 17 1. On suicide notes in eighteenth-century print culture, see Eric Parisot, 18 “Suicide Notes and Popular Sensibility in the Eighteenth-Century 19 British Press,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 47, no. 3 (2014): 277–91; 20 and Michael MacDonald, “Suicide and the Rise of the Popular Press 21 in England,” Representations 22 (Spring 1988): 36–55. On changes in 22 burial laws for suicides, see Barbara Gates, Victorian Suicide: Mad 23 Crimes and Sad Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 24 1987). 25 2. These findings were published in an 1883 essay in Nature called 26 “Suicide of Scorpions.” For more on this, see the second chapter of 27 Jesse Bering’s Suicidal: Why We Kill Ourselves (Chicago: University 28 of Chicago Press, 2018). 29 3. David Constantine, introduction to The Sorrows of Young Werther by 30 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (New York: Oxford University Press, 31 2012), xxvii. 32 4. The following is a chronological list of books published on the subject 33 in the last two decades: Georges Minois, History of Suicide: Voluntary 34 Death in Western Culture, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Baltimore: Johns 35 Hopkins University Press, 2001); Jeffrey R. Watt, ed., From Sin to 36 Insanity: Suicide in Early Modern Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univer- 37 sity Press, 2004); Ron Brown, The Art of Suicide (London: Reaktion, 38 2004); John Weaver and David Wright, Histories of Suicide: Interna- 39 tional Perspectives on Self-Destruction in the Modern World (Toronto: 40 University of Toronto Press, 2009); R. A. Houston, Punishing the 41 Dead? Suicide, Lordship, and Community in Britain, 1500–1830 (New 42 43

129 130 Notes

1 York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Alexander Murray, Suicide in 2 the Middle Ages (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Ian 3 Marsh, Suicide: Foucault, History and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge 4 University Press, 2010); Richard Bell, We Shall Be No More: Suicide 5 and Self-government in the Newly United States (Cambridge, MA: 6 Harvard University Press, 2012); Kelly McGuire, Dying to Be English: 7 Suicide Narratives and National Identity (London: Pickering and 8 Chatto, 2012); Jennifer Michael Hecht, Stay: A History of Suicide and 9 the Philosophies Against It (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 10 2014); Marzio Barbagli, Farewell to the World: A History of Suicide, 11 trans. Lucinda Byatt (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2015); Terri Snyder, The 12 Power to Die: Suicide and Slavery in British North America (Chicago: 13 University of Chicago Press, 2015); and Andrew Bennett, Suicide 14 Century: Literature and Suicide from James Joyce to David Foster 15 Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Earlier book- 16 length studies include, in addition to Gates’s Victorian Suicide: Olive 17 Anderson, Suicide in Victorian and Edwardian England (London: 18 Clarendon, 1987); A. Alvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide 19 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990); Michael MacDonald and Terence 20 R. Murphy, Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early Modern England (New 21 York: Oxford University Press, 1991); and Victor Bailey, This Rash 22 Act: Suicide Across the Life Cycle in the Victorian City (Stanford, CA: 23 Stanford University Press, 1998). 24 5. Scholars who have debunked this myth include James Whitehead, 25 Madness and the Romantic Poet (New York: Oxford University Press, 26 2017) and Duncan Wu, 30 Great Myths About the Romantics (Chich- 27 ester, UK: John Wiley, 2015). I realize that my categorization of the 28 romantic genius as almost exclusively male may draw objections because 29 women writers also adopted the persona. However, as Andrew Bennett 30 has shown, when women contemporaries of those poets we now asso- 31 ciate with romanticism adopted this persona, it was with the express 32 aim of separating themselves from the male canon and its “gendering 33 of genius and neglect.” More recently, Tricia Lootens has shown how 34 twentieth-century feminist literary critics used the trope of romantic 35 suicide to establish some women writers as canonical: “Sylvia Plath 36 killed herself and was born again to a dominant role in the world of 37 letters.” In these readings, and as I’ll demonstrate in this book, suicide 38 circulates as a cipher of privileges that reinscribes modernity’s invest- 39 ment in patriarchy and whiteness. See Andrew Bennett, Romantic 40 Poets and the Culture of Posterity (Cambridge: Cambridge University 41 Press, 1999), 68; and Tricia Lootens, The Political Poetess: Victorian 42 Femininity, Race, and the Legacy of Separate Spheres (Princeton, NJ: 43 Princeton University Press, 2017), 58. Notes 131

6. For images of McQueen’s coats, see Andrew Bolton, Alexander 1 McQueen: Savage Beauty (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2 2011), 31–50. 3 7. Bolton, Alexander McQueen, 92, 112, 184. 4 8. Compare the accompanying web pages for the exhibition: while the 5 show itself remains conceptually framed through the lens of romanti- 6 cism, as per Bolton’s vision, four of the V&A’s ten subsections explicitly 7 include the label “romantic,” whereas in the earlier iteration at the Met, 8 all the subsections are labeled “romantic.” See Victoria and Albert 9 Museum, “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty—About the Exhibi- 10 tion,” accessed September 28, 2018, http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/ 11 exhibitions/exhibition-alexander-mcqueen-savage-beauty/about-the-ex- 12 hibition; and Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Alexander McQueen: 13 Savage Beauty,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art, accessed February 14 28, 2015, http://blog.metmuseum.org/alexandermcqueen/about. 15 9. Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure 16 of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 21. 17 10. Wilderson, Red, White, and Black, 11. 18 11. Attending to recommendations set forth by P. Gabrielle Foreman 19 et. al., I generally avoid calling people of African descent who were 20 enslaved slaves so as to disarticulate the condition from the person. 21 However, I use “suicidal slave,” always in quotation marks, to under- 22 score that this figure precisely normalizes such elisions. For more on 23 this, see P. Gabrielle Foreman, et al., “Writing about Slavery/Teaching 24 About Slavery: This Might Help,” community-sourced document, 25 accessed May 14, 2020, https://docs.google.com/document/d/1A4TEd- 26 DgYslX-hlKezLodMIM71My3KTN0zxRv0IQTOQs. 27 12. In addition to Snyder’s The Power to Die, see Brycchan Carey, 28 British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Senti- 29 ment, and Slavery, 1760–1807 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); 30 Michelle Faubert, “The Wollstonecraftian Plot: Female Suicide as 31 Slave Protest,” in Romantic Bodyscapes: Embodied Selves, Embodied 32 Spaces and Legible Bodies in the Romantic Age, ed. Gerold Sedlmayr 33 (Trier, Germany: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2015), 123–44; Moira 34 Ferguson, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial 35 Slavery, 1670–1834 (London: Routledge, 1992); Lynn Festa, Sentimental 36 Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (Balti- 37 more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); Margaret Higonnet, 38 “Dialogues with the Dead: Enlightened Selves, Suicide, and Human 39 Rights,” 1616: Anuario de Literatura Comparada 2 (2012): 189–208. 40 Many others are referenced throughout this book. 41 13. For more on this, see the fourth chapter of McGuire’s Dying to Be 42 English. 43 132 Notes

1 14. Minois, History of Suicide, 267. 2 15. It is now generally accepted that there was no significant uptick in 3 suicides following the publication of Goethe’s novella. However, “the 4 Werther effect” remains in circulation as a theory in the social sciences, 5 informing the strict guidelines that reporters in many countries follow 6 when writing about or discussing suicide. David Phillips originated 7 the term in “The Influence of Suggestion on Suicide: Substantive and 8 Theoretical Implications of the Werther Effect,” American Sociological 9 Review 39, no. 3 (1974): 340–54. Since then, aspects of the theory— 10 from its historicity to its accuracy in predicting suicide rates—have 11 been called into question. See Jan Thorson and Per-Arne Öberg, “Was 12 There a Suicide Epidemic After Goethe’s Werther?,” Archives of Suicide 13 Research 7, no. 1 (2003): 69–72; James Hittner, “How Robust is the 14 Werther Effect? A Re-examination of the Suggestion-Imitation Model 15 of Suicide,” Mortality (August 2005): 193–200; and Michelle Faubert, 16 “Werther Goes Viral: Suicidal Contagion, Vaccination, and Infections 17 Sympathy,” Literature and Medicine 34, no. 2 (Fall 2016): 389–417. 18 16. Quoted in Bruce Duncan, Goethe’s Werther and the Critics (Roch- 19 ester, NY: Camden House, 2005), 1; and Minois, History of Suicide, 181, 20 respectively. Ironically, despite his own penchant for morbid themes 21 and self-destructive behavior, Lord Byron lobbed a similar charge right 22 back at Goethe: “It is moreover asserted that ‘the predominant char- 23 acter of the whole body of English poetry is a disgust and contempt 24 for life’—but I rather suspect that, by one single work of prose, you 25 [Goethe] yourself have excited a greater contempt for life than all the 26 English volumes of poesy that ever were written. Madame de Staël says 27 that ‘Werther has occasioned more suicides than the most beautiful 28 woman,’ and I really believe that he has put more individuals out of 29 this world than Napoleon himself.” This quote appears in the ulti- 30 mately rejected dedication to Byron’s 1820 play Marino Faliero. See 31 The Works of Byron: Letters and Journals, ed. Rowland E. Prothero, 32 vol. 5 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1904), 102. 33 17. McGuire, Dying to Be English, 116. 34 18. See, particularly, McGuire, Dying to Be English; Bell, We Shall Be 35 No More; and Snyder, The Power to Die. Although it is only recently 36 that monographs have read the history of suicide through sociopolit- 37 ical frameworks, Margaret Higonnet pioneered this approach in her 38 1985 article “Suicide: Representations of the Feminine,” Poetics Today 39 6, no. 1–2 (1985): 103–18. This article opened conversations about 40 the relationship between gender, rights discourses, sensibility, and 41 the male-centered culture of romantic suicide. It is thus all the more 42 surprising that there has been no book-length study on suicide and 43 romanticism between then and now. Notes 133

19. MacDonald and Murphy, Sleepless Souls, 2. 1 20. Watt, From Sin to Insanity, 8. In terms of influence on subsequent 2 thinking about suicide, the only conceivable rival to Hume’s text is 3 Emile Durkheim’s On Suicide (1897). Durkheim used statistical records 4 to advance the theory that suicide rates are contingent upon the inter- 5 play of social forces. If we can control those forces, he argued, we can 6 lower incidence of suicide at least to some degree. Durkheim’s work 7 remains influential in academic studies of suicide trends, as well as in 8 the development of public policies on suicide education and prevention. 9 21. David Hume, On Suicide (New York: Penguin, 2005), 4–5. 10 22. Hume, On Suicide, 7. It is worth noting that in Catholicism, Protes- 11 tantism, Anglicanism, Calvinism, and Lutheranism, suicide is strictly 12 condemned. Other Christian denominations view it somewhat more 13 leniently. For instance, Methodism (which, perhaps not coinciden- 14 tally, developed in England toward the end of the eighteenth century) 15 stresses compassion toward those who kill themselves, though it still 16 considers the act itself to be sinful. For more on suicide and Christi- 17 anity, see Minois, History of Suicide, 68–76. 18 23. Hume, On Suicide, 8–9. 19 24. Hume, 8–9. 20 25. Hume, 8–9. 21 26. Hume, 10. 22 27. Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/ 23 Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An 24 Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 260. 25 28. Quoted in John Immerwahr, “Hume’s Revised Racism,” Journal of the 26 History of Ideas 53, no. 3 (1992): 481–82. 27 29. Immerwahr, “Hume’s Revised Racism,” 483. 28 30. Immerwahr, 483. 29 31. Immerwahr, 486. Aaron Garrett and Silvia Sebastiani also discuss 30 these changes and their implications in “David Hume on Race,” in 31 The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Race, ed. Naomi Zack (New 32 York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 31–43. 33 32. Henry Louis Gates Jr., Figures in Black: Words, Signs and the ‘Racial 34 Self ’ (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 18. 35 33. Wilderson, Afropessimism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2020), 224. 36 34. Wilderson, Afropessimism, 48. 37 35. Wilderson, 20–21. 38 36. Iyko Day, “Being or Nothingness: Indigeneity, Antiblackness, and 39 Settler Colonial Critique,” Journal of the Critical Ethnic Studies Asso- 40 ciation 1, no. 2 (Fall 2015): 102–21. 41 37. Mark Rifkin, Fictions of Land and Flesh, (Durham, NC: Duke Univer- 42 sity Press, 2019), 3, 5. Rifkin’s first chapter offers a thorough overview 43 134 Notes

1 of commonalities and divergences between western academic and 2 activist discourses of blackness and indigeneity. See also Glen Sean 3 Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics 4 of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); 5 Tiffany Lethabo King, The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black 6 and Native Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019); and 7 Tiya Miles and Sharon P. Holland, eds., Crossing Waters, Crossing 8 Worlds (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). 9 38. Fred Moten, “Chromatic Saturation,” in The Universal Machine 10 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 195–96. 11 39. Jared Sexton, “Ante-Anti-Blackness,” Lateral: Journal of the Cultural 12 Studies Association 1(2012), http://csalateral.org/section/theory/ 13 ante-anti-blackness-afterthoughts-sexton/. 14 40. Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: 15 Duke University Press, 2016), 22. 16 41. Fred Moten, “Knowledge of Freedom,” in Stolen Life (Durham, NC: 17 Duke University Press, 2018), 33. 18 42. Saidiya V. Hartman and Frank B. Wilderson III, “The Position of the 19 Unthought,” Qui Parle 13, no. 187 :(2003) 2. 20 43. Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s 21 House,” in Sister Outsider (New York: Ten Speed, 2007), 110–14. 22 44. Wilderson, Red, White, and Black, 11. 23 45. Quoted in Siddhartha Mitter, “‘What Does it Mean to Be Black and 24 Look at This?’ A Scholar Reflects on the Dana Schutz Controversy,” 25 Hyperallergic, March 24, 2017, https://hyperallergic.com/368012/ 26 what-does-it-mean-to-be-black-and-look-at-this-a-scholar-reflects- 27 on-the-dana-schutz-controversy/. Sharpe is referring here to the 28 analytic she develops for reading black existence as always occur- 29 ring in relation to modernity’s structural antiblackness, which she 30 names through metaphorical engagements with elements of the Middle 31 Passage—the slave ship, the hold, the weather: “The question for 32 theory is how to live in the wake of slavery, in slavery’s afterlives, the 33 afterlife of property, how, in short, to inhabit and rupture this epis- 34 teme with their, with out, knowable lives.” Sharpe, In the Wake, 50. 35 46. Recognizing that the “liberal” in “liberal arts” predates the eigh- 36 teenth-century liberalism this book focuses on, I make this assertion 37 with an eye on Patrick Deneen’s claim that in practice, this later 38 sense of “liberal” has emerged as more prominent in universities 39 today: “Under the guise of differences in race, an exploding number 40 of genders, and a variety of sexual orientations, the only substan- 41 tive worldview advanced is that of advanced liberalism: the ascent of 42 the autonomous individual backed by the power and support of the 43 state and its growing control over institutions, including schools and Notes 135

universities.” While Deneen advocates for a return to the ancient sense 1 of the “liberal arts” as “the rescue of liberal education from liberalism,” 2 I see far more possibility in Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s call “to 3 be in but not of” the university—to embrace what they variously call 4 fugitive study, maroon study, black study, the undercommons, modali- 5 ties that champion collectivity over university cultures that churn out 6 state-sanctioned “autonomous individuals” committed to “enlightened” 7 narratives of objectivity, civilization, and progress. See Patrick Deneen, 8 Why Liberalism Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 9 124, 130; also see Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: 10 Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Brooklyn, NY: Minor Composi- 11 tions, 2013), 26. 12 47. Marlon Ross, “The Race of/in Romanticism: Notes Toward a Crit- 13 ical Race Theory,” in Race, Romanticism, and the Atlantic, ed. Paul 14 Youngquist (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), 34. 15 48. Generally speaking, critical race work in Anglo-European literary 16 studies lags significantly behind American literary studies. However, 17 scholars of premodern and early modern literature and culture have 18 made significant headway in this area since at least the pathbreaking 19 publication of Kim F. Hall’s Things of Darkness: Economies of Race 20 and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University 21 Press, 1995). More recently, the RaceB4Race conference series, created 22 by Ayanna Thompson, has helped to substantially shift these fields 23 by shining a light on antiracist scholarship in premodern and early 24 modern studies and centering scholars of color. For more on this, see 25 the following: https://www.ayannathompson.com/raceb4race. 26 49. Manu Samriti Chander, Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in 27 the Global Nineteenth Century (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University 28 Press, 2017), 101. 29 50. Chander, Brown Romantics, 154. 30 51. Bakary Diaby, “Black Women and/in the Shadow of Romanticism,” 31 European Romantic Review 30, no. 3 (2019): 253. 32 52. Eva Beatrice Dykes, The Negro in English Romantic Thought: Or, A 33 Study of Sympathy for the Oppressed (Washington, DC: Associated, 34 1942), 153. 35 53. Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People 36 to Talk About Racism (Boston: Beacon, 2018), 20. 37 54. Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British 38 Rule in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 3. 39 55. Chander, Brown Romantics, 36–38. 40 56. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (Minneap- 41 olis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 23. 42 57. Eagleton, Literary Theory. 43 136 Notes

