The Gothic Other

This thesis examines three novels all communicating ideas about race, gender, and slavery under the conventions of Gothic literature. Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables (1851) show how patriarchy oppressed and haunted women while keeping slavery at the margins. Beloved (1987), by Toni Morrison, fictionalizes the account of a female slave who murdered her child to assert her power and reject slavery. However, Morrison rewrites and defies aspects of the Gothic mode by bringing the ghost of the murdered child back to life, and later showing steps the community can take to heal from their collective trauma. The third novel, The Bondwoman's Narrative, is assumed to have been written by Hannah Crafts around the mid-late 1850s, but not published until the 21st century. Similar to Morrison, Crafts vocalizes the terrors felt as a result of systemic oppression through her Gothic storytelling techniques but focuses on ways slavery impacted both blacks and whites. Studying these three novels together shows how these two African American female authors subverted traditional approaches to the Gothic in a way Hawthorne did not. These specific female novelists recognize how the Gothic mode can be used to provide accurate accounts of history alongside race gender, and slavery; however, they were conscious and deliberate in their choices to re-appropriate and rearrange certain aspects of the Gothic mode in a more subversive way.

DEUSES NA ENCRUZILHADA: hibridismo religioso em Um defeito de cor, de Ana Maria Gonçalves e The bondwoman’s narrative, de Hannah Crafts

<em>Um defeito de cor</em> (2006) e <em>The bondwoman’s narrative</em> (2002) são o <em>corpus</em> desse estudo. Ambas foram ambientadas no contexto da escravidão, o primeiro no Brasil e, o último, nos Estados Unidos. Apresentam como protagonistas Kehinde/Luísa e Hannah experienciando entre-lugares, mencionando a ancestralidade nas vivências de suas tradições. O hibridismo manifesta-se pelos contatos entre senhores e escravizados, em que uma das consequências foi a ressignificação da religiosidade das identidades escravizadas. Para isso, definiu-se como objetivo desenvolver reflexões sobre o modo como as protagonistas ressignificaram suas identidades religiosas, diante dos vários contatos culturais ocorridos durante o período da escravidão. Kabengele Munanga (2015), Reginaldo Prandi (2001, 2015), W. E. B. Du Bois (1999) e Stefania Capone (2011) foram os referenciais teóricos desse estudo que foi feito por meio de levantamento bibliográfico. Espera-se que este estudo contribua para a compreensão das ressignificações das identidades religiosas do sujeito escravizado.

Entre Romanticismo, Antiesclavismo y Espiritualidad: Los ecos feministas transculturales de Sab de Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda en The Bondwoman’s Narrative de Hannah Crafts

El siguiente artículo se centra en las novelas Sab (1841) de la escritora cubana Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda y en la recientemente descubierta novela The Bondwoman’s Narrative (1857) de la esclava afroamericana Hannah Crafts pues ambas son excelsas en el manejo de una serie de recursos románticos y góticos que encuadran las historias en un contexto decimonónico específicamente femenino. El poder de la pasión, el desbordante y sugestivo marco natural que abriga o arrumba el destino de los personajes y la exaltación de los sentimientos como paradigma epistemológico son los rasgos que las autoras desarrollan siguiendo los cánones establecidos de la época. A través de una intertextualidad transcultural indirecta que moldea los tropos del romanticismo, el uso de la esclavitud y la creación de una espiritualidad redentora, las novelas de Gómez de Avellaneda y de Hannah Crafts se entrelazan entre sí y contribuyen no sólo a perpetuar un género literario que enciende la mecha de la reivindicación femenina sino que, además, demuestran que las mujeres utilizaron también la literatura para participar en los debates nacionales empleando sus propias armas culturales y, por tanto, plantando la semilla de una literatura genuina que florecerá a lo largo del siglo XIX con más precisión y fuerza.

Conclusion

This concluding chapter turns to a new, yet old, slave fiction: Hannah Crafts' The Bondwoman's Narrative(2002). According to its editor, the novel was written by a female fugitive slave in the 1850s, though it was never published during the author's lifetime. The book's gripping, visceral depictions of slave life and an escape to the North are familiar to readers of the slave narratives. From here, the chapter returns to the tension between history and fiction that was raised in the introduction. By doing so, the chapter considers Crafts' novel not as historical fact but as a slave fiction, a form that presents experience through the eyes of a slave. This perspective, fictional though it may be, offers readers today insights into the past that was not, for various reasons, contained by historical accounts of slavery.

The black female slave takes literary revenge: Female gothic motifs against slavery in Hannah Crafts’s "The Bondwoman’s Narrative"

The Bondwoman’s Narrative is a novel that functions as a story made up from Hannah Crafts’s experiences as a bondwoman and thus merges fact and fiction giving a thoroughly new account of slavery both committed to reality and fiction. Following and taking over the Gothic literary genre that spread in Europe as a reaction toward the Romantic spirit, Crafts uses it to denounce the degrading slavery system and, mainly, to scathingly attack the patriarchal roots that stigmatize black women as the ultimate victims. It is my contention that Hannah Crafts uses the female Gothic literary devices both to attack slavery and also to stand as a proper (African) American citizen capable of relating to the cultural outlets that American culture offered aiming to counteract the derogatory stereotypes that rendered African American women at the very bottom of the social ladder.