Slavery in Literature

The Issue

Slavery existed in North America almost from the beginning of British colonization, but by the late 1700s it was largely confined to the South. The historian Peter Kolchin argues in his book American Slavery: 1619-1877 (1993) that this condition was a result of the Southern states’ agricultural economy; the slave as farm laborer was a far more intrinsic part of the Southern economy than of the industrial and manufacturing economies of the North. As one part of the nation grew to rely more on slaves while another region prospered without forced servitude, the issue of slavery became an increasingly heated national debate. The slave trade was outlawed in 1808, and by the 1840s the abolitionist movement was gaining strength. Significantly, this movement coincided with a surge in American thinking and writing, encompassing the American Transcendentalist movement of the 1830s and 1840s and with the first publication of the American novelists Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. As America began to establish its own identity through original literature and ideas, the question of whether or not it was to be a nation of slaveholders became more pressing.

Before the Civil War

Much of the writing about slavery before the Civil War took the form of sermons and pamphlets, and most was done by whites; the writing of African Americans consisted largely of autobiographical slave narratives rather than fiction or poetry. While the poetry of the New England slave Phillis Wheatley was widely acclaimed during the 1770s, much of it is religious or devotional rather than political, and she rarely writes explicitly of her position as an enslaved African. The poet James Russell Lowell’s The Biglow Papers (1848) include satirical antislavery poems, but slavery has largely been the subject of the novel rather than the poem. The first significant antislavery novel is Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Or, Life Among the Lowly (1852).

Uncle Tom’s Cabin became an almost instant best seller and significantly increased abolitionist sentiment in the United States. It is primarily the story of the slave, Tom, who is sold from a Kentucky farm to a kind master (Augustine St. Clare) in New Orleans and then, upon St. Clare’s death, to the evil plantation owner Simon Legree. The novel concludes with Tom being whipped to death and looking heavenward. While Stowe presumably intended Tom’s last act as a symbol of the goodness of the slave and the hypocrisy of proslavery Christians, the term “Uncle Tom” has come to mean one who is submissive to whites. Stowe’s secondary plot, concerning the escape of the slave Eliza with her son and her husband George, raises other issues of identity. Eliza and George are light-skinned, which aids in their escape, and at the novel’s end they leave America to return to Africa. The ability to pass for white has been a significant theme in African American literature, and many freed slaves wondered whether or not to go to Africa after the Civil War; both issues raise the question of what defines racial and national identity.

A second important literary work written before the Civil War is Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno” (in The Piazza Tales, 1855). In this story of an American sea captain’s encounter with a Spanish slave-trading ship, the Africans are initially represented as either docile and obedient servants or frightening savages. As the story progresses, the American Captain Delano learns that the slaves have mutinied and taken control of the ship. Melville’s work is significant not for any abolitionist fervor but for what it reveals about white fear of Africans and the white need to represent them as subhuman in order to justify the practice of slavery. Although the story is set in 1799, there is no indication in the text that Captain Delano’s views of the slaves were uncommon in the 1850s.

After the Civil War

After the Civil War, slavery became the subject of much fiction, written at first largely by whites but later also by African Americans. Of the nineteenth-century novels, the most significant is Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). In some ways Jim, the runaway slave and friend of Huck, continues the representation of stereotypical views of African Americans; he generally submits to Huck and is superstitious rather than rational. Yet he and Huck also develop a friendship, and Huck learns to see him as a person rather than an object. The novel’s view of African American identity is a complex and sometimes contradictory one, painting slavery as evil on one hand, yet using the character of Jim for comedy on the other. A second significant work of the late nineteenth century is George Washington Cable’s The Grandissimes (1880), a novel about New Orleans in 1803 that depicts slavery as barbarous and cruel.

In the twentieth century two significant works by white writers were William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936) and William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967). The former novel, like much of Faulkner’s work, deals in part with the destruction and ruin of the South after the Civil War. In the portion of the narrative that takes place before the war, Faulkner writes of the difficult relationship between slaves and the poor whites of the South. The novel itself is a novel of identity; it has as its crux the discovery that a white man is partially of African descent. Styron’s historical novel re-creates the 1831 slave revolt led by Nat Turner in Southampton, Virginia; Nat is represented as a merciless, if complex, man following his visions of God. Slavery is shown as brutal and dehumanizing. Following initial acclaim, the novel received criticism from African American writers, essentially for Styron’s appropriation of the African American experience.