1 58. Paul Youngquist, “The African Queen,” in Race, Romanticism, and 2 the Atlantic, ed. Paul Youngquist (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), 81. 3 59. See, for example, Chander’s Brown Romantics and Jared Hickman’s 4 Black Prometheus: Race and Radicalism in the Age of Atlantic Slavery 5 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). Joel Pace and I discuss 6 the limits of the term in “Introduction: New Directions in Transat- 7 lantic Romanticisms,” Symbiosis: A Journal of Transatlantic Literary 8 and Cultural Relations 23, no. 1 (Spring 2019): 5–19, while the Bigger 9 Six Collective (of which I am a founding member) offers a counterar- 10 gument for its utility in the coda to the same volume, pages 139–40. 11 60. These definitions are variously drawn from: bell hooks, Teaching to 12 Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 13 1994); Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture (New York: 14 Routledge, 1997); Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (New 15 York: W. W. Norton, 2010); and DiAngelo, White Fragility. 16 61. Thus, for example, bell hooks uses variations of the term “imperialist 17 white supremacist capitalist hetero-patriarchy” to make visible the 18 continually interlocking systems of subjugation that buttress liberal 19 modernity. See, among others, hooks, The Will to Change: Men, 20 Masculinity, and Love (New York: Washington Square, 2004) and 21 Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (London: Pluto, 2000). 22 62. Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham, NC: Duke University 23 Press, 2017), 152–53. 24 63. Youngquist, “The African Queen,” 82. Even as I write about defamil- 25 iarizing whiteness, I am reminded of Kehinde Andrews’s claim that 26 whiteness is akin to psychosis: it cannot be reasoned with and efforts 27 to defamiliarize it merely reproduce it. He’s right. The very existence of 28 this work underlines his point that because “there are surely limits to 29 the role that universities—bastions of Whiteness—can play in disman- 30 tling White supremacy,” scholarly contributions to those efforts will 31 always be necessarily insufficient. See “The Psychosis of Whiteness: 32 The Celluloid Hallucinations of Amazing Grace and Belle,” Journal 33 of Black Studies 47, no. 5 (2016): 439. 34 64. Bennett, Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity, 78. 35 65. See Bennett, especially chapter 6. 36 66. Victor Hugo, “Author’s Preface to the First Edition of Hernani,” in Dramas, 37 Vol. 1 of The Works of Victor Hugo (New York: Little, Brown, 1909), 3. 38 67. I’m thinking here of Amanda Anderson’s Bleak Liberalism, which 39 contends that liberalism has always been aware of these limitations 40 and sets out to demonstrate that awareness through a reading practice 41 meant to reconcile liberalism’s twin poles of individual self-reflection 42 and social analysis. In so doing, she ascribes liberalism’s racial exclu- 43 sions to blind spots that can be corrected as opposed to systemic logics Notes 137

at its core. This is especially clear in her reading of Ralph Ellison’s 1 Invisible Man, which sidesteps Ellison’s engagement with black radical 2 thought. The black radical tradition precisely holds that blackness is 3 a structural position located outside of and in opposition (or apposi- 4 tion) to liberalism. For example, as bell hooks argues, “Understanding 5 marginality”—or, in Ellison’s case, invisibility—“as a position and 6 place of resistance is crucial for oppressed, exploited, colonized people. 7 If we only view the margin as a sign marking despair, a deep nihilism 8 penetrates in a destructive way the very ground of our being. It is there 9 in that space of collective despair that one’s creativity, one’s imagina- 10 tion is at risk, there that one’s mind is fully colonized, there that the 11 freedom one longs for is lost.” Anderson’s reading implicitly denies the 12 validity, if not also the existence, of such fugitive modes of social and 13 political life. See Anderson, Bleak Liberalism (Chicago: University of 14 Chicago Press, 2016) and hooks, “Choosing the Margin as a Space of 15 Radical Openness,” in Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics 16 (Boston: South End, 1990), 207. 17 68. Dwight A. McBride, Impossible Witnesses: Truth, Abolitionism, and 18 Slave Testimony (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 21. 19 69. Fred Moten, “Black Op,” in Stolen Life (Durham, NC: Duke Univer- 20 sity Press, 2018), 155–56. Attending to Moten’s distinction in this essay 21 and elsewhere between “blackness” as an analytical framework and 22 “Blackness” as conventionally capitalized to signal a cultural identifier, 23 I have chosen not to capitalize “black” and “blackness.” I capitalize 24 “Afropessimism” but not “black optimism” in keeping with the most 25 recent conventional usage among their chief proponents, Wilderson 26 and Moten, respectively. In a broader sense, I have understood the 27 choice not to capitalize “black” in some work coming out of black 28 studies as attestation of the field’s, as well as African and Afrodias- 29 poric people’s, fugitive relations to the western academy. By contrast, 30 disciplinary formations around certain other terms that are conven- 31 tionally capitalized, such as “romanticism” and “the enlightenment,” 32 are as authorized by the same academy as they are complicit in its 33 project of disseminating the intellectual, social, and political capital of 34 “the west.” My choice not to capitalize these three terms, while partly 35 a move to unsettle that project’s authority, is more precisely meant to 36 bring forward and render formally the epistemic tensions and irrecon- 37 cilabilities running through this book. When quoting from authors 38 who have made different choices in these matters, I maintain their 39 language as it appears in print. 40 70. Alexander Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopoli- 41 tics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke 42 University Press, 2014), 4. 43 138 Notes

1 71. In choosing whether or not to capitalize certain words, my intent was 2 to bring some of these frictions to the surface and make them visible 3 at the level of form. See n. 69. 4 72. To cite all the relevant scholarship on romanticism and the rights 5 discourses that informed the French, American, and Haitian revolu- 6 tions would be next to impossible. A handful of book-length studies 7 that explicitly consider liberalism as the groundwork for romanticism 8 include: Nancy L. Rosenblum, Another Liberalism: Romanticism and 9 the Reconstruction of Liberal Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard 10 University Press, 1987); R. S. White, Natural Rights and the Birth 11 of Romanticism in the 1790s (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); 12 and Zoe Beenstock, The Politics of Romanticism: The Social Contract 13 and Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016). 14 73. Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection (New York: Oxford University 15 Press, 1997), 122. 16 74. Charles W. Mills, Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial 17 Liberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 29. See also 18 Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University 19 Press, 1999) and Domenico Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History, 20 trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2014). Part of Losurdo’s over- 21 arching argument is that liberalism and racial enslavement emerged as 22 the “twin birth” of modernity. 23 75. In terms of romantic studies, beyond those already mentioned, I would 24 be remiss not to include Nikki Hessell’s Romantic Literature and the 25 Colonised World: Notes from Indigenous Translations (New York: 26 Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). And, while not principally concerned with 27 romanticism, Tricia Lootens’s The Political Poetess also takes an explic- 28 itly antiracist stance in reading nineteenth-century British texts. There 29 is, by now, little doubt that major changes are occurring in histori- 30 cally Eurocentric subfields of English studies. I hope that this book, 31 whatever its flaws, contributes positively to these transformations. 32 33 34 Notes to Chapter 1 35 36 1. Thomas Day and John Bicknell, The Dying Negro, Gale Eighteenth 37 Century Collections Online (CW3310391049) (London: John Stock- 38 dale, 1793), 1. 39 2. This explanation appears in the advertisement to the first edition. 40 According to the English periodical The Bibliographer, “This story 41 was told to Day by his friend John Bicknell, and the result was a poem 42 entitled The Dying Negro.” See “The Author of Sanford and Merton,” 43 Bibliographer 5 (January 1884): 31. Notes 139

3. Paul Halliday, Habeas Corpus: From England to Empire (Cambridge, 1 MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 179. 2 4. Wilderson, Red, White, and Black, 44. 3 5. The chief precursor here is Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, although in that 4 text, Oroonoko’s attempted suicide is usurped and completed by his 5 captors. More importantly, the text as a whole is decidedly not advo- 6 cating for the abolition of slavery. If anything, Oroonoko’s nobility 7 frames his attempted suicide as exceptional, giving audiences license to 8 feel for him without raising the idea that all enslaved Africans should 9 be free. For more on the “noble African” trope, see Wylie Sypher, 10 “The African Prince in London,” Journal of the History of Ideas 2, 11 no. 2 (1941): 237–47, as well as Laura Doyle’s discussion of Equiano’s 12 engagement with that trope in Freedom’s Empire: Race and the Rise 13 of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640–1940 (Durham, NC: Duke 14 University Press, 2008). For an incisive reading of how the scene of 15 Oroonoko’s death signals Behn’s and the novel’s convoluted politics, 16 see Megan Griffin, “Dismembering the Sovereign in Aphra Behn’s 17 Oroonoko,” ELH 86, no. 1 (Spring 2019): 107–33. 18 6. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 3. 19 7. See William S. Laufer, Corporate Bodies and Guilty Minds: The Failure 20 of Corporate Criminal Liability (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 21 2008); and Gary Francione, Animals as Persons: Essays on the Abolition 22 of Animal Exploitation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). 23 8. Carey, British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility, 76. 24 9. There is no exact transcription of the proceedings, and several 25 contemporary accounts of the case survive, including one by Gran- 26 ville Sharp. Following scholarly precedent, my references to the case 27 rely on the Lofft report: Somerset v. Stewart, 1 Lofft (King’s Bench, 28 1772), 510. 29 10. For more on this history, see T. K. Hunter, “Geographies of Liberty: 30 A Brief Look at Two Cases” in Prophets of Protest: Reconsidering The 31 History of American Abolitionism, ed. Timothy Patrick McCarthy and 32 John Stauffer (New York: New Press, 2006), 41–58. 33 11. On the historical and continuing impact of Mansfield’s decision, 34 see Justin Buckley Dyer, “After the Revolution: Somerset and the 35 Antislavery Tradition in Anglo-American Constitutional Develop- 36 ment,” Journal of Politics 71, no. 4 (October 2009): 1422–34; Jenny 37 S. Martinez, “Antislavery Courts and the Dawn of International 38 Human Rights Law,” Yale Law Journal 118, no. 3 (2008): 550–641; 39 and Paul Waldau, “Will the Heavens Fall? De-Radicalizing the Prec- 40 edent Breaking Decision,” Animal Law 7 (2001): 75–117. 41 12. See Don Fehrenbacher, Slavery, Law, & Politics: The Dred Scott Case 42 in Historical Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981): 43 140 Notes

1 28; and William R. Cotter, “The Somerset Case and the Abolition of 2 Slavery in England,” History 79, no. 255 (February 1994): 32. 3 13. Spirited reconsiderations of habeas corpus extend well into the present 4 day. Consider, for instance, petitions for “world habeas corpus” that 5 became prominent in the 1950s and 1960s, or, more recently, the 6 controversy over violations of habeas corpus in Guantanamo Bay. For 7 more on these particular examples, see Luis Kutner, The Human Right 8 to Individual Freedom: A Symposium on World Habeas Corpus (Miami: 9 University of Miami Press, 1970); and Anthony Gregory, The Power of 10 Habeas Corpus in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 11 14. On this long history, see also Edward Jenks, “The Story of Habeas 12 Corpus,” Law Quarterly Review 18 (1902): 64–77; William F. Duker, 13 A Constitutional History of Habeas Corpus (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 14 1980); and Justin J. Wert, Habeas Corpus in America: The Politics of 15 Individual Right (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011). 16 15. The later acts were largely clarifications of the 1679 Act. The Acts of 17 1803 and 1804 clarify the capacity of the judges of the King’s Courts 18 of Records and the Court of King’s Bench to grant writs of habeas 19 corpus; the Act of 1816 expedites the timeframe within which appeals 20 of habeas corpus are to be heard; and the Act of 1862 limits issuances 21 of writs of habeas corpus to England only, excluding the colonies from 22 its reach. Full texts can be accessed at legislation.gov.uk. 23 16. Gregory, Power of Habeas Corpus in America, 32. 24 17. Gregory, 31. 25 18. Gregory, 35. 26 19. Quoted in Tony Wright, Citizens and Subjects: An Essay on British 27 Politics (New York: Routledge, 2003), 16. 28 20. Kevin Gutzman, foreword to The Power of Habeas Corpus in America, 29 by Anthony Gregory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 30 ix. 31 21. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (Indianapolis: Hackett, 32 1980), 19. 33 22. Locke, Second Treatise of Government, 19. 34 23. Locke, 23. 35 24. This, of course, remains largely true today. As Margaret Jane Radin 36 explains, “The premise underlying the personhood perspective is that 37 to achieve proper self-development—to be a person—an individual 38 needs some control over resources in the external environment.” In 39 a foundational text of critical race theory, Cheryl Harris traces how 40 whiteness operates as a form of property in American legal history. 41 See Radin,“Property and Personhood,” Stanford Law Review 34, no. 42 5 (May 1982): 957–58; and Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard 43 Law Review 106, no. 8 (1993): 1707–91. Notes 141

25. Isaac Kramnick, Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism (Ithaca, NY: 1 Cornell University Press, 1990), 36. 2 26. Kramnick, Republicanism, 187. 3 27. Kramnick, 193. 4 28. Thomas Hallie Delamayne, The Rise and Practice of Imprisonment in 5 Personal Actions, Examined, Gale Eighteenth Century Collections 6 Online (CB3327352670) (London: J. Wilkie, 1772), 13. 7 29. Delamayne, The Rise and Practice, 81. 8 30. Delamayne, 20. 9 31. Samuel Estwick, Considerations on the Negroe Cause Commonly So 10 Called, Addressed to the Right Honourable Lord Mansfield, Lord Chief 11 Justice of the Court of King’s Bench, Gale Eighteenth Century Collec- 12 tions Online (CW3323898286) (London: J. Dodsley, 1773), 89. 13 32. Estwick, Considerations on the Negroe Cause, 91. 14 33. Locke served as Secretary to the Council of Trade Plantations, was an 15 investor in the Royal Africa and Bahama Adventure companies, and 16 helped to draft the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina. Beyond 17 these obvious conflicts of interest, his stated opposition to slavery in 18 general is contradicted by a defense of slavery in the Second Treatise, 19 namely the justification of slavery as a form of punishment in chapter 20 4. Some critics claim that Locke’s theory of slavery was intended to 21 apply only to English absolutism and not to African enslavement. 22 While I anticipate that some readers will have similar objections to 23 the reading I offer here, I agree with Jennifer Rae Greeson’s argument 24 that Locke’s economic involvement with transatlantic slavery should 25 be viewed as seriously compromising his position as a champion of 26 liberty and that his claims about property cannot and should not be 27 divorced from his involvement with African enslavement. See Greeson, 28 “The Prehistory of Possessive Individualism,” PMLA 127, no. 4 (2012): 29 918–24. For more on Locke’s relationship to slavery, see James Farr, 30 “Locke, Natural Law, and New World Slavery,” Political Theory 36, 31 no. 4 (2008): 495–522; Jack Greene, “‘Slavery or Independence’: Some 32 Reflections on the Relationship among Liberty, Black Bondage, and 33 Equality in Revolutionary South Carolina,” South Carolina Histor- 34 ical Magazine 80, no. 3 (July 1979): 193–214; and Jennifer Welchman, 35 “Locke on Slavery and Inalienable Rights,” Canadian Journal of Philos- 36 ophy 25, no. 1 (March 1995): 67–81. On the relationship between suicide 37 and slavery in Locke, see Gary D. Glenn, “Inalienable Rights and 38 Locke’s Argument for Limited Government: Political Implications of a 39 Right to Suicide,” Journal of Politics 46, no. 1 (February 1984): 80–105. 40 34. Greeson, “Prehistory,” 918. 41 35. Fred Moten, “Erotics of Fugitivity,” in Stolen Life (Durham, NC: Duke 42 University Press, 2018), 253. 43 142 Notes

