Introduction | Literatures of Slavery | Literatures of Pastoral | Counter-Pastoral Literatures | Recommended Resources

The American institution of chattel slavery began with the first importation of captured Africans in the 1620s and did not end until the Confederacy's surrender in 1865. By the second decade of the nineteenth century, slavery's legal practice was confined mostly within the plantation South. The system of national and state laws that were developed to organize and control this racially defined, captive labor force was augmented by systems of social codes that regulated how white slave owners, African American slaves, and non-slaveowning whites behaved across race, class, and gender lines. Northerners developed their own understanding of these interactions, and the literature that was written on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line began to be shaped as responses across ideological as well as sectional borders.

White novelists of the southern states began in the 1820s to develop the plantation setting as an idealized literary world populated by characters who developed into types, each expected to convey a set of personal qualities—virtues or vices—as well as to act according to fixed mannerisms of dress, gesture, and language. Gender codes also developed for plantation writing as both northern and southern women entered, and finally took over, the marketplace for popular social fiction. Often the plantation literature by men was considered to belong to the genre of the historical romance that used Sir Walter Scott's works as a model, while women's writing came to be viewed under the heading of "sentimental" or "domestic" fiction. In the plantation fiction by writers of either gender, slavery itself was seldom foregrounded in any obvious way. However, if we examine the class constructions on which such fiction’s plots are based, we see that the planter aristocracy was the center of social organization for both the "male" historical romance and the "female" domestic novel. At least implicitly, and often directly, these works of both genders were promoting model slave societies founded upon the plantation ideal of patriarchy. The white belles and matriarchs enshrined in domestic plantation Arcadies and the cavaliers whose horses are curried and armaments carried by "sable body servants" are iconic endorsements of a social system and emerging nationalism operating on the backs of usually silent, often invisible black "dependents."

While white writers in the South were looking to the plantation to provide the most fertile ground for fictions representing their socioeconomic ideals, ex-slave, African American writers during the same period used the plantation scheme very differently in developing what might be seen as America's first indigenous literature: the North American slave narrative. An ironic factor in the production of these narratives can be noted in the generic title "Fugitive Slave Narrative" now often given to these works. Southern-born narrators, telling firsthand of their experience of slavery, could become authors only by escaping both the South and the condition. In their narratives they had to return to the world that enslaved them, and were called upon to provide accurate reproductions of both the places and the experiences contained within the past they had fled. This genre was tightly bound within conventions designed to accomplish anti-slavery goals (as indeed, plantation fiction was bound to legitimize the world the slaveholders had made). The "formula" of the slave narrative was something that the ex-slave writer understood only too well. Today we can acknowledge some features of the genre that represent the ex-slave writers' chafing against the genre rules as well as their attending to them.

Slavery generated northern writing as much as southern, and the North's most eloquent literary writer on the subject, Harriet Beecher Stowe, stimulated the production of plantation fiction in the South, especially in the form of a specialized sub-genre designed specifically to answer her attack on slavery in Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). Stowe drew upon specific details and situations that she took directly from several slave narratives, but she also found her own form, combining epic, realism, sentiment, and jeremiad to reach the largest reading audience that a novel had ever produced in America. In response, "Anti-Tom" novels by the dozens modeled their plots and characters on Stowe's creations, reproducing a format that remained effective even after the Civil War decided the questions she had raised.

Uncle Tom's Cabin provided for writers a hundred years later some key features, in detail and scope, that African American writers in particular drew upon to relate slavery to the message of the Civil Rights Era in the 1960s and 1970s. The epic historical novel, exemplified by Alex Haley's Roots, traced the freedom struggle back to its historical beginnings in the middle passage and the cotton and rice plantations of the Old South. Like Stowe's novel, these works offer emotional dramatizations of slave life within a sweeping episodic structure designed to convey both a sense of past history and present urgency.

The slave narrative genre, like Stowe's novel, has continued for over a century to generate fiction that draws upon its distinctive formal features. Beginning in the 1970s, writers as disparate as Ishmael Reed and William Styron, Octavia Butler and Charles Johnson have brought the first-person slave narrator's voice into dialogue with modern practices of racial discrimination through the genre of "neo-slave narrative."

The categories enumerated below reflect the great variety of literature produced out of the fugitive-slave and slaveowning South, beginning within the period of 1820 to 1865 and extending down to the present. In each genre we see how persistently the South's identity, within and beyond its literature, was formed by and remains tