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Embodied Social Death: Speaking and Nonspeaking Corpses in Hannah Crafts’S the Bondwoman’S Narrative and Solomon Northup’S Twelve Years a Slave

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Embodied Social Death: Speaking and Nonspeaking Corpses in Hannah Crafts’S the Bondwoman’S Narrative and Solomon Northup’S Twelve Years a Slave University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Masters Theses Graduate School 5-2016 Embodied Social Death: Speaking and Nonspeaking Corpses in Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative and Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave Rachel Jane Dunsmore University of Tennessee - Knoxville, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_gradthes Part of the Other English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Dunsmore, Rachel Jane, "Embodied Social Death: Speaking and Nonspeaking Corpses in Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative and Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave. " Master's Thesis, University of Tennessee, 2016. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_gradthes/3742 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Masters Theses by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a thesis written by Rachel Jane Dunsmore entitled "Embodied Social Death: Speaking and Nonspeaking Corpses in Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative and Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave." I have examined the final electronic copy of this thesis for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts, with a major in English. Katy L. Chiles, Major Professor We have read this thesis and recommend its acceptance: Mary E. Papke, Bill J. Hardwig Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) Embodied Social Death: Speaking and Nonspeaking Corpses in Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative and Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave A Thesis Presented for the Master of Arts Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Rachel Jane Dunsmore May 2016 I dedicate this thesis to W.B. and Elsie Shaw ii Acknowledgements First and foremost, I offer my deepest gratitude to Dr. Katy Chiles for her support, advice, and encouragement during this writing process. I would also like to thank Dr. Mary Papke and Dr. Bill Hardwig for their invaluable feedback and advice with this work. Last, many thanks to my family for their constant encouragement. iii Abstract Hannah Crafts and Solomon Northup share remarkable similarities in their constructions of social death portrayed through characters’ bodies in images that not only represent this social death but do so in ways that illuminate the forced inbetweenness of slave life in antebellum America. This study looks at how the authors represent social death with figures that I term “speaking corpses” and “nonspeaking corpses” and portray embodiments of a unique type of social nonexistence. In Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative, the author constructs these images of speaking corpses in characters that are trapped in states of liminality and an existence that forces them into physically deteriorating figures. However, these corpse-like characters continue to vocalize their trauma even as they approach actual death. Similarly, Northup’s corpse-like depictions of chattel persons in Twelve Years a Slave portray the same type of social death and physical deterioration. In contrast to the characters in Crafts’s fictionalized autobiography, the characters in Northup’s slave narrative cannot or do not vocally articulate their trauma, even while their bodies represent the trauma of social death. Of additional interest is how Crafts and Northup infuse the fictionalized autobiography and slave narrative, respectively, with these decomposing figures and thus call back to and resemble the authors’ initial portrayals of these tormented characters. Moreover, Crafts’s and Northup’s narrator and protagonist turn away from these figures at the end of the texts as they head towards the Northern states and freedom. Thus, the authors demonstrate how their protagonists must reject embodied social death while they progress towards freedom and away from slavery and chattel status. iv Table of Contents Introduction: Social Death Embodied 1 Defining Speaking Corpses and Nonspeaking Corpses 3 The Bondwoman’s Narrative: Speaking Corpses between Life and Death 5 Twelve Years a Slave: Torturous Repetitions of Nonspeaking Corpses 8 The Authors Turn Away 11 Chapter 1: “Suspended between Heaven and Earth”: Speaking Corpses in Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative 13 Current Scholarship 15 The Speaking Corpse as Embodied Social Death 20 “Suspended between Heaven and Earth” 23 The Tragic Mulatta Turned Speaking Corpse 29 Social Death as Punishment 38 The Speaking Corpses’ Wildest Despair 42 Hannah Meets Embodied Death 48 Hannah’s Farewell 54 Chapter 2: “Even now the flesh crawls upon my bones”: Nonspeaking Corpses and Repetitions of Demoniac Exhibitions in Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave 57 Current Scholarship 59 The Language of Trauma: Speaking the Unspeakable 64 A Name Stripped From the Bones 67 “This was the story of her life”: Eliza’s Silence 72 Entitled by Law: Tortured Flesh Continued 79 A Demoniac Exhibition 86 The Reversal of Social Death 92 Conclusion: Bodies and Voices on the Margins 95 References 97 Vita 108 v Introduction: Social Death Embodied The study of early and antebellum African American literature has been in large part defined by the recovery and republication of previously unknown works. Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative, by Hannah Crafts, a Fugitive Slave Recently Escaped from North Carolina and Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave. Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853, From a Cotton Plantation Near the Red River, in Louisiana provide opportunities in which we can analyze not only the texts themselves but also our reactions to the recovery of one recently published work and our renewed interest in the other. Historical context tells us that the time period in which the authors wrote was clearly filled with multiple tensions as proslavery and antislavery discourse permeated the national atmosphere. In the midst of these tensions, African American authors entered the white public discourse and brought their own perspectives and personal experiences to the public arena through memoirs, fictionalized autobiographies, poetry, slave narratives, novels, and autobiographies. Moreover, these authors crafted rich works that adjusted contemporary literary trends and styles to represent the experience of slavery and created their own nuanced and multilayered styles of writing. Their literature was as varied as the individual experiences of each author. However, whether the authors were free, enslaved, fugitive, man, or woman, many of these antebellum black writers sought to represent slavery’s effects and use the written word to depict slavery’s realities. In this thesis, I turn to two authors, Hannah Crafts and Solomon Northup, to discuss how writers represented the peculiar institution and the multiple traumas inflicted on slaves through their portrayals of social death, physical, verbal, and mental abuse. 1 Hannah Crafts’s previously unpublished work, likely composed between 1853 and 1861, did not reach the literary marketplace until 2002, as I discuss in detail in Chapter 1. Although it was an instant bestseller after its 1853 publication, Solomon’s Northup’s slave narrative received little contemporary attention until the release of Steve McQueen’s 2013 film adaption. Both works provide abundant opportunities to study how two very different authors not only addressed the horrors of the peculiar institution but also crafted portrayals of these horrors in their writing. There are obvious differences between the two: Crafts’s demographic background has not yet been unequivocally verified and her work is very likely a fictionalized autobiography, whereas Northup’s identity has been verified and his slave narrative is generally considered historically and geographically accurate. Despite these differences in author and genre, their works share remarkable similarities in their depictions of social death and socially nonexistent chattel. Furthermore, each of these works portrays the end results of social death and physical, emotional, and psychological abuses, results which I argue can be read in the authors’ images of speaking corpses and nonspeaking corpses. It is through this analytical lens, which I present as a theory of speaking and nonspeaking corpses, that we can see how minor and secondary characters’ physical, liminal bodies represent an embodied social death. I argue that this analytical lens of reading the speaking and nonspeaking corpses can offer a way in which we may further understand how these authors depicted the nearly incomprehensible realities of the chattel system. Furthermore, these speaking and nonspeaking corpses offer a means for the author and narrator to describe multiple traumas, such as the trauma of social death, numerous acts of abuse and torture, and liminality. Where words fail in representing fully slavery’s realities, corpse-like figures speak of the peculiar institution through the authors’ words, their liminal bodies, vocalized sufferings, and even their enforced silence. I 2 posit that readings of these figures may show us how we can better understand, through analyses of characters that
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