1 36. Locke, Second Treatise, 9. 2 37. Locke, 17. 3 38. In the absence of line numbers, I refer to the page numbers of the 4 1773 edition. I use the 1773 edition because of its historical proximity 5 to the Somerset case, as well as its more sustained focus on the issue 6 of suicide than subsequent editions. In subsequent editions, Day and 7 Bicknell shift the poem’s focus from the speaker’s personal suffering 8 (and therefore from his motivations to kill himself) to more general 9 considerations of African enslavement. 10 39. Day and Bicknell, Dying Negro, 3. 11 40. Marcus Wood, The Horrible Gift of Freedom: Atlantic Slavery and the 12 Representation of Emancipation (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 13 2010), 2–3. Italics in original. 14 41. Wood, The Horrible Gift of Freedom, 2. 15 42. Sharon Patricia Holland, Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and 16 (Black) Subjectivity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 16. 17 43. Wood, The Horrible Gift of Freedom, 1. 18 44. Seymour Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery 19 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 9–10. 20 45. Day and Bicknell, Dying Negro, 18. 21 46. Day and Bicknell, 18. 22 47. This was the case until Augustine declared suicide a sin in the fifth 23 century. See Minois, History of Suicide, 23–31. 24 48. Celeste-Marie Bernier, Characters of Blood: Black Heroism in the Trans- 25 atlantic Imagination (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 26 2012), 21. Wood also discusses the trope of the black martyr in Blind 27 Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 28 1780–1865 (New York: Routledge, 2000). 29 49. Day and Bicknell, Dying Negro, 14. 30 50. While outside the scope of this chapter, it is worth pointing to the 31 further possibility that the poem’s condemnation of Christianity also 32 echoes historical cases, including that of Somerset, who was baptized 33 in what may have been a strategic move to help the case for establishing 34 his personhood, as well as the unnamed man in the “item of news” the 35 poem claims to be based on. For a rich account of the political appli- 36 cations of various theologies in transatlantic discourses of abolition, 37 refer to Hickman, Black Prometheus. 38 51. Day and Bicknell, Dying Negro, 18–19. 39 52. Day and Bicknell, 19. 40 53. Day and Bicknell, 19. 41 54. On the wide reach of this trope, see Snyder, The Power to Die and Bell, 42 We Shall Be No More. 43 55. Wilderson, Red, White and Black, 22. Notes 143

56. See MacDonald, “Suicide and the Rise of the Popular Press in 1 England.” 2 57. Parisot, “Suicide Notes and Popular Sensibility,” 279, 285. 3 58. Parisot, 285. 4 59. The ethical problems inherent in these strategies have been widely 5 discussed. On the uses of such strategies in British abolitionist writing, 6 see: Brycchan Carey and Peter J. Kitson, eds., Slavery and the Cultures 7 of Abolition (Cambridge, UK: English Association, 2007); Paul Goring, 8 The Rhetoric of Sensibility of Eighteenth-Century Culture (New York: 9 Cambridge University Press, 2005); Christine Levecq, Slavery and 10 Sentiment: The Politics of Feeling in Black Atlantic Antislavery Writing, 11 1770–1850 (Hanover: University of New Hampshire Press, 2008); 12 Ramesh Mallipeddi, Spectacular Suffering: Witnessing Slavery in the 13 Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic (Charlottesville: University of 14 Virginia Press, 2016); Srividhya Swaminathan and Adam R. Beach, 15 eds., Invoking Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century British Imagination 16 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013); Helen Thomas, Romanticism and 17 Slave Narratives (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and 18 Marcus Wood, Slavery, Empathy, and Pornography (New York: Oxford 19 University Press, 2002). 20 60. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 18–19. 21 61. Hartman, 20. 22 62. Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire, 161. 23 63. This was not lost on the poem’s contemporary readers. In 1775, Day 24 and Bicknell revised the poem to make the speaker’s suicide a function 25 of a decidedly un-Christian ideology. Carey reads this version of the 26 poem as “a rejection of his recent conversion to Christianity. In these 27 later editions, the [speaker] offers himself as a sacrifice to unspecified, 28 but clearly unchristian deities. . . . Perhaps mindful of the accusations 29 of impiety the first edition received, Day [adds a pun on ‘falling’ 30 into the third edition]. But, if the [speaker] is indeed falling towards 31 damnation, it is a voluntary and calculated fall. No longer desiring 32 the favours of a Christian God, the slave asks for ‘no long eternity of 33 happiness.’ Instead, he wants freedom.” See Carey, British Abolitionism 34 and the Rhetoric of Sensibility, 83–84. 35 64. Snyder, The Power to Die, 9. Further discussions of suicide among 36 enslaved Africans are to be found in: Alex Bontemps, The Punished 37 Self: Surviving Slavery in the Colonial South (Ithaca, NY: Cornell 38 University Press, 2001); Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden: Death 39 and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard 40 University Press, 2008); Michael Gomez, Exchanging Our Country 41 Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and 42 Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 43 144 Notes

1 1998); William D. Pierson, “White Cannibals, Black Martyrs: Fear, 2 Depression, and Religious Faith as Causes of Suicide among New 3 Slaves,” Journal of Negro History 62, no. 2 (April 1977): 147–59; Marcus 4 Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Penguin, 5 2007); Eric Robert Taylor, If We Must Die: Shipboard Insurrections 6 in the Era of the Atlantic Slave Trade (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State 7 University Press, 2006); Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: 8 A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, MA: 9 Harvard University Press, 2007); and Daniel E. Walker, “Suicidal 10 Tendencies: African Transmigration in the History and Folklore of 11 the Americas,” Griot 18, no. 2 (Spring 1999): 10–18. 12 65. Snyder, Power to Die, 45. 13 66. Quoted in Walker, “Suicidal Tendencies,” 11. 14 67. Walker, 11. 15 68. Liberal modernity’s inability to disarticulate its ideal of freedom from 16 its deep-seated investment in the spectacle of black suffering is also 17 enshrined in abolitionist iconography. For instance, in Josiah Wedg- 18 wood’s abolitionist seal (easily the abolitionist era’s most enduring 19 and recognizable image), a kneeling bondsperson gazes up, presum- 20 ably at his enslaver, with his hands clasped in a pose suggesting prayer 21 or supplication. The stance is submissive, despairing, and dependent, 22 suggesting that the enslaved African of the sentimental imagination 23 must look outside of himself for his salvation. This representation of 24 the enslaved in perpetually subordinate and submissive relation to 25 enslavers is reproduced throughout abolitionist and emancipationist 26 iconography. Such images undermine the agency of the person being 27 represented and call attention instead to the dominant culture that 28 keeps him kneeling at somebody else’s feet. For more on this visual 29 history, see Patricia A. Matthew, “Serving Tea for a Cause,” Lapham’s 30 Quarterly 28 (February 2018), https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/ 31 roundtable/serving-tea-cause. 32 69. Were it not for the fact that it is written in the first person, it might 33 also be possible to read The Dying Negro as an epitaph for the histor- 34 ical person it is based on. On a tertiary level, perhaps it can be read 35 that way. However, the fact that it is written and narrated in the first 36 person makes it, fundamentally, an act of ventriloquism—of “giving 37 voice” to someone that it first has to imagine as voiceless. 38 70. In “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,” Johnson brings what she 39 considers to be a fundamental relationship between apostrophe, anima- 40 tion, and death in western poetry to bear on contemporary debates 41 about abortion in order to grapple with assumptions about the limits 42 of human life implied through the uses of apostrophe in poetic and 43 legal language. In “Anthropomorphism in Lyric and Law,” Johnson Notes 145

considers more broadly the possibility that “lyric and law might be 1 seen as two very different ways of instantiating what a ‘person’ is.” 2 Both essays have been reprinted many times. “Anthropomorphism in 3 Lyric and Law” first appeared in the Yale Journal of Law and Human- 4 ities 10, no. 2 (1998): 549–74 and was later reprinted in Persons and 5 Things (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); “Apos- 6 trophe, Animation, and Abortion” first appeared in Diacritics 16, no. 7 1 (1986): 29–47 and reprinted in A World of Difference (Baltimore: 8 Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987) and also in several anthologies 9 of literary and cultural criticism. My references to these essays refer 10 to their first printings in the Yale Journal of Law and Humanities and 11 Diacritics, respectively. 12 71. Johnson, “Anthropomorphism in Lyric and Law,” 574. 13 72. Johnson, 556. 14 73. Moten, “Knowledge of Freedom,” 33. 15 74. Vincent Brown, “Social Death and Political Life in the Study of 16 Slavery,” American Historical Review (2009): 1235. See also Jared 17 Sexton, “The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and 18 Black Optimism,” InTensions 5 (2011): 1–47. 19 75. Day and Bicknell, Dying Negro, 6. 20 76. Day and Bicknell, 6. 21 77. Day and Bicknell, 9. 22 78. Day and Bicknell, 4. 23 79. While somewhat beyond the scope of this discussion, suicide can also 24 be viewed here as anticipating later associations between blackness 25 and criminality. In their discussion of the speaker’s final resting place, 26 Day and Bicknell reframe liberalism’s emphasis on property through 27 the period’s debate over what happens to the property of people who 28 die by suicide. In England, this entailed forfeiture of any property to 29 the state. This practice is part of a longer history that K. J. Kessel- 30 ring argues is a defining feature of felony in English Common law: 31 “Despite its ubiquity in legal discourse, the term ‘felony’ defies easy 32 definition . . . we can only define felony by its legal effects. . . . And 33 forfeiture was the defining legal concept of felony.” Thus, criminal 34 laws were shaped, in part, around people’s relationships to property, 35 even as property also came to define, with increasing prominence, the 36 very people these laws were meant to govern. Sir William Blackstone 37 highlights this problem when he calls suicide a “peculiar species of 38 felony.” For Blackstone, suicide confounds easy categorization because 39 it is a crime against both providence and law. He finally labels suicide 40 “a felony committed to oneself” but admits that legal action against 41 suicides is illogical because “human laws [cannot operate] on one 42 who has withdrawn himself from their reach.” The laws only affect 43 146 Notes

1 whatever and whomever the deceased leaves behind: reputations are 2 tarnished by dishonorable burials, and families are destroyed by forfei- 3 ture. By the end of the eighteenth century, faith in the effectiveness 4 of these laws had largely eroded. In 1771, the barrister William Eden, 5 First Baron Auckland, called the practice of forfeiture “ineffectual 6 and absurd,” and moreover, “cruel” and “unjust . . . to heap sufferings 7 on the head of innocence,” which is to say, the surviving family. By 8 1826, the laws were overturned. Underscoring the increasing prom- 9 inence of suicide within legal discourses of property, Blackstone’s 10 unease about and Eden’s interest in reforming the laws that criminal- 11 ized suicide highlights the extent to which the concept of suicide was 12 associated not only with property and personhood but also criminality 13 at the time Day and Bicknell wrote The Dying Negro. See Kesselring, 14 “Felony Forfeiture in England, c. 1170–1870,” Journal of Legal History 15 30, no. 3 (2009): 202–3; William Blackstone, Commentaries on the 16 Laws of England, Book the Fourth, Gale Eighteenth Century Collec- 17 tions Online (CW3324351452)(Oxford: Clarendon, 1769), 189–90; 18 and William Eden, Principles of Penal Law, Gale Eighteenth Century 19 Collections Online (CW3324202367). (Dublin: John Milliken, 1772), 20 205. 21 80. Jared Sexton, “Ante-Anti-Blackness,” http://csalateral.org/section/ 22 theory/ante-anti-blackness-afterthoughts-sexton/. 23 81. Sexton, “Ante-Anti-Blackness.” 24 82. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 1–2. 25 83. Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American 26 Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 65–81. 27 84. Holland, Raising the Dead, 58. 28 85. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 19. 29 30 31 Notes to Chapter 2 32 33 1. As previously indicated, at the time of writing, there exists no book- 34 length study of suicide in British romanticism. There is, however, a 35 substantial body of essay-length scholarship on suicide and gender in 36 the period historically associated with romanticism. This work begins 37 with Margaret Higonnet’s “Suicide: Representations of the Femi- 38 nine,” which opened conversations about the relationship between 39 women’s rights discourses, sensibility, and the masculine culture of 40 romantic suicide. Other relevant essays by Higgonet include: “Suicide 41 as Self-Construction” in Crossing the Borders: Madame de Staël, ed. 42 Avriel Goldberger, Madelyn Gutwirth, and Karyna Smurlo (New 43 Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 69–81; “Frames of Notes 147

Female Suicide,” Studies in the Novel 32, no. 2 (2000): 229–42; and 1 “‘This Winged Nature Fraught’: Suicide and Agency in Women’s 2 Poetry,” Literature Compass 12, no. 12 (December 2015): 683–89. In 3 recent years, Michelle Faubert has been at the forefront of reener- 4 gizing the field’s interest in suicide. In addition to essays already cited, 5 her work on the subject includes: “Romantic Suicide, Contagion, and 6 Rousseau’s Julie,” in Romanticism, Rousseau, Switzerland: New Pros- 7 pects, ed. Diane Piccitto, Angela Esterhammer, and Patrick Vincent 8 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015): 38–53; and “The Fictional 9 Suicides of Mary Wollstonecraft,” Literature Compass 12, no. 12 (2015): 10 652–59. On gender and suicide in eighteenth-century and Victorian 11 England, see McGuire, Dying to Be English and chapter 2 of Lootens, 12 Political Poetess, respectively. This list is not exhaustive, merely indic- 13 ative of some influential voices in conversations on suicide and gender 14 in romantic and romantic-adjacent texts and authors. It is worth noting 15 that some nineteenth-century women also drew on romantic represen- 16 tations of white male suicidal genius as a way of claiming their place 17 in the literary landscape of the day. The third chapter of Bennett’s 18 Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity gives an excellent over- 19 view of women’s emulations of the conventionally masculine trope of 20 suicidal genius. 21 2. William Blackstone, The Commentaries of Sir William Blackstone, Gale 22 Eighteenth Century Collections Online (CW3325233304) (London, 23 1796), 77. 24 3. McGuire, Dying to Be English; Faubert, “The Wollstonecraftian Plot” 25 and “Fictional Suicides.” See also Anne Mellor, “‘Am I Not A Woman 26 and a Sister?’: Slavery, Romanticism and Gender,” in Romanticism, 27 Race, and Imperial Culture, 1780–1834, ed. Alan Richardson and Sonia 28 Hofkosh (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 311–29. 29 4. Lootens, Political Poetess, 54. This is especially true in literary and 30 historical scholarship informed by black feminism. For instance, Sasha 31 Turner recently demonstrated how between the 1780s and 1834— 32 the age of abolition and (British) emancipation but also the timeline 33 conventionally associated with both romanticism and early liberal 34 feminism—enslaved and free black women in Jamaica variously nego- 35 tiated and leveraged their knowledge of the importance of enslaved 36 women’s bodies to the British Empire. More generally and founda- 37 tionally, Hortense Spillers has theorized that the kinship structures 38 imposed on enslaved people created forms of “ungendered” being that 39 implicitly challenge hegemonic gender roles and other patriarchal 40 structures of liberal modernity. See Turner, Contested Bodies: Preg- 41 nancy, Childrearing, and Slavery in Jamaica (Philadelphia: University 42 of Pennsylvania Press, 2017); and Spillers, “Mama’s Baby,” 68. 43 148 Notes

1 5. Michelle Faubert, “A Family Affair: Ennobling Suicide in Mary Shel- 2 ley’s Matilda,” Essays in Romanticism 20 (2013): 116. 3 6. See Cora Kaplan, “Mary Wollstonecraft’s Reception and Legacies,” in 4 The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Claudia 5 Johnson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 246–70. 6 7. Janet Todd, “Reason and Sensibility in Mary Wollstonecraft’s The 7 Wrongs of Woman,” Frontiers 5, no. 3 (1981): 17. My usage of “sensi- 8 bility” here is similar to Kyla Schuller’s discussion of “sentimentalism” 9 in the US context. For Schuller, “Sentimentalism posits that the needs 10 of the individuated subject can be reconciled to those of other individ- 11 uated subjects through the guiding moral philosophy of sympathetic 12 feeling . . . the sentimental state, [in turn] identifies the feelings of 13 the civilized individual—and only the civilized individual—as the 14 kernel of liberal democracy.” Schuller delimits sensibility to medical 15 discussions of the nervous system, while in her study sentimentalism 16 encapsulates the capacity for sensibility and other behaviors and 17 responses to mark social standing and individualism or the poten- 18 tial for it. Because Wollstonecraft names sensibility as the marker of 19 self-discipline characteristic of the “civilized individual,” I stay with 20 that term above. However, as Markman Ellis reminds us, these terms, 21 especially in the British context, “offer no obvious distinction . . . they 22 amalgamate and mix freely a large number of varied discourses.” See 23 Schuller, The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nine- 24 teenth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 2; and 25 Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the 26 Sentimental Novel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 7–8. 27 8. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (New 28 York: Oxford World’s Classics, 2008), 73. 29 9. Wollstonecraft, Vindication, 73. 30 10. Wollstonecraft, 99. 31 11. Wollstonecraft, Maria, in Mary, A Fiction and The Wrongs of Women, 32 or Maria, ed. Michelle Faubert (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2012), 33 241, italics original. 34 12. Todd, “Reason and Sensibility,” 19. 35 13. Wollstonecraft, Vindication, 166. 36 14. Wollstonecraft, Maria, 287. 37 15. Wollstonecraft, Vindication, 66. 38 16. Wollstonecraft, 228. 39 17. Todd, “Reason and Sensibility,” 19. 40 18. Moira Ferguson, Colonialism and Gender Relations: From Mary Woll- 41 stonecraft to Jamaica Kincaid (New York: Columbia University Press, 42 1993), 15, 32. 43 19. Wollstonecraft, Vindication, 170. Notes 149