Among the twentieth-century novels by African American writers dealing with slavery and its effects, works by Octavia E. Butler, Charles Johnson, and Toni Morrison stand out. Butler, who was largely known as a science-fiction writer, wrote of American slavery in several of her works, notably Kindred (1979). Butler used the device of time travel to write a contemporary version of the autobiographical slave narrative. The narrator, Dana, is married to a white man, and when they travel to the plantation past, the novel explores the difference between white and black experiences of slavery in the past and the present. Johnson, in his novel Oxherding Tale (1982), also transforms the slave narrative into fiction; his novel is the story of escape from slavery to freedom. The narrator, Andrew, is the son of a slave and a plantation owner’s wife, a reversal of the usual historical pattern, in which the children of female slaves were fathered by the masters. Significantly, Andrew’s journey to freedom is eased by his white parentage; he has not only been educated but is able to pass. Johnson’s Middle Passage (1990), the story of a freed slave who inadvertently takes a job on a slave ship going to Africa, partially rewrites “Benito Cereno”; on the return voyage from Africa the slaves (some of whom share names with Melville’s characters) mutiny. The novel raises questions about the economic forces surrounding slavery, as well as examining the complicity of freed slaves with oppressive white power structures. Morrison’s novel Beloved (1987), arguably the most significant novel about slavery by an African American writer of the twentieth century, tells the story of an escaped slave, Sethe, who murders her daughter in order to prevent her from being taken back into slavery. The novel, set in southern Ohio after the Civil War, moves back and forth from the consequences of that act (Sethe meets a young woman whom she believes to be the ghost of her murdered child) to Sethe’s memories of slavery.

In the early twenty-first century, African American writers continued to explore the negative legacy of slavery through literature. In 2016 alone, two critically acclaimed novels examined the impact of the institution by telling the harrowing stories of complex characters. Colson Whitehead reimagined the networks by which some slaves were able to escape to freedom by creating a physical system of underground trains in the National Book Award winner The Underground Railroad. At the same time, Natashia Deón's Grace focuses on the hardships endured by several generations of female slaves.

Identity and Slavery

Slavery’s relationship to identity is a complex one, for African Americans and for white Southerners. African Americans during slavery had to create their identities in a culture in which they did not have ownership or control over their own bodies, in which their families were broken up by the slave trade, and in which they were not treated as human. As generations of slaves were born on American soil, African names, customs, religions, and languages disappeared, leaving the slaves with few ways of shaping identity outside the world of the slaveholders.

Two particular components of slavery that affected identity were color and names. Many of the slave states had rigid rules concerning proportion of African blood; a person having one-sixteenth African and fifteen-sixteenths European ancestry could still be considered black and so barred from any of the legal rights that whites had. Autobiographical slave narratives and fiction often deal with the white slave. A slave who looked white not only had a better chance of escaping but was often treated differently—being assigned to the house rather than the field, for example. In the early twentieth century, a white skin provided access to better jobs and greater opportunity in general, and passing became the subject of literature such as Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) or Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Plum Bun (1929). The question of the relationship between racial identity and actual skin color is a difficult one. Naming is a similar identity issue; many slaves were named by their masters, and African names were frequently either transformed into English ones or became derogatory terms. After the Civil War, many slaves retained their master’s surnames, in part because it was easier to locate family members who had been sold away, or took the names of famous Americans, often presidents, whom they admired. A name is one central indicator of identity, so the names slaves chose for themselves, whether during or after slavery, became one of the few ways in which they could establish a unique identity. Naming has remained a theme in African American literature.

For the white Southerner, particularly in the generations following the Civil War, slavery also had long-term effects on the identity of the culture and its people. The Southern economy was decimated by the war and by the end of slavery, and many of the foundations of Southern culture were no longer either in existence or valued. Upper-class whites had to learn new ways of surviving and became dependent upon the North, and poor whites could no longer automatically see themselves as superior to African Americans. Much of the literature by Southern authors such as Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner depicts the complex relationship between race, economics, and shame, and the effect of that relationship upon identity.

Bibliography

Genovese, Eugene D. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. Random House, 1974. An extensive anthropological study of the culture and traditions created by slaves.

Kakutani, Michiko. "Review: ‘Underground Railroad’ Lays Bare Horrors of Slavery and Its Toxic Legacy." Review of The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead. The New York Times, 2 Aug. 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/08/03/books/review-the-underground-railroad-colson-whitehead.html. Accessed 26 Aug. 2019.

Kolchin, Peter. American Slavery, 1619-1877. Hill and Wang, 1993. Thorough history of American slavery.

Plasa, Carl, and Betty J. Ring, editors. The Discourse of Slavery: Aphra Behn to Toni Morrison. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1994. Collection of critical essays on works dealing with slavery by American and British authors.

Senior, Jennifer. "Review: Natashia Deón’s ‘Grace,’ a Tale of Slavery, Its Ghosts and Legacy." Review of Grace, by Natashia Deón. The New York Times, www.nytimes.com/2016/06/20/books/review-natashia-deons-grace-a-tale-of-slavery-its-ghosts-and-legacy.html. Accessed 26 Aug. 2019.