20. Lootens, Political Poetess, 60. 1 21. Hazel V. Carby, Cultures in Babylon: Black Britain and African 2 America (London: Verso, 1999), 68. Other foundational texts that 3 speak to these issues include: Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist 4 Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment 5 (New York: Routledge, 2000); Angela Davis, Women, Race and Class 6 (New York: Vintage, 1983); bell hooks, Ain’t I A Woman: Black Women 7 and Feminism (Boston: South End, 1999); Akasha (Gloria T.) Hull, 8 Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds., All the Women Are White, 9 All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave (New York: Femi- 10 nist Press at the City University of New York, 1982); Audre Lorde, 11 “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” in Sister 12 Outsider (New York: Ten Speed, 2007), 114–123; Audre Lorde, “An 13 Open Letter to Mary Daly,” in This Bridge Called My Back, Fourth 14 Edition: Writings by Radical Women of Color, ed. Cherríe Moraga and 15 Gloria Anzaldúa (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015), 16 90–93; and Valerie Smith, Not Just Race, Not Just Gender: Black Femi- 17 nist Readings (New York: Routledge, 1998). 18 22. Faubert, “Fictional Suicides,” 655–56. In a strictly historicist frame- 19 work, it is of course absurd to hold figures from the past responsible 20 for ideas that had not yet been articulated. But even in such a frame- 21 work, it must be said that conversations about gender parity do not 22 begin solely with eighteenth-century white women. Moreover, not all 23 forms of woman-centered activisms (feminism is too limited a term 24 here) owe their existence to white liberal feminism. For more on this, 25 see Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism, and History 26 (London: Verso, 2015). 27 23. For example: Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, 28 Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania 29 Press, 2016); Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the 30 Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008); Lisa 31 Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke Univer- 32 sity Press, 2015); Jennifer Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and 33 Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsyl- 34 vania Press, 2004); Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black 35 Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of 36 Minnesota Press, 2006); and Imani Perry, Vexy Thing: On Gender and 37 Liberation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). 38 24. Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham, NC: Duke University 39 Press, 2017), 157. 40 25. Mary Darby Robinson, A Letter to the Women of England on the 41 Injustice of Mental Subordination (London: Longman, 1799), https:// 42 romantic-circles.org/editions/robinson/index.html, 94. 43 150 Notes

1 26. Robinson, “Letter,” 9, italics in original. 2 27. Robinson, 18–19. 3 28. Robinson, 69. 4 29. Robinson, 12. 5 30. Robinson, 13. 6 31. Robinson, 13. 7 32. Mary Robinson, “The Storm,” Morning Post and Fashionable World 8 (February 3, 1796), http://spenserians.cath.vt.edu/TextRecord.php?- 9 textsid=38639, emphasis in original. 10 33. Shelley A. J. Jones, “Revision as Conversation in Mary Robinson’s 11 ‘The Storm’ and ‘The Negro Girl,’” CEA Critic 71, no. 3 (Spring and 12 Summer 2009): 37. 13 34. Higonnet, “‘This Winged Nature Fraught,’” 684. 14 35. Mary Robinson, “The Negro Girl,” in Mary Robinson: Selected Poems, 15 ed. Judith Pascoe (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 1999), 234–239, ll. 16 73–78. 17 36. Robinson, “Storm.” 18 37. Robinson, “Negro Girl,” ll. 85–90. 19 38. Robinson, “Negro Girl,” l. 73. 20 39. Robinson, “Storm,” emphasis in original. 21 40. For more on the text’s background and the cultural craze it inspired, 22 see Robin Mitchell, “‘Ourika mania’: Interrogating Race, Class, Space, 23 and Place in Early Nineteenth-Century France,” Africa and Black Dias- 24 pora: An International Journal 10, no. 1 (2017): 85–95; and Pratima 25 Prasad, Colonialism, Race, and the French Romantic Imagination (New 26 York: Routledge, 2009). 27 41. Mitchell, “‘Ourika mania,’” 88. 28 42. Mitchell, 89. 29 43. Claire de Duras, Ourika, trans. John Fowles (New York: Modern 30 Language Association of America, 1994), 4. 31 44. Duras, Ourika, 9. 32 45. Duras, 12. 33 46. Duras, 12. 34 47. Such readings include David O’Connell, “Ourika: Black Face, White 35 Mask,” French Review 47, no. 6 (Spring 1974): 47–56; Christopher 36 Miller, Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French (Chicago: 37 University of Chicago Press, 1985); Mary Jane Cowles, “The Subjec- 38 tivity of the Colonial Subject from Olympe de Gouges to Mme. de 39 Duras,” L’Esprit Createur 47, no. 4 (2007): 29–43; and Fowles’s intro- 40 duction to his translation, cited above. In addition to Mitchell and 41 Prasad, Adeline Koh offers a compelling counter-reading in “Marriage, 42 ‘Metissage,’ and Women’s Citizenship: Revisiting Race and Gender in 43 Claire de Duras’ ‘Ourika’,” French Forum 38, no. 3 (Fall 2013): 15–30. Notes 151

48. Duras, Ourika, 17. 1 49. Koh, “Marriage, ‘Metissage,’ and Women’s Citizenship,” 21. 2 50. Prasad, Colonialism, Race, and the French Romantic Imagination, 102. 3 51. Wollstonecraft, Maria, chapter 1. 4 52. Wollstonecraft, Vindication, 99. 5 53. Duras, Ourika, 40. 6 54. Duras, 42. 7 55. Duras, 42. 8 56. Duras, 43. 9 57. Duras, 46. 10 58. Duras, 19. 11 59. Duras, 20. 12 60. Duras, 21. 13 61. Francoise Massardier-Kenney, “Duras, Racism, and Class,” in Trans- 14 lating Slavery: Gender and Race in French Women’s Writing, 1783–1823, 15 ed. Doris Y. Kadish and Francoise Massardier-Kenney (Kent, OH: 16 Kent State University Press, 1994), 186. 17 62. Massardier-Kenney, “Duras, Racism, and Class.” 18 63. Wheatley famously excoriates these logics in “On Being Brought from 19 Africa to America” and elsewhere. For more on this, see Elizabeth J. 20 West, African Spirituality in Black Women’s Fiction: Threaded Visions 21 of Memory, Community, Nature, and Being (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 22 2011). 23 64. Duras, Ourika, 21. 24 65. Wilderson, Red, White and Black, 5. 25 66. Wilderson, 24. 26 67. Susan Wolfson, Borderlines: The Shifting of Gender in British Roman- 27 ticism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 60. While not 28 an exhaustive list, other texts that touch on the theme of death and/ 29 as gender liberation in Hemans’s work include: Myra Cottingham, 30 “Felicia Hemans’s Dead and Dying Bodies,” Women’s Writing 8, no. 31 2 (2001): 275–94; Anthony John Harding, “Felicia Hemans and the 32 Effacement of Woman,” in Romantic Women Writers: Voices and 33 Countervoices, ed. Paula R. Feldman and Theresa M. Kelley (Hanover, 34 NH: University Press of New England, 1995), 138–49; and Michael T. 35 Williamson, “Impure Affections: Felicia Hemans’s Elegiac Poetry 36 and Contaminated Grief,” in Felicia Hemans: Reimagining Poetry in 37 the Nineteenth Century, ed. Nanora Sweet and Julie Melnyk (London: 38 Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 19–35. 39 68. Gary Kelly, “Death and the Matron: Felicia Hemans, Romantic Death, 40 and the Founding of the Modern Liberal State,” in Felicia Hemans: 41 Reimagining Poetry in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Sweet and Melnyk 42 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 201. 43 152 Notes

1 69. Gary Kelly, “Introduction,” Felicia Hemans: Selected Poems, Prose, and 2 Letters (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2002), 28. 3 70. Felicia Hemans, “Indian Woman’s Death Song,” in Records of Woman, 4 With Other Poems, ed. Paula R. Feldman (Lexington: University of 5 Kentucky Press, 1999), 57–59, ll. 3, 7. 6 71. Hemans, “Indian Woman’s Death Song,” ll. 10–11. 7 72. Hemans, ll. 7–8. 8 73. Hemans, ll. 36, 39. 9 74. Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History 10 of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke 11 University Press, 1995), 7. 12 75. Astrid Wind, “‘Adieu to All’: The Death of the American Indian at the 13 Turn of the Eighteenth Century,” Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-Amer- 14 ican Literary Relations 2, no. 1 (April 1998): 51–52. 15 76. This common premise of liberal feminist scholarship on suicide is most 16 clearly articulated in Higonnet, “Dialogues with the Dead” and “‘This 17 Winged Nature Fraught.’” Nancy Moore Goslee makes a similar argu- 18 ment, acknowledging but underemphasizing the troubling logics by 19 which “allegories of culture” are turned into “allegories of gender, in 20 which the [white] woman’s plight is primary and the other interpreta- 21 tions subordinate to . . . her exploitation” in “Hemans’s ‘Red Indians’: 22 Reading Stereotypes,” in Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture, 23 1780–1834, ed. Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh (Bloomington: 24 Indiana University Press, 1996), 249. 25 77. Felicia Hemans, “Properzia Rossi,” in Records of Woman, With Other Poems, 26 ed. Paula R. Feldman (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1999), 29. 27 78. Felicia Hemans, “The Last Song of Sappho,” in The Poetical Works of 28 Felicia Dorothea Hemans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 318 ,(1914. 29 Nell Irvin Painter traces how these conventions were standardized in 30 accordance with Eurocentric principles in The History of White People 31 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010). 32 79. Felicia Hemans, “The Bride of the Greek Isle,” in Records of Woman, 33 With Other Poems, ed. Paula R. Feldman (Lexington: University of 34 Kentucky Press, 1999), 17–25, ll. 13, 216. Sati was viewed as controver- 35 sial by Britons and banned by the British government in India in 1829. 36 For more on this, see Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on 37 Sati in Colonial India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 38 80. Hemans, “Bride of the Greek Isle,” ll. 216–221. 39 81. Felicia Hemans, “The Sicilian Captive,” in Records of Woman, With 40 Other Poems, ed. Paula R. Feldman (Lexington: University of Kentucky 41 Press, 1999), 90–94, ll. 23, 26. On Sicilian identity and racialization, 42 see chapter 5 of Roberto Dainotto, Europe (In Theory) (Durham, NC: 43 Duke University Press, 2007). Notes 153

82. Lootens also suggestively reads “The Bride of the Greek Isle” in terms 1 of the history of transatlantic slavery: “When is a ‘Greek slave’ not 2 necessarily a Greek slave? At a moment of acute controversy around 3 transatlantic slavery, it would seem: a moment, that is, like 1825, when 4 Hemans’s poem first appeared. . . . Slave runners’ denials notwith- 5 standing, generation after generation of kidnapped Africans, including 6 women, had killed and were killing themselves in the Middle Passage.” 7 See Lootens, Political Poetess, 29. 8 83. Hemans, “Sicilian Captive,” ll. 71–76. 9 84. The most notable exception to this claim is William Wells Brown’s 10 Clotel, or the President’s Daughter, the first published English-language 11 novel by a writer of African descent. While this is an abolitionist text 12 that centers a biracial woman as its protagonist, it is not chiefly inter- 13 ested in women’s rights and is thus beyond the scope of this chapter’s 14 discussion. There are also many qualifications to be made here about 15 the role of the written text in Afrodiasporic storytelling, associations 16 between suicide and problematic European tropes (such as the “tragic 17 mulatto”), the relative paucity of material from which to draw defin- 18 itive conclusions and the reasons for that paucity. As Mary Helen 19 Washington writes, “We have seldom seen black women characters 20 struggling over such questions as suicide, or racial violence as a means 21 to freedom . . . and that is because the women who raised these issues 22 have been silenced, omitted, patronized, made invisible,” quoted in 23 Lootens, The Political Poetess, 70. See also Washington’s discussion of 24 the politics of anger and its manifestation as self-destruction in nine- 25 teenth-century writing by black women in Mary Helen Washington, 26 Black-Eyed Susans and Midnight Birds: Stories By and About Black 27 Women (New York: Doubleday, 1989). 28 85. Joycelyn Moody, Sentimental Confessions: Spiritual Narratives of 29 Nineteenth-Century African American Women (Athens: University of 30 Georgia Press, 2001), 124. Jackson’s short narrative has not received 31 much scholarly attention. In addition to Moody’s reading, DoVeanna 32 S. Fulton’s Speaking Power: Black Feminist Orality in Women’s Narra- 33 tives of Slavery (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006) 34 discusses Jackson’s resistance to various women enslavers, emphasizing 35 how Jackson challenges assumptions about white women’s compassion 36 and virtue. 37 86. For instance, James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw discusses only briefly 38 his attempted suicide. Ignatius Sancho passively references the suicide 39 of his father in his letters. The spiritual autobiography of Old Eliza- 40 beth emphasizes how religion subdues suicidal tendencies. And though 41 Mary Prince, quoted in this chapter’s epigraph, briefly considers 42 suicide, these thoughts are quickly set aside. Rather than return to 43 154 Notes

1 Prince, I conclude my discussion with Jackson because hers is a more 2 sustained (albeit still quite muted) focus on suicide. These and many 3 other examples are available through the University of North Caroli- 4 na’s Documenting the American South project: https://docsouth.unc. 5 edu. 6 87. Mattie J. Jackson, The Story of Mattie J. Jackson (Lawrence. KS: 7 Sentinel Office, 1866), 4, https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/jacksonm/ 8 jackson.html. 9 88. Jackson, Story. 10 89. Per Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death, social death is partially 11 achieved through natal alienation—the systematic isolation of enslaved 12 people from their kin. Without kin, the enslaved are limited to a single 13 legally authorized social relation: the enslaver. 14 90. Jackson, Story, 17–18. 15 16 17 Notes to Chapter 3 18 19 1. William Wells Brown, Clotel; or The President’s Daughter, ed. M. 20 Giulia Fabi (New York: Penguin, 2003), 185. 21 2. Brown, Clotel, 185. Notably, this is left out of the final edition of the 22 novel, Clotelle: or, the Colored Heroine, published in Boston in 1867. 23 3. Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the 24 Philosophy of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 25 294. 26 4. Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic, 295. 27 5. Baucom, 290. 28 6. See Amiri Baraka, Wise Why’s Y’s: The Griot’s Song (Djeli Ya) 29 (Chicago: Third World, 1995). 30 7. Samuel Baker, Written on the Water: British Romanticism and the 31 Maritime Empire of Culture (Charlottesville: University of Virginia 32 Press, 2010), 3. 33 8. See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Conscious- 34 ness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). 35 9. Paul Youngquist, “The Afro Futurism of DJ Vassa,” European Romantic 36 Review 16, no. 2 (2005): 188. 37 10. Bryan Wagner, Disturbing the Peace: Black Culture and the Police After 38 Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 12. 39 11. To be sure, blackness is antonymous to the liberal state, though, as 40 Wagner emphasizes, modern notions of race are often used to support 41 antiblack state policies. It is worth reiterating here what differentiates 42 “blackness” as an analytical framework from the cultural signifier 43 sometimes delineated by the capitalized “Blackness.” As Fred Moten Notes 155

explains, “The implication here is not just that blackness and black 1 culture are not the same; what is further and more importantly implied 2 is that blackness and black people are not the same, however much it 3 is without doubt the case that black people have a privileged relation 4 to blackness, that black cultures are (under)privileged fields for the 5 transformational expression and enactment of blackness.” See Moten, 6 “Knowledge of Freedom,” 18. 7 12. As Vincent Carretta notes in his edition of the text, Equiano misquotes 8 and conflates lines from three editions of the poem. Altogether, 9 Equiano includes nineteen lines. See Olaudah Equiano, The Inter- 10 esting Narrative and Other Writings, ed. Vincent Carretta (New York: 11 Penguin, 2003), 97–98 and n. 277. 12 13. Equiano, Interesting Narrative, 98. 13 14. Though the theme of suicide recurs throughout The Interesting Narra- 14 tive, it appears with particular frequency in the first volume, which 15 details Equiano’s capture into slavery and his early adventures as a 16 sailor: the portion of his life, in other words, before he came to define 17 himself as an Englishman and Christian subject to the social codes of 18 liberal individualism. 19 15. Achille Joseph Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” trans. Libby Meintjes, Public 20 Culture 15, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 11. 21 16. Equiano, Interesting Narrative, 197. 22 17. Equiano, 213. 23 18. Equiano, 205. 24 19. Equiano, 214. 25 20. Snyder, Power to Die, 73. 26 21. Quoted in Snyder, Power to Die, 77. 27 22. Snyder, 12. 28 23. Equiano, Interesting Narrative, 56. 29 24. Equiano, 56. 30 25. Equiano, 56. 31 26. Equiano, 56. 32 27. Equiano, 58. 33 28. I am indebted to Jonathan Howard for first drawing my attention to 34 this phrase many years ago. His work on it appears in “‘Gone with the 35 Ibos’: The Blueness of Blackness in Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the 36 Widow,” Callaloo 39, no. 4 (Fall 2016): 898–918. 37 29. Georgia Writers’ Project, Drum and Shadows: Survival Studies among 38 the Georgia Coastal Negroes (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 39 1986), 116. This text provides transcriptions that claim to be faithful 40 to the dialects of the people interviewed. Given the contentious history 41 of these practices, I have chosen not to reproduce those transcriptions 42 here. For more on this, see Catherine A. Stewart, Long Past Slavery: 43 156 Notes

1 Representing Race in the Federal Writers’ Project (Chapel Hill: Univer- 2 sity of North Carolina Press, 2016). 3 30. Georgia Writers’ Project, Drum and Shadows, 185. 4 31. Snyder, Power to Die, 17–18. 5 32. Jason R. Young similarly argues that “the communities and cultures 6 in which flying African stories reside reveal wide fields of ontological 7 and epistemological possibilities . . . proposing not only the existence 8 of a mythic culture hero capable of escaping from slavery and racial 9 oppression, but also the primacy of new worlds and possibilities away 10 from the constraints of slavery and racial oppression.” See Jason R. 11 Young, “All God’s Children Had Wings: The Flying African in 12 History, Literature, and Lore,” Journal of Africana Religions 5, no. 1 13 (2017): 61–62. 14 33. Both individual and group suicides were commonly framed as tactics 15 of rebellion. Ottobah Cugoano, Equiano’s contemporary, recalls 16 being part of such a plan in his autobiography: “And when we found 17 ourselves at last taken away, death was more preferable than life; and 18 a plan was concerted amongst us, that we might burn and blow up the 19 ship, and to perish all together in the flames: but we were betrayed by 20 one of our own countrywomen.” See Ottobah Cugoano, Narrative of 21 the Enslavement of Ottobah Cugoano, Narrative of the Enslavement of 22 Ottobah Cugoano, a Native of Africa (London: Hatchard, 1825), https:// 23 docsouth.unc.edu/neh/cugoano/cugoano.html. 24 34. Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: 25 Penguin, 2007), 121–22. 26 35. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 136–37. 27 36. Wilderson, Red, White, and Black, 23. 28 37. Sharon Patricia Holland, “Vocabularies of Vulnerability,” Journal for 29 Cultural Research 22, no. 2 (2018): 206. 30 38. Holland, “Vocabularies of Vulnerability,” 206. 31 39. Sharpe, In the Wake, 40–41. 32 40. Equiano, Interesting Narrative, 81–82. 33 41. On the common fear of white cannibalism among newly enslaved Afri- 34 cans, see Piersen, “White Cannibals, Black Martyrs: Fear, Depression, 35 and Religious Faith as Causes of Suicide among New Slaves.” Journal 36 of Negro History 62, no. 2 (April 1977): 147–59. 37 42. Monique Allewaert, Ariel’s Ecology: Plantations, Personhood, and Colo- 38 nialism in the American Tropics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota 39 Press, 2013), 86. Allewaert frames the emergence of the parahuman in 40 terms of the mutilation frequently performed on the bodies of enslaved 41 people, arguing that because the Anglo-European gaze registered 42 African bodies as always potentially unwhole, all enslaved Africans 43 came to be regarded as not wholly human. Tracing the parahuman Notes 157

through Creole folk tales of African Americans with missing body 1 parts who form complex relations with animals, Allewaert reads the 2 parahuman body as one “built on the intimacies borne through incom- 3 pletion.” See Allewaert, Ariel’s Ecology, 99. 4 43. Allewaert, 108, 111. 5 44. Equiano, Interesting Narrative, 59. 6 45. Equiano, 59. 7 46. Equiano, 59. 8 47. Equiano, 66. 9 48. Equiano, 65. 10 49. Henry John Drewal, “Performing the Other: Mami Wata Worship in 11 Africa,” Drama Review 32, no. 2 (1988): 161. 12 50. Henry John Drewal, Charles Gore, and Michelle Kisliuk, “Siren Sere- 13 nades: Music for Mami Wata and Other Water Spirits in Africa,” 14 in Music of the Sirens, ed. Linda Austern and Inna Naroditskaya 15 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 295. My discus- 16 sion relies mainly on Drewal’s work on Mami Wata. A contrasting 17 narrative of her origin is given in Barbara Paxton, “Mammy Water: 18 New World Origins?,” in Baessler-Archiv, Neue Folge 31 (1983): 19 407–446, as well as by some contemporary practitioners of Mami 20 Wata worship. For example, Mama Zogbé (Vivien Hunter-Hin- 21 drew) holds that the name is not pidgin English but derives from 22 ancient Egypt. See Mama Zogbé (Vivien Hunter-Hindrew), Mami 23 Wata: Africa’s Ancient God/dess, Unveiled (Martinez, GA: Mami 24 Wata Healers Society of North America, 2007). While I follow the 25 protocols of western academia in deferring to the scholarship cited 26 above, I am ever mindful of the fact that these methods and epis- 27 temologies may not be the best way into this body of knowledge. 28 51. According to Drewal, this holds even today: “The Mami Wata 29 phenomenon illustrates what Roy Wagner calls the invention of 30 culture, an ongoing process of creating one’s reality, of constructing 31 meaning out of experience. Such invention never occurs in a vacuum 32 or by accident, but rather emerges out of what already exists. Like 33 anthropologists, Mami Wata Devotees ‘study’ others—overseas visi- 34 tors—and generalize them from impressions, experiences, and other 35 evidence. . . . That process is at the same time one of self-determination 36 for Mami Wata devotees.” See Drewal, “Performing the Other,” 160. 37 52. Michelle D. Commander, Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and 38 the Black Fantastic (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 235, n. 5. 39 53. Barbara Frank, “Permitted and Prohibited Wealth: Commodity-Pos- 40 sessing Spirits, Economic Morals, and the Goddess.” Ethnology 34, no. 41 4 (Fall 1995): 331–346. 42 54. Commander, Afro-Atlantic Flight, 2–3. 43 158 Notes

1 55. Drewal, Gore, and Kisliuk “Siren Serenades,” 295. 2 56. Equiano, Interesting Narrative, 59. 3 57. Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: 4 University of Michigan Press, 1997), 7–8. 5 58. Glissant, 8. 6 59. Jared Sexton, “Unbearable Blackness,” Cultural Critique 90 no. 1 7 (2015): 171. 8 60. Moten, “Chromatic Saturation,” 197, italics original. 9 61. Moten, 194. 10 62. Moten, 206, 197. 11 63. Moten, 197. 12 64. Equiano, Interesting Narrative, 194. In the absence of line numbers, I 13 refer to page numbers. 14 65. Equiano, 195. 15 66. Equiano, 195. 16 67. Equiano, 195. 17 68. Equiano, 195. 18 69. Equiano, 195. 19 70. John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale,” in The Complete Poems, ed. John 20 Barnard (London: Penguin, 2003), 346–348, l. 52. While some biogra- 21 phers have described Keats as suicidal toward the end of his life—see 22 particularly Eric Wilson, How to Make a Soul: The Wisdom of John 23 Keats (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015) and Sue 24 Brown, Joseph Severn, A Life: The Rewards of Friendship (New York: 25 Oxford University Press, 2009)—I would distinguish between his 26 strong desire for death to relieve him of intense pain and suffering and 27 an active attempt to take his own life. However, I submit that Brown’s 28 discussion of Keats’s failed effort to convince Severn to give him a large 29 quantity of laudanum blurs that distinction. Keats explicitly discusses 30 the act of killing himself once, and this is in the context of a sarcastic 31 rebuke of Benjamin Bailey in a June 1818 letter: “Yes, on my soul, my 32 dear Bailey, you are too simple for the world—and that Idea makes me 33 sick of it . . . I should not by rights speak in this tone to you for it is an 34 incendiary spirit that would do so. Yet I am not old enough or magnan- 35 imous enough to annihilate self—and it would perhaps be paying you 36 an ill compliment.” See Grant F. Scott, ed., Selected Letters of John 37 Keats (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 128–29. 38 71. Keats, Selected Letters, 485. 39 72. Joseph Severn, “To John Taylor, 6 March 1821,” in Joseph Severn: Letters 40 and Memoirs, ed. Grant F. Scott (New York: Routledge, 2016), 137–40. 41 73. Keats, Selected Letters, 422. 42 74. Quoted in Allen Grossman, The Long Schoolroom: Lessons in the Bitter Logic 43 of the Poetic Principle (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 21. Notes 159

75. Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale,” ll. 19–20. 1 76. Keats, ll. 1–4. 2 77. Keats, ll. 5–7, 10. 3 78. Keats, ll. 61–64. 4 79. Helen Vendler, The Odes of John Keats (Cambridge, MA: Harvard 5 University Press, 1983), 94. 6 80. Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale,” ll. 23–30. 7 81. Keats, l. 33. 8 82. Keats, l. 79. 9 83. Moten, “Knowledge of Freedom,” 15. 10 84. Phillis Wheatley, “On Imagination,” in The Collected Works of Phillis 11 Wheatley, ed. John C. Shields (New York: Oxford University Press, 12 1989), 65–69. ll. 13–22. 13 85. While the primary objects of her inquiry are beyond the scope of this 14 discussion, Cristin Ellis offers a marvelous reading of the convergences 15 and tensions of posthumanist and antiracist thought that is worth 16 noting here. For Ellis, both frameworks “urge us to conceive . . . an 17 episteme no longer premised upon the manufacture of a ‘lesser’ class 18 of devalued and exploitable beings but, rather, one that embraces all 19 being as one densely conjoined world,” but when considered “from 20 another angle . . . it is not clear that liberation is a term that can mean- 21 ingfully be applied to an ontology of entanglement. Liberation, as we 22 know it, implied disentanglement—an unburdening that restores us 23 to a natural state of freedom, honoring our inherent right, as auton- 24 omous selves, to self-sovereignty. But none of these things—freedom, 25 autonomy, sovereignty, the singular ‘self’—remain readily legible in 26 a world in which being is primordially relational.” See Cristin Ellis, 27 Antebellum Posthuman: Race and Materiality in the Mid-Nineteenth 28 Century (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), 159. 29 30 31 Notes to Chapter 4 32 33 1. Mary Shelley, The Journals of Mary Shelley, 1814–1844, eds. Paula R. 34 Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 40. 35 2. Mary Shelley, Journals of Mary Shelley, 40, n. 134. 36 3. George Henry Davis, Memorials of Hamlet of Knightsbridge (London: 37 J. Russel Smith, 1859), 112. 38 4. Davis, Memorials, 113. 39 5. Bryan Rivers, “‘Revolting Burial’: A Victorian Commentary on the 40 Harriet Shelley Inquest,” Notes and Queries 52, no. 4 (December 2005): 41 480. 42 6. Rivers, “Revolting Burial,” 480. 43 160 Notes

1 7. Rivers, “Revolting Burial,” 480. 2 8. Bryan Rivers, “‘Tenderly’ and ‘With Care’: Thomas Hood’s ‘The 3 Bridge of Sighs’ and the Suicide of Harriet Shelley,” Notes and Queries 4 53, no. 3 (September 2006): 327–329. 5 9. Tim Marshall, Murdering to Dissect: Graverobbing, Frankenstein, and 6 the Anatomy of Literature (Manchester, UK: Manchester University 7 Press, 1996), 9. 8 10. See particularly: Diana Coke, Saved from a Watery Grave: The Story 9 of the Royal Humane Society’s Receiving House in Hyde Park, London 10 (London: Royal Humane Society, 2000); and Carolyn D. Williams, 11 “‘The Luxury of Doing Good’: Benevolence, Sensibility, and the Royal 12 Humane Society,” Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Roy Porter 13 and Marie Mulvey Roberts (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1996), 14 77–107. 15 11. See Carolyn D. Williams, “‘Inhumanly Brought Back to Life and 16 Misery’: Mary Wollstonecraft, Frankenstein, and the Royal Humane 17 Society,” Women’s Writing 8, no. 2 (2001): 213–234. 18 12. For more on this, see McGuire, Dying to Be English, particularly the 19 chapter on Eliza Haywood, one of the earliest social critics to comment 20 on the so-called English malady. 21 13. Samuel Jackson Pratt, Harvest-Home (London: Richard Phillips, 1805), 552. 22 14. Williams, “Inhumanly Brought Back,” 222–223. 23 15. Quoted in Janet Todd, Death and the Maidens: Fanny Wollstonecraft 24 and the Shelley Circle (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2007), 3. 25 16. Suggested explanations are as follows: the maid did it in order to avoid 26 the taint of suicide on the premises; Fanny tore it off either because 27 of a sense that she lacked an identity or to spare the Godwins embar- 28 rassment; Godwin did it; or, perhaps most sensationally, Percy did it 29 because of a secret affair with Fanny. In addition to Todd’s Death and 30 the Maidens, see B. R. Pollin, “Fanny Godwin’s Suicide Re-examined,” 31 Etudes anglaises 18, no. 3 (1965): 258–68. 32 17. Though suicide is sometimes mentioned in the context of broader 33 discussions of Frankenstein (e.g., as in Ana M. Acosta’s study of Genesis 34 in eighteenth-century novels), only Richard K. Sanderson has read 35 suicide as central to the novel. Sanderson reads suicide through the 36 novel’s allusion to Eve’s suggestion in Paradise Lost that she and Adam 37 either practice abstinence or mutually destroy each other. Thus, Sand- 38 erson posits that suicide is essential to the novel’s interest in procreation. 39 See Acosta, Reading Genesis in the Long Eighteenth Century: From 40 Milton to Mary Shelley (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006); and Sand- 41 erson, “‘Glutting the Maw of Death’: Suicide and Procreation in 42 Frankenstein,” South Central Review 9, no. 2 (Summer 1992): 49–64. 43 Notes 161

18. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, ed. J. Paul Hunter (New York: W. W. 1 Norton, 1995), 156. 2 19. See Faubert, “A Family Affair”; and Deanna Koretsky, “The Interra- 3 cial Marriage Plot: Suicide and the Politics of Blood in Romantic-Era 4 Women’s Fiction,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 51, no. 1 (Spring 5 2018): 1–18. 6 20. Rachel Feder, Harvester of Hearts: Motherhood Under the Sign of Fran- 7 kenstein (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018), 3. 8 21. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 126–27. 9 22. Mary Shelley, 138–40. 10 23. On the nature of the Shelleys’ working relationship, particularly in the 11 years leading up to Frankenstein, see Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady 12 and the Woman Writer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), as 13 well as Charles Robinson’s edition of the novel, entitled The Original 14 Frankenstein (New York: Vintage Classics, 2009), in which Robinson 15 italicizes areas that Percy likely contributed to. Shelley herself notes 16 many of their intellectual exchanges in her journals. 17 24. That is, the notion of love that unfolds in close association with 18 Godwin’s interest in “Necessity,” which Percy would develop in 19 Prometheus Unbound and other later works. 20 25. Although the Shelleys appear to have read more Hume than Smith, 21 Percy’s works suggest his familiarity with Smith. Percy cites Hume 22 through much of his prose, including in “A Fragment on Miracles” 23 (ca. 1813–15), “A Refutation of Deism” (1814), “Speculations on Morals” 24 (1815), “On the Devil, and Devils” (ca. 1819), and A Defence of Poetry 25 (1821). Further, the reading lists that Mary kept in her journals suggest 26 that both Shelleys read Hume extensively between 1814 and 1817. 27 Smith, on the other hand, is not listed in Mary’s journals, nor does 28 Percy cite Smith in his prose from this period. However, in his intro- 29 ductory essay on the development of Percy’s thought in Shelley’s Prose, 30 David Lee Clark notes echoes of Smith in Percy’s writing as early as 31 1812. See David Lee Clark, “Introduction,” in Shelley’s Prose, ed. David 32 Lee Clark (Bel Air, CA: New Amsterdam, 1988). 33 26. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Ernest C. Mossner 34 (New York: Penguin, 1985), 441. 35 27. Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Knud Haakonssen (New 36 York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 11. 37 28. David Marshall, The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, 38 Rousseau, and Mary Shelley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 39 1988), 181–82. 40 29. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 21. 41 30. Chander, Brown Romantics, 69. 42 43 162 Notes

1 31. Hume, Treatise, 593. See also M. Jamie Ferreira, “Hume and Imagina- 2 tion: Sympathy and ‘the Other,’” International Philosophical Quarterly 3 34, no. 133 (March 1994): 39–57. 4 32. Percy Shelley, “Speculations on Morals,” in The Prose Works of Percy 5 Bysshe Shelley, ed. Richard Herne Shepherd (London: Chatto and 6 Windus, 1906), 199. 7 33. Percy Shelley, “Speculations on Morals,” 199. 8 34. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 77. 9 35. Mary Shelley, 75. 10 36. Mary Shelley, 74–75. 11 37. Mary Shelley, 80–81. 12 38. Mary Shelley, 81. 13 39. Mary Shelley, 66. 14 40. Mary Shelley, 66. 15 41. As discussed in this book’s introduction, anxieties about the capacity 16 of texts to affect minds in undesired ways were at the forefront of the 17 Anglo-European cultural consciousness following the 1774 publication 18 of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. In its references to Werther, 19 Frankenstein can also be read as calling up the limits of the bildung 20 tradition, a genre in which Goethe is a key figure. But Goethe’s famed 21 bildungsroman is not Werther but Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. 22 So, one could read the panic over Werther as stemming from the fact 23 that the bourgeois subject the European novel was meant to shape is 24 presented in that novella as so fragile that Werther would choose to 25 commit suicide rather than cultivate and manage himself. 26 42. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 90. 27 43. Mary Shelley, 99. 28 44. Maureen McLane, Romanticism and the Human Sciences (New York: 29 Cambridge University Press, 2000), 103. 30 45. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 114. 31 46. Percy Shelley, “On Love,” in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Neil Frai- 32 stat and Donald H. Reiman (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 503. 33 47. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 10. 34 48. Percy Shelley, “On Love,” 504. 35 49. Percy Shelley, 503–4. 36 50. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 8. 37 51. Mary Shelley, 69. 38 52. Mary Shelley, 142. 39 53. Mary Shelley, 14. 40 54. Mary Shelley, 15. 41 55. Mary Shelley, 14. 42 56. Mary Shelley, 147–48. 43 57. Mary Shelley, 33. Notes 163

58. Mary Shelley, 43–4. 1 59. Mary Shelley, 33. 2 60. Mary Shelley, 33. 3 61. Mary Shelley, 33. 4 62. Mary Shelley, 132. 5 63. Mary Shelley, 133. 6 64. Mary Shelley, 154. 7 65. Mary Shelley, 154. 8 66. Percy Shelley, “On Love,” 504. 9 67. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 19. 10 68. See H. L. Malchow, Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century 11 Britain (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996); Debbie Lee, 12 Slavery and the Romantic Imagination (Philadelphia: University of 13 Pennsylvania Press, 2002); Alan Lloyd Smith, “‘This Thing of Dark- 14 ness’: Racial Discourse in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” Gothic Studies 15 6, no. 2 (2004): 208–222; and Marie Mulvey-Roberts, Dangerous Bodies: 16 Historicizing the Gothic Corporeal (Manchester, UK: Manchester 17 University Press 2016). 18 69. See Elizabeth Young, Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American 19 Metaphor (New York: New York University Press, 2008). 20 70. See, for example, Anne K. Mellor, “Frankenstein, Racial Science and 21 the Yellow Peril,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 23, no. 1 (2008): 1–28; 22 Cathy S. Gelbin, “Was Frankenstein’s Monster Jewish?,” Publications of 23 the English Goethe Society 82, no. 1 (2013): 16–25; and Stephen Bertman, 24 “The Role of the Golem in the Making of Frankenstein,” Keats-Shelley 25 Review 29, no. 1 (2015): 42–50. 26 71. Victor LaValle, Destroyer (Los Angeles: Boom! Studios, 2017). 27 72. Sharpe, In the Wake, 21. 28 73. Sharpe, 22. 29 74. Wilderson, Red, White, and Black, 55, 57. 30 75. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New 31 York: Grove, 2004), 2. 32 76. Wilderson, Red, White, and Black, 37. 33 34 35 Notes to Chapter 5 36 37 1. Anne Spencer, “Dunbar,” in The Book of American Negro Poetry, With 38 an Essay on the Negro’s Creative Genius, ed. James Weldon Johnson 39 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922), 174. For more on Spencer, see J. 40 Lee Greene, Time’s Unfading Garden: Anne Spencer’s Life and Poetry 41 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977); Maureen Honey, 42 ed., Shadowed Dreams: Women’s Poetry of the Harlem Renaissance 43 164 Notes

1 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006); Cheryl A. Wall, 2 Women of the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington: Indiana Univer- 3 sity Press, 1995); and Jane Baber White, Lessons Learned from a Poet’s 4 Garden (Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell, 2011). 5 2. William Hazlitt, “On Burns and the Old English Ballads,” in Lectures 6 on the English Poets, ed. Alfred Rayney Waller and Earnest Rhys 7 (London: Taylor and Hessey, 1818; Project Gutenberg, 2005), July 24, 8 2012, http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/16209/pg16209.html. 9 3. Bennett, Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity, 3. 10 4. Jungian psychology views myth as an expression of a culture’s fears, 11 goals, and dreams, a window into its collective unconscious. In a 12 similar vein, religion scholar Bruce Lincoln has discussed myths as “an 13 ideology in narrative form.” See Jung on Mythology, ed. Robert A. Segal 14 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998); and Bruce Lincoln, 15 Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship (Chicago: 16 University of Chicago Press, 1999), 207. 17 5. See Nick Groom, “Introduction,” in Thomas Chatterton and Romantic 18 Culture, ed. Nick Groom (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), 3; 19 and Maria Losada Friend, “Romantic Suicide: The Chatterton Myth 20 and Its Sequels,” Encontro de Estudos Românticos (2006): 124. 21 6. William Wordsworth, “Resolution and Independence,” in The Major 22 Works, ed. Stephen Gill (New York: Oxford World’s Classics, 2008), 23 260–65. ll. 43–49. A number of works concerning Chatterton include 24 some variation of the “marvelous boy” epithet in their title, while 25 Michael MacDonald and Terrence R. Murphy’s groundbreaking book 26 on the history of suicide, Sleepless Souls, takes its title from the line 27 that follows. See, among others, Peter Corris, The Marvellous Boy 28 (New York: Random House, 1986); Karen Foxlee, Ophelia and the 29 Marvelous Boy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014); Linda Kelly, The 30 Marvellous Boy: The Life and Myth of Thomas Chatterton (London: 31 Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1971); and Charles Edward Russell, Thomas 32 Chatterton, The Marvellous Boy: The Story of a Strange Life, 1752–1770 33 (New York: Moffatt, Yard, 1908). 34 7. See chapter 12 of Kelly, Marvellous Boy. 35 8. Some literary titles include Peter Ackroyd, Chatterton (New York: 36 Grove Atlantic, 1987); Neil Bell, Cover His Face: A Novel of the 37 Life and Times of Thomas Chatterton, the Marvelous Boy of Bristol 38 (London: Collins, 1943); Francis William Grattan, Thomas Chat- 39 terton, the Marvellous Boy in the Foes and Woes of a Poet—A Four Act 40 Drama (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2010); Barry MacSweeney, Elegy 41 for January: Thomas Chatterton, 1752–1770 (London: Menard, 1970); 42 Charles Reznikoff, Chatterton, The Black Death (London: Forgotten 43 Books, 2012); and Vita Sackville-West, Chatterton: A Drama in Three Notes 165

Acts (London: Through Leaves, 2002). Matthew Dewey, Serge Gains- 1 bourg, and Matthias Pintscher are among those who have written 2 music inspired by Chatterton. Scholars who explicitly link Chatterton 3 to Cobain include Jennifer Otter Bickerdike, Fandom, Image and 4 Authenticity: Joy Devotion and the Second Lives of Kurt Cobain and 5 Ian Curtis (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); P. David Marshall, 6 Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture (Minneapolis: 7 University of Minnesota Press, 2014); and Maureen McLane, My Poets 8 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012). 9 9. Michelle Faubert, “Fashionable Suicide in the Romantic Era,” Fash- 10 ionable Diseases: Medicine, Literature, and Culture, ca. 1660–1832: 11 A Leverhulme Trust Project at the Universities of Northumbria and 12 Newcastle, MP3 audio, accessed February 15, 2015, http://www.fash- 13 ionablediseases.info/downloads/suicide.MP3. 14 10. Andrew Radford and Mark Sandy, “Introduction: Romanticism and 15 the Victorians,” in Romantic Echoes in the Victorian Period, ed. Andrew 16 Radford and Mark Sandy (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 8. 17 11. William L. Pressly, The Artist as Original Genius: Shakespeare’s “Fine 18 Frenzy” in Late-Eighteenth-Century British Art (Newark: University 19 of Delaware Press, 2007), 165–71. See also Joseph Bristow and Rebecca 20 Marshall, Oscar Wilde’s Chatterton: Literary History, Romanticism, 21 and the Art of Forgery (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 22 85–88. The Singleton and West images are both held by the National 23 Portrait Gallery, London, and available for viewing on their website, 24 npg.org.uk. 25 12. Ron M. Brown, The Art of Suicide (London: Reaktion, 2001), 99. Inga 26 Bryden also discusses the Wallis image as an example of memento mori. 27 See Inga Bryden, “The Mythical Image: Chatterton, King Arthur, 28 and Heraldry,” in Thomas Chatterton and Romantic Culture, ed. Nick 29 Groom (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 64–78. 30 13. Brown, Art of Suicide, 138. 31 14. See The Complete Poetical Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed. William 32 M. Rossetti (Boston: Little, Brown, 1899), 261, 266. 33 15. Quoted in Bristow and Marshall, Oscar Wilde’s Chatterton, 110. 34 16. Radford and Sandy, “Introduction: Romanticism and the Victorians,” 35 2–3. See also Julie Crane, “‘Wandering between Two Worlds’: The 36 Victorian Afterlife of Thomas Chatterton,” in Romantic Echoes in the 37 Victorian Period, ed. Andrew Radford and Mark Sandy (Burlington, 38 VT: Ashgate, 2008), 27–38. 39 17. Gates, Victorian Suicide, 23. 40 18. Groom, “Introduction,” in Thomas Chatterton and Romantic Culture, 5. 41 19. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Balti- 42 more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 8. 43 166 Notes

1 20. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, italics in original, 8. 2 21. Girard, 255. 3 22. My thinking here also draws on Roland Barthes’s notion of myths as 4 tools used by the ruling class to conserve its way of life: “The bour- 5 geoisie hides the fact that it is the bourgeoisie and thereby produces 6 myth; revolution announces itself openly as revolution and thereby 7 abolishes myth,” in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: 8 Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972), 149. 9 23. See Timothy Egan, “Kurt Cobain, Hesitant Poet of ‘Grunge,’ 10 Dead at 27,” New York Times, April 9, 1994, https://www.nytimes. 11 com/1994/04/09/obituaries/kurt-cobain-hesitant-poet-of-grunge- 12 rock-dead-at-27.html; and Jonathan Freedland, “Kurt Cobain: An 13 Icon of Alienation,” Guardian, republished April 5, 2014, https:// 14 www.theguardian.com/music/from-the-archive-blog/2014/apr/05/ 15 kurt-cobain-an-icon-of-alienation. 16 24. Newsweek, “Kurt Cobain: Poet of Alienation—How Newsweek Grappled 17 with the Musician’s Suicide in 1994,” Newsweek, April 5, 2018, https:// 18 www.newsweek.com/kurt-cobain-poet-alienation-how-newsweek- 19 grappled-musicians-suicide-1994-873712. 20 25. See Neil Strauss, “Kurt Cobain’s Downward Spiral: The Last Days 21 of Nirvana’s Leader,” Rolling Stone, June 2, 1994, https://www. 22 rollingstone.com/music/music-news/kurt-cobains-downward-spiral- 23 the-last-days-of-nirvanas-leader-99797; and Gus Van Sant, dir., Last 24 Days (New York: HBO Films, 2005). 25 26. Factors for this include the CDC’s insistence on including information 26 about suicide prevention resources in discussions of Cobain’s death— 27 now a standard practice in reporting on suicide—as well as his widow 28 Courtney Love’s public reading of his suicide note in the days after 29 his death. Charles Cross suggests that Love’s response “took away any 30 glamour that might have been associated with the act and showed how 31 much pain was left for others after his suicide.” See David A. Jobes, 32 et al., “The Kurt Cobain Suicide Crisis: Perspectives from Research, 33 Public Health, and the News Media,” Suicide and Life-Threatening 34 Behavior 26, no. 3 (1996): 260–71; and Charles Cross, Here We Are 35 Now: The Lasting Impact of Kurt Cobain (New York: HarperCollins, 36 2014), 149. 37 27. The painting can be seen on the artist’s website, part of his History 38 Paintings series, accessed April 13, 2020, https://sandowbirk.com. The 39 painting is also discussed in David S. Rubin, It’s Only Rock and Roll: 40 Rock and Roll Undercurrents in Contemporary Art (New York: Prestel, 41 1996). 42 28. Quoted in Michael Azerrad, Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana 43 (New York: Doubleday, 2001), 349. Notes 167

29. Charles Cross, Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain 1 (New York: Hachette, 2001), 34. 2 30. Kurt Cobain, Journals (New York: Riverhead, 2001), 18. 3 31. Cobain, Journals, 167–170. 4 32. Quoted in Cross, Here We Are Now, 57–58. 5 33. In a Google search for “Kurt Cobain” on May 28, 2019, the second hit 6 after his Wikipedia page is another Wikipedia page dedicated solely 7 to his suicide. The fourth is a website dedicated to his suicide note. 8 Of the top four suggestions for additional searches, two are questions 9 about how he died, one is about his health problems, and one asks 10 where he is buried. 11 34. Cross, Here We Are Now, 40. 12 35. Brandon Soderburg, “The Rap on Kurt: Hood Pass 4 Life,” SPIN, July 13 18, 2011, https://www.spin.com/2011/07/rap-kurt-hood-pass-4-life/. 14 36. John Norris, “Denzel Curry in his New Album ‘Ta1300,’ Why Kurt 15 Cobain is Glorified for the Wrong Reasons & His Connection to Trayvon 16 Martin,” Billboard, August 8, 2018, https://www.billboard.com/articles/ 17 columns/hip-hop/8469090/denzel-curry-ta1300-album-clout-cobain- 18 interview. 19 37. Jake Woolf, “The White Sunglasses You’re Seeing Everywhere Now 20 Have a New Name,” GQ, July 25, 2017, https://www.gq.com/story/ 21 kurt-cobain-sunglasses-clout-coggles. 22 38. “Kurt Cobain Death Scene Photos,” CBS News, accessed March 29, 23 2019, https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/new-kurt-cobain-death-scene- 24 photos/. 25 39. See, for example, Camila Domonoske, “Court Dismisses Latest Attempt 26 to Acquire Kurt Cobain Death Scene Photos,” NPR, May 16, 2018, 27 https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/05/16/611801099/ 28 court-dismisses-latest-attempt-to-acquire-kurt-cobains-death-scene- 29 photos. 30 40. Casey McNerthney and Amy Clancy, “Seattle Police Re-Examine Cobain 31 Suicide, Develop Scene Photos,” KIRO 7, March 20, 2014, https://www. 32 kiro7.com/news/only-kiro-7-seattle-police-re-investigate-kurt-cob/ 33 81808273. 34 41. In 2020, 250 years after Chatterton’s death, a number of tributes to 35 the poet have been organized by scholars and fans. By contrast, though 36 Bristol’s involvement in the triangular trade is well known to scholars, 37 large-scale efforts to reckon with this part of the city’s past are rela- 38 tively recent, as journalist Aamna Mohdin discusses in her article 39 about Olivette Otele, the nation’s first black woman history professor, 40 who began her post at Bristol University in 2020. See Steven Morris, 41 “Bristol Celebrates its Poet Genius Who Died at Just 17,” Guardian, 42 March 30, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/mar/30/ 43 168 Notes

1 bristol-celebrates-poet-thomas-chatterton-who-died-at-17; “Chat- 2 terton250: A Call for Odes and Elegies,” Keats-Shelley Association of 3 America, February 18, 2020, https://k-saa.org/chatterton250-a-call- 4 for-odes-and-elegies; and Aamna Mohdin, “UK’s First Black Female 5 History Professor to Research Bristol’s Slavery Links,” Guardian, 6 October 30, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/ 7 oct/30/olivette-otele-uk-first-black-female-history-professor-to-re- 8 search-bristol-slavery-links. 9 42. Congressional Black Caucus, Ring the Alarm: The Crisis of Black Youth 10 Suicide in America (Washington, DC: CBC, 2019), https://watson- 11 coleman.house.gov/uploadedfiles/full_taskforce_report.pdf. The 12 report is the result of a task force launched by Congresswoman Bonnie 13 Watson Coleman in April of 2019. The only other such resource to 14 make explicit the link between suicide and racial injustice is Widening 15 the Lens: Exploring the Role of Social Justice in Suicide Prevention: A 16 Racial Equity Toolkit, also published in 2019 by the Massachusetts 17 Coalition for Suicide Prevention, https://www.masspreventssuicide. 18 org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/WideningTheLensToolkit.pdf. 19 43. Wilderson, Afropessimism, 225. 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 1 2 3 4 5 Bibliography 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 Ackroyd, Peter. Chatterton. New York: Grove Atlantic, 1987. 16 Acosta, Ana M. Reading Genesis in the Long Eighteenth Century: From 17 Milton to Mary Shelley. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006. 18 Ahmed, Sara. Living a Feminist Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 19 2017. 20 Allewaert, Monique. Ariel’s Ecology: Plantations, Personhood, and Colo- 21 nialism in the American Tropics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota 22 Press, 2013. 23 Alvarez, A. The Savage God: A Study of Suicide. New York: W. W. Norton, 24 1990. 25 Anderson, Amanda. Bleak Liberalism. Chicago: University of Chicago 26 Press, 2016. 27 Anderson, Olive. Suicide in Victorian and Edwardian England. New York: 28 Oxford University Press, 1987. 29 Andrews, Kehinde. “The Psychosis of Whiteness: The Celluloid Halluci- 30 nations of Amazing Grace and Belle.” Journal of Black Studies 47, no. 5 31 (2016): 435–53. 32 “The Author of Sanford and Merton.” Bibliographer, no. 5 (January 1884): 33 30–34. 34 Azerrad, Michael. Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana. New York: 35 Doubleday, 2001. 36 Bailey, Victor. This Rash Act: Suicide Across the Life Cycle in the Victorian 37 City. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. 38 Baker, Samuel. Written on the Water: British Romanticism and the Maritime 39 Empire of Culture. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2010. 40 Balzac, Honoré de. Le Peau de Chagrin. In Vol. 10 of La Comédie Humaine, 41 edited by Pierre Georges Castex, 5–294. Paris: Gallimard, 1979. 42 43

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1 2 3 4 5 Index 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 abolitionist movement and writings, Ahmed, Sara, 15, 54 16 4–7, 11–14, 17, 19–20, 23–27; 38–40, alienation: Duras on, 60; natal, 70, 17 44, 48, 55–57, 62–64, 69, 71, 76–77, 154n89 18 81, 90, 115, 123. Duras on, 62–63; Allewaert, Monique, 84, 156n42 19 The Dying Negro and, 25; Equiano American Revolution, 16, 38. 20 on, 77; iconography of, 144n68; Ann and Mary, 26. 21 Robinson and, 57; and suicide, 4 analogy, ruse of, 9. See also Frank 22 academia, western, romanticism and, B. Wilderson III 23 12 Anderson, Amanda, 136n67 24 Adanson, Michel, 36 Andrews, Kehinde, 136n63 25 Adonais (Shelley), 119 animals: Equiano on, 82–89; Keats 26 Aesthetics of suicide, 15, 41, 75, 122 on, 93–95; and personhood, 25; 27 Africa, Equiano on, 91 and suicide, 2. See also fish; birds 28 Afropessimism, 4, 9–10, 19, 24, 38, anthropomorphism, in epitaphs, 29 89, 97, 114–115; term, 137n69. 41–42 30 See also Frank B. Wilderson III; antiblackness, 11; suicide tropes and, 31 Jared Sexton 4–5 32 afterlife: of slavery, 4, 40, 44, 128; antiracist thought, 12, 159n85 33 literary afterlife, 21, 118–119; apostrophe, 144n70; in epitaphs, 42 34 The Dying Negro on, 40, 42–45. aristocratic heroine, Duras on, 59, 63 35 See also literary immortality; Ashanti, and suicide, 40 36 posthumous Atlantic Ocean: and blackness, 37 agency: Equiano on, 86, 90; 74–75; Equiano on, 76–89; Gilroy 38 Frankenstein on, 115; Jackson on, on, 76; Glissant on, 87–88 39 71; Mami Wata and, 86; Robinson Augustine of Hippo, 142n47 40 on, 58; versus social death, 43; autobiography, Jackson and, 41 strategies of, 39 69–71 42 43

193 194 Index

1 Badiou, Alain, 89 bourgeois white male individualism, 2 Bailey, Benjamin, 158n70 5, 21–22, 122; myth of romantic 3 Baker, Samuel, 75 suicide and, 118; and romanticism, 4 Balzac, Honoré de, 1–2 14–15. See also bourgeoisie 5 Baraka, Amiri, 73, 75 “Bridge of Sighs, The” (Hood), 99 6 Barthes, Roland, 166n22 “Bride of the Greek Isle, The” 7 Bartolozzi, Francesco, 120 (Hemans), 67–68, 153n82 8 Baucom, Ian, 75 Bristol, 128, 167n41 9 Behn, Aphra, 5, 41, 139n5 Bristow, Joseph, 122 10 Bennett, Andrew, 15, 118 British and suicide, 2, 6, 78, 100, 11 Bernier, Celeste-Marie, 35–36 132n16 12 Bicknell, John, 20, 23–26, 33, 35–45, British romantics: and Chatterton, 13 58, 76. See also Thomas Day and 119–23; cultural context of, 14 The Dying Negro 5–11; and racism, 12–14, 18; and 15 birds, Keats on, 93–95 sympathy, 103; and water imagery, 16 Birk, Sandow, 124, 127. See also The 75. See also romanticism 17 Death of Kurt Cobain Brown, Charles, 92 18 Black Atlantic, 76, 88. See also Paul Brown, Ron, 121 19 Gilroy and Olaudah Equiano Brown, Vincent, 43 20 black life, 10, 82; Equiano on, 77, Brown, William Wells, 5, 73–76, 21 86–87, 91; Moten on, 89 153n84 22 blackness, 5, 17, 102; and Atlantic Byron, George Gordon, lord, 1–2, 23 Ocean, 74–75; and criminality, 114, 132n16 24 145n79; and death, 4, 9–10, 42–43; 25 Duras on, 60; The Dying Negro Cachexia Africana, 78. See also 26 and, 41; Equiano on, 76–82, 91; George Davidson 27 fungibility of, 103; humanity Cambrian, The, 101 28 and, 8; liberalism and, 113–16; canonical romanticism, 4, 12, 29 romanticism and, 96; term, 137n69, 14, 16, 93, 118–19, 122. See also 30 154n11; Wagner on, 76; Wilderson British romantics; romanticism 31 on, 4, 9–10, 37 Carby, Hazel V., 53 32 black optimism, 10, 19; and Carey, Brycchan, 26, 143n63 33 Equiano, 89–92; term, 137n69. celebration, black thought and, 89 34 See also Fred Moten Chander, Manu Samriti, 12, 14, 103 35 black radical tradition, 137n67 Charles I, king of England, 28 36 Blackstone, William, 48, 145n79 Chatterton, Thomas, 5–6, 15–16, 37 black studies, 16–19 21–23, 45, 117–28, 167n41 38 black women, 47–49, 53, 59–64, 69– Chatterton’s suicide, 119, 121–122. 39 76; and suicide, 47–71, 153n84 See also Thomas Chatterton 40 Blake, William, 122 Cheyne, George, 6, 78 41 Botkin, Fran, 16 Christianity, 6–7; Duras on, 60–61, 42 bourgeoisie, 4–5, 14, 21–22, 51–53, 63; The Dying Negro on, 33, 35–37, 43 63, 67, 71, 118, 122–23 40, 142n50, 143n63; Equiano on, Index 195

90–91; and suicide, 133n22, 42–43; Equiano on, 76; Hemans 1 142n47 on, 64–68; Moten on, 31–32; 2 class: Duras on, 59, 62–63; myths and, Native Americans and, 66; and 3 166n22; Robinson on, 54–56; and water tropes, 92. See also social 4 romanticism, 14; Wollstonecraft death 5 on, 51–52 Death of Chatterton, The (Wallis), 6 Clotel; or the President’s Daughter 124 7 (Brown), 5, 73–76, 153n84 Death of Kurt Cobain, The (Birk), 8 “Clout Cobain” (Curry), 125–28. See 124, 127 9 also Kurt Cobain Delamayne, Thomas Hallie, 30 10 Cobain, Kurt, 21, 119, 124–28 Deneen, Patrick, 134n46 11 Coëtnempren, Guy de, 63 Destroyer (LaValle), 21, 97–98, 114–16 12 Coleman, Bonnie Watson, 168n42 Diaby, Bakary, 12–13, 16 13 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 94, 98, 119, Dicey, A. V., 28 14 122 Drescher, Seymour, 35 15 collective suicide, 80. See also Igbo Drewal, Henry John, 157n51 16 Landing Duras, Claire de, 20, 49, 54, 59–64, 17 colonialism, 8, 17, 27, 36, 52, 55–56, 67, 71; background of, 63 18 60, 69, 86, 106; and romanticism, Durkheim, Émile, 133n20 19 12–14 Drug use, 125–27. See also Kurt 20 Commander, Michelle D., 86 Cobain; War on Drugs 21 Congressional Black Caucus (US), Dying Negro, The (Day and Bicknell), 22 128 20, 23–45, 48, 58, 76; influence of, 23 contracts, Locke on, 31 25, 44–45 24 Cooper, James Fenimore, 65 Dykes, Eva Beatrice, 12–13 25 corporations, and personhood, 25 26 coverture, laws of, 48 Eagleton, Terry, 14 27 criminality, and blackness, 145n79 Eau de Werther, 2. See also The 28 Cross, Charles, 124–25, 166n26 Sorrows of Young Werther 29 Cugoano, Ottobah, 156n32 ecology: Equiano on, 82–89, 91; 30 culture: and resurrection, 100; and term, 88 31 suicide, 2–3, 5–11, 39 economic issues: Locke on, 29; 32 Curry, Denzel, 125–28 Robinson on, 55; Shelley (Mary) 33 Curtis, Ian, 119 on, 99 34 Eden, William, 146n79 35 Davidson, George, 78 Education: Duras on, 59; 36 Davis, Henry George, 99 Frankenstein on, 105–6, 37 Day, Iyko, 10 109–10; literary, and control, 38 Day, Thomas, 20, 23–26, 33, 35–45, 13–14, 109; Robinson on, 56–57; 39 58, 76. See also John Bicknell and Wollstonecraft on, 50 40 The Dying Negro Elegiac Sonnets (Charlotte Smith), 41 Deans, Zev, 125–26 94 42 death, 10–11; and blackness, 4, 9–10, Ellis, Cristin, 159n85 43 196 Index

1 Ellis, Markham, 148n7 fish, Equiano on, 83–85 2 Ellison, Ralph, 137n67 Five English Poets (Rossetti), 122 3 emotions: Chatterton and Werther Flaxman, John, 121–22 4 and, 5; Duras on, 60; Equiano on, flesh: Spillers on, 44, 81; Weheliye 5 76; Frankenstein on, 111; Jackson on, 44, 81–82 6 on, 70 flight: Equiano on, 85; African 7 Endymion (John Keats), 119 folktales on, 80, 86, 156n32; Keats 8 English Malady, The (Cheyne), 6, on, 95 9 78. See also methods of suicide Fordyce, James, 52–53 10 enlightenment: and suicide, 6; term, forfeiture, 99, 145n79 11 137n69 Frankenstein (Shelley), 21, 97–116 12 enslavement: England and, 26–27; Franklin, Benjamin, 100 13 Frankenstein on, 113–14; Hemans freedom, 5; black imagination and, 14 on, 153n82; Locke on, 31–32, 34–35, 95–96; The Dying Negro and, 15 141n33; versus marriage, 48–49; 33–38; Equiano on, 81, 87; Hume 16 Moten on, 31–32; Robinson on, 55; on, 9; Locke on, 32, 34–35; Moten 17 Wollstonecraft on, 52–53.See also on, 31–32; Wood on, 34 18 trade in enslaved Africans; Middle free will, Hume on, 7 19 Passage French identity, Duras on, 59–64 20 epistemology: Glissant on, 88; French revolution, 62–63 21 Weheliye on, 44 Friedrich, Caspar David, 2–3 22 epitaphs, 41–42; The Dying Negro friendship, Frankenstein on, 23 as, 144n69; of Keats, 73, 92; of 107–12 24 Shelley, 92 futurity, Equiano on, 81 25 Equiano, Olaudah, 75–89 26 Estwick, Samuel, 30–31 Galvani, Luigi, 100 27 exclusion: Frankenstein on, 107, Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 8 28 115; LaValle on, 114–15; myth of gender: and romantic writers, 12, 14; 29 romantic suicide and, 118 and suicide, 47–71, 130n5, 146n1; 30 and whiteness, 15 31 Fanon, Frantz, 60, 115 genius, suicide myth and, 3, 15–16, 32 fashion: Goethe and, 2; McQueen 117–23 33 and, 2–3 geophagy, 78. See also George 34 Faubert, Michelle, 48, 53, 119–20 Davidson; Cachexia Africana 35 Feder, Rachel, 101 Georgics (Virgil), 93–94 36 Federal Writers’ Project, 80. See Ghana, 86 37 also Floyd White; Igbo Landing; Giaour, The (Byron), 1 38 St. Simon’s Island gift, term, Wood on, 34 39 Feldman, Paula R., 98 Gilroy, Paul, 76, 88. See also Black 40 felony, term, 145n79 Atlantic 41 Ferguson, Moira, 52 Girard, René, 123 42 Festa, Lynn, 40 Glissant, Édouard, 87–88 43 Filmer, Robert, 31 Gloster, Marcus, 125 Index 197

Godwin, William, 50, 98 Hume, David, 7–11, 97–98, 100, 1 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 2, 102–4, 113, 161n25 2 5–6, 106, 124 Hunter, John, 100 3 Gorton, John, 5 4 Goslee, Nancy Moore, 152n76 Igbo, 78 5 Greeson, Jennifer Rae, 31, 141n33 Igbo Landing, 80. See also St. 6 Gronniosaw, James Albert Ukawsaw, Simon’s Island 7 153n86 imagination: of alternatives, 44, 96; 8 Groom, Nick, 122 black, 95–96; and Chatterton’s 9 Grossman, Allen, 93–94 death, 120; Shelley (Percy) on, 104 10 Gutzman, Kevin, 28 Imlay, Fanny, 100–101, 160n16. See 11 also suicide notes 12 habeas corpus, 23–45; history of, 27; Immerwahr, John, 8 13 term, 29 Incesticide (Nirvana), 124. See also 14 Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, 27–29 Kurt Cobain, Nirvana 15 habeas viscus, term, 24–25, 44 “Indian Woman’s Death Song” 16 Haitian revolution, 6, 16, 38, 62–66 (Hemans), 65–67 17 Halliday, Paul, 24 individualism, 4–5; 14, 45, 76, 98, 18 Harney, Stefano, 135n46 113, 123; The Dying Negro on, 33; 19 Hartman, Saidiya, 11, 17–18, 39, 103, Frankenstein on, 107–12; Glissant 20 113 on, 87–88; habeas corpus and, 28; 21 Hazlitt, William, 117 Locke on, 32–33; myth of romantic 22 Hemans, Felicia, 20, 49, 64–68, 71 suicide and, 5. See also bourgeois 23 Hernani (Hugo), 119 white male individualism 24 Hessell, Nikki, 138n75 individual rights, Hume on, 7, 9 25 Hickman, Jared, 16, 114 inhabitants of the deep, 93; Equiano 26 Higonnet, Margaret, 48, 56, 132n18, on, 80–82, 85, 92 27 152n76 interdisciplinary studies, and 28 hip-hop, and Cobain, 125–28 romanticism, 16–17 29 Holland, Sharon Patricia, 35, 44, Interesting Narrative of the Life 30 82–83 of Olaudah Equiano, The 31 Hood, Thomas, 99 (Equiano), 20–21 71, 75–77, 79, 32 hooks, bell, 137n67 81–82, 84, 89–90 33 Hugo, Victor, 16, 119 interracial relationships: Duras on, 34 humanity, 5; Allewaert on, 84; 61–62; The Dying Negro on, 40 35 blackness and, 8; Brown on, 73–74; invisibility, 15, 137n67; Wollstonecraft 36 The Dying Negro on, 36; Equiano and, 52–53 37 on, 82–89, 92; Frankenstein on, isolation, 21, 111–12 38 115; Keats on, 95; LaValle on, 115; 39 Orpheus and, 93; personhood and, Jackson, Mattie J., 49, 69–71, 100 40 26; Robinson on, 57; Snyder on, Jamaica, 8, 26 41 80; Weheliye on, 44; Wilderson Jay-Z, 125 42 on, 4, 9–10 Jefferson, Thomas, 73–74 43 198 Index

1 Johnson, Barbara, 41–42, 144n70 and, 118; romanticism and, 17–18; 2 Jones, Shelley, 56 social life and, 44–45; suicide and, 3 102; women writers and, 47–71 4 Keating, William, 65 liberty, 23–45 5 Keats, John, 1–2, 21, 73, 76, 92–96, life. See black life; social life 6 117–22, 158n70; and Chatterton, Lil Peep, 125 7 119; Spencer on, 117 Lincoln, Abraham, 27 8 Kelly, Gary, 64 Lincoln, Bruce, 164n4 9 Kesselring, K. J., 145n79 literary genius, 3, 5, 15–16, 19, 21, 92, 10 Knowles, John, 26 118–19, 122–23, 128 11 Koh, Adeline, 60–61 literary immortality, 15, 117 12 Kool Keith, 125 Locke, John, 20, 25, 28–34, 141n33; 13 Kramnick, Isaac, 29 influence of, 29 14 Kweli, Talib, 125 Lootens, Tricia, 49, 53, 130n5, 153n82 15 love, Shelley (Percy) on, 107–8 16 labor, Locke on, 28 Love, Courtney, 166n26 17 Lamar, Kendrick, 125 Lyrical Tales (Robinson), 55 18 Last Days (Van Sant), 124 19 “Last Song of Sappho, The” MacDonald, Michael, 39 20 (Hemans), 67–68 Magna Carta, 30 21 LaValle, Victor, 21, 97–98, 114–16 Makonnen, Atesede, 16 22 Lee, Debbie, 114 Malchow, H. L., 114 23 legal issues: felony, 145n79; and Mami Wata, 85–86, 93, 157n50–51 24 gender, 48–49; personhood, 25; “Man,” 17, 26; The Dying Negro on, 25 Somerset v. Stewart, 23–45; writ, 93 36; Equiano on, 90; Hume on, 10; 26 Letter to the Women of England Locke on, 28; sacrifice and, 123; 27 on the Injustice of Mental Wynter on, 8 28 Subordination (Robinson), 54–55 marginality, 137n67 29 liberal, term, 134n46 marriage: Duras on, 60–61; 30 liberal arts, 134n46 Wollstonecraft on, 51–53; analogy 31 Liberal subjectivity, 3, 21, 25, to slavery, 48–49 32 31–44, 98, 102, 109, 111, 125. Marshall, David, 103 33 See also bourgeois white male Marshall, Rebecca N., 122 34 individualism; individualism; Marshall, Tim, 100 35 “Man” martyrdom: Chatterton and, 122–23; 36 liberalism, 3–5, 7, 11–12, 16–22, The Dying Negro on, 35–37; 37 24–25, 29, 33, 37, 41–42, 44, 55, 59, Equiano on, 77 38 63–63, 66, 68–69, 74–76, 81–82, Matthew, Patricia A., 16 39 87, 89, 91, 96–97, 101–2, 109, 113, Mbembe, Achille, 77 40 115–16, 123, 126; Anderson on, McBride, Dwight, 16 41 136n67; blackness and, 113–16; McDonald, Michael, 6 42 Frankenstein on, 106–7; Locke McGuire, Kelly, 6, 48 43 and, 29; myth of romantic suicide McLane, Maureen, 107 Index 199

McQueen, Alexander, 2–3, 119 “Nightingale, The: A Conversation 1 mental illness, 6–7, 18 Poem” (Coleridge), 94 2 Meredith, George, 120 Nirvana, 124–26. See also Kurt 3 Metamorphoses (Ovid), 93 Cobain 4 Methodism, and suicide, 133n22 5 methodology, 11–19 ocean. See Atlantic Ocean 6 Middle Passage, 75–76, 85, 96; “Ode to a Nightingale” (Keats), 1, 7 Baraka on, 73, 75; Equiano on, 93–96 8 79–80; Wilderson on, 11. See also “Of National Characters” (Hume), 9 Black Atlantic; slave trade; Zong 8 10 Massacre Old Elizabeth, 153n86 11 Mills, Charles W., 18 “On Love” (Percy Shelley), 21, 102, 12 Mitchell, Robin, 59 107–9, 113 13 modernity. See liberalism On Suicide (Hume) 7–11, 97, 14 “Monody on the Death of Thomas 113–14 15 Chatterton” (Coleridge), 119 ontological blackness, 4, 9, 24–25, 16 Moody, Joycelyn, 69 41–44,48, 76, 81–82, 86–87, 97, 17 Morgan, C. Lloyd, 2 114. See also Afropessimism, 18 Moten, Fred, 10, 17, 31–32, 42, 89, Frank B. Wilderson III, Fred 19 95, 135n46, 137n69, 154n11. See Moten, black optimism 20 also black optimism optimism. See black optimism 21 MTV Video Music Awards, 126 Orme, Edward, 120 22 Mulvey-Roberts, Marie, 114 Oroonoko (Behn), 5, 41 23 Murphy, Terrance R., 6 Orpheus, 93–94 24 Murray, William, 27. See also Otele, Olivette, 167n41 25 Somerset v. Stewart Ourika (Duras), 59–64, 71 26 myth(s): ideological functions of, 3, Ourika, Charlotte Catherine 27 123, 164n4, 166n22; term, 119 Benezet, 59 28 myth of romantic suicide, 2, 5, 15–16, Ovid, 93–94 29 18–19, 21; Chatterton and, 117–23; 30 Cobain and, 124–28; Curry on, Pace, Joel, 16 31 128; ideological functions of, 5, paintings: of Chatterton’s death, 32 118–23; McQueen and, 2–3, 118 120–22; of Cobain’s death, 124; by 33 Turner, 75 34 natal alienation, 70; and social death, parahuman, Allewaert on, 84, 35 154n89 156n42 36 Native Americans: Hemans on, 65– Parisot, Eric, 39 37 66; Wilderson on, 9–10 patriarchy, 15; Hemans and, 68; 38 “Negro Girl, The” (Robinson), Robinson on, 59; and white 39 55–59 supremacy, 54–64 40 Nevermind (Nirvana), 125. See also Patrickson, Proctor, 98–99. See also 41 Kurt Cobain, Nirvana William Godwin 42 nightingale, Keats on, 93–94 Patterson, Orlando, 43, 70 43 200 Index

1 personhood, 4, 18, 20–21, 29–33, Hume and, 8; romantic writers 2 140n24; The Dying Negro on, and, 12–14, 18; Shelley (Percy) and, 3 37–42; and epitaphs, 42–45; 103; and suicide, 128 4 legal issues in, 24–26. See also Radford, Andrew, 120, 122 5 Afropessimism; black optimism; Radin, Margaret Jane, 140n24 6 John Locke Rankin, John, 39 7 personification, in epitaphs, 41–42 rationality: Duras on, 59–60, 62; 8 Phillips, David, 132n15 in epitaphs, 42; Hume on, 7; 9 Philomela, 93–94 and personhood, 25; Robinson 10 photographs, of Cobain death scene, on, 54, 56–58; and suicide, 6, 24; 11 127 Wollstonecraft on, 50–52 12 Pitt, William, 27 reader: Frankenstein on, 106; Keats 13 Plath, Sylvia, 130n5 and, 94–95 14 poetry: Brown and, 74; Chatterton reading: Frankenstein on, 109–10; 15 and, 117–18; The Dying Negro, Shelley (Percy) on, 104 16 23–45; epitaphs, 41–42; Equiano reason. See rationality 17 and, 89–92; Frankenstein on, 109; Rediker, Marcus, 81 18 Hemans and, 64–68; Jackson relation, ethic of, Equiano and, 19 and, 70–71; Keats and, 92–96; 82–83, 87 20 Robinson and, 54–59; Wheatley religion: Duras on, 60–61, 63; The 21 and, 96 Dying Negro on, 33, 35–37, 40; 22 politics: The Dying Negro on, 33–38, Equiano on, 90–91; Hume on, 7; 23 41; sentimentalism and, 39; suicide Mami Wata, 85–86; and suicide, 6, 24 and, 3–4, 6, 16, 23–45 133n22, 142n47 25 posthumanism, 159n85 reputation, 93; Chatterton and, 26 posthumous: fame, 16, 76, 92, 117–23; Cobain and, 124–28; Keats 27 118–119, 124; haunting, 75. See also and, 92–96 28 afterlife; literary immortality residence time, 83 29 Prasad, Pratima, 61 resistance, Equiano on, 81, 86 30 Pratt, Samuel Jackson, 100 revenge, The Dying Negro on, 37 31 Pressly, William L., 120 Rifkin, Mark, 10 32 Prince, Mary, 47, 153n86 Robinson, Mary, 20, 49, 54–59, 63, 33 property: Estwick on, 31; Locke on, 67, 71 34 28–33; marriage laws and, 48; romanticism: blackness and, 35 personhood and, 25; types of, 30; 96; Equiano and, 76–82; 36 Wollstonecraft on, 51 interdisciplinary studies and, 37 “Properzia Rossi” (Hemans), 67–68 16–17; term, 14, 137n69. See also 38 prosopopoeia, in epitaphs, 42 British romantics 39 romantic suicide. See myth of 40 race: and gender, 47–71; Hemans on, romantic suicide 41 65–68. See also under black; white Ross, Marlon, 12, 16 42 racialization, definition of, 25–26 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 122 43 racism: Curry on, 126; Duras on, 60; Royal Humane Society, 99–100, 110 Index 201 sacrifice, Chatterton as, 123 on, 115–116; Equiano on, 75, 87, 1 Sancho, Ignatius, 153n86 89; Frankenstein on, 101, 106; 2 Sanderson, Richard K., 160n17 gender and, 64; Moten on, 10; 3 Sandler, Matt, 16 natal alienation and, 154n89; 4 Sandy, Mark, 120, 122 Sexton on, 44; Wilderson on, 4, 5 Sappho, 67–68 10. See also Orlando Patterson 6 Schiller, Friedrich, 65 social life, 24–25, 32; Equiano on, 77, 7 Schneider, Rebecca, 16 86; Frankenstein on, 106; white 8 Schöning, Maria Elonora, 98–99 women writers and, 67 9 Schuller, Kyla, 148n7 Somerset, James, 23–24, 26, 142n50 10 science, Shelley (Mary) and, 100, 105 Somerset v. Stewart, 20, 23–24, 26–27, 11 Scott-Kilvert, Diana, 98 30, 33–36 12 self-consciousness: Duras on, 60; and Sorrows of Young Werther The 13 personhood, 25 (Goethe), 2, 5–6, 23, 45, 50, 106, 14 sensibility, 39; Duras on, 59, 61; 124 15 Jackson on, 69–71; Robinson Southey, Robert, 23 16 on, 57–58; term, 50, 148n7; sovereignty: Hume on, 7; Locke 17 Wollstonecraft on, 49–54 on, 31–33; Mbembe on, 77; 18 sentimentalism, 39; Jackson on, 70; Wilderson on, 9–10 19 term, 148n7 “Speculations on Morals” (Percy 20 Severn, Joseph, 92, 158n70 Shelley), 21, 102–4, 107 21 Sexton, Jared, 10, 44, 88–89. Spelman, Elizabeth, 53 22 See also Afropessimism; black Spencer, Anne, 117–18 23 optimism Spillers, Hortense, 44, 81, 147n4 24 Shakespeare, William, 92 St. Simon’s Island, GA, 80. See also 25 Sharp, Granville, 26 Igbo Landing 26 Sharpe, Christina, 10–11, 83, 114–15, Staël, Germaine de, 132n16 27 134n45 Stewart, Charles, 26. See also 28 Shelley, Harriet, 99–100 Somerset v. Stewart 29 Shelley, Mary, 21, 97–116, 161n25 Stoler, Ann Laura, 65 30 Shelley, Percy, 92, 98, 117, 119, 161n25; “Storm, The” (Robinson), 55–59 31 on sympathy, 102–8 Story of Mattie J. Jackson, The 32 “Sicilian Captive, The” (Hemans), (Jackson), 20, 49, 69–71 33 67–68 suffering of others, 39, 53, 64, 75; 34 Singleton, Henry, 120–22 Brown on, 73–74 35 slavery. See enslavement; trade in suicidal genius. See myth of romantic 36 enslaved Africans suicide 37 Smith, Adam, 98, 102–5 suicidal slave figure, 4–5, 11, 37, 38 Smith, Alan Lloyd, 114 44–45; term, 131n11 39 Smith, Charlotte, 94 suicide, 1–22; African American 40 Snyder, Terri L., 40–41, 78, 80 youth and, 128, 168n42; Brown on, 41 social death, 32, 35; The Dying 73–76; Chatterton and, 117–23; 42 Negro on, 40, 42–45; Destroyer Cobain and, 124–28; 43 202 Index

1 suicide (continued), culture and Van Sant, Gus, 124 2 beliefs on, 5–11, 39; Duras on, Vendler, Helen, 95 3 60; Durkheim on, 133n20; The Vigny, Alfred de, 119 4 Dying Negro on, 33–38; Equiano Vindication of the Rights of Woman, A 5 on, 77–78, 84, 90; Hemans (Wollstonecraft), 50–54 6 on, 64–68; Keats and, 158n70; Viswanathan, Guari, 14 7 Locke on, 28–33; methods of, 8 Africans and, 78, 81; prevention Wagner, Bryan, 76, 154n11 9 of, 99–100, 166n26; Robinson on, Wagner, Roy, 157n51 10 55–59; Shelley (Mary) and, 97–116; Wallis, Henry, 120–21, 121f, 122 11 Wollstonecraft on, 47–71, 100.See Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, The 12 also myth of romantic suicide (Friedrich), 3 13 suicide notes, 37–42; by Chatterton, War on Drugs, 127. See also Denzel 14 119–20; by Cobain, 124; by Imlay, Curry; drug use; Kurt Cobain 15 101; publication of, 2, 38–39 Washington, Mary Helen, 153n84 16 Sunbury, Jonah, 80 water imagery, 73–96; Equiano on, 17 sympathy, 97–116; Brown on, 76–82; Keats and, 92–96 18 73–74; The Dying Negro on, 40; Wedgwood, Josiah, 144n68 19 Frankenstein on, 113; Shelley (Percy) Weheliye, Alexander, 17, 24–26, 44, 20 on, 102–8; and suicide notes, 39 81 21 Werther effect, 5–6, 124, 132n15, 22 texts: anxieties about, 162n41; Shelley 162n41 23 (Percy) on, 104. See also Werther West, Raphael Lamar, 120–22 24 effect the west, 17, 76; term, 137n69 25 “Tiber, Niles, and Thames” West African peoples, and suicide, 26 (Rossetti), 122 40 27 Thomas Chatterton Taking the Westbrook family, 99. See also 28 Bowl of Poison from the Spirit of Harriet Shelley 29 Despair (Flaxman), 121 Westmacott, Richard the younger, 30 Thompson, Ayanna, 135n48 67 31 Thompson, L. S., 69 Wheatley, Phillis, 56, 90, 95–96 32 Todd, Janet, 51 White, Floyd, 80 33 trade in enslaved Africans: Bristol white male individualism, 5, 14, 34 and, 167n41; Glissant on, 87–88; 113, 123. See also bourgeois white 35 Robinson on, 55; Zong Massacre, male individualism 36 74–75. See also enslavement; whiteness, 18; Andrews on, 136n63; 37 Middle Passage Duras on, 59–60; The Dying Negro 38 transmigration, 41, 68; Equiano on, on, 42–43; Frankenstein on, 115; 39 77–78, 90. See also Mami Wata; Hemans and, 64–68; Hume and, 8; 40 Igbo Landing romanticism and, 13–14; term, 14–15 41 Trippie Redd, 125 white supremacy: and liberal 42 Turner, Ellen, 69–70 feminism, 47–59, 69, 147n4, 43 Turner, J. M. W., 75 149n42; and patriarchy, 54–64 Turner, Sasha, 147n4 white women: and patriarchy, 49, Index 203

53–54; and rights, 6–7, 18, 20, women. See black women; gender; 1 48–69, 71, 78; and sensibility, 50; white women 2 and white supremacy, 47–69. See Wood, Marcus, 34–35, 37 3 also Duras; Hemans; Robinson; Wordsworth, William, 119 4 Wollstonecraft Wrongs of Woman, or Maria, The 5 Wilde, Oscar, 122 (Wollstonecraft), 50–51 6 Wilderson, Frank B., III, 4, 9–11, 24, Wynter, Sylvia, 8 7 37, 64, 82, 115–16, 128, 137n69. See 8 also Afropessimism Yoruba, and suicide, 40 9 Williams, Carolyn, 100 Young, Elizabeth, 114 10 Williams, Robin, 119 Young, Jason R., 156n32 11 Wind, Astrid, 66 Youngquist, Paul, 14, 16, 76 12 Wolfson, Susan, 64 13 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 21, 47–71, Zong Massacre, 74–75 14 99–100, 110 Žižek, Slavoj, 89 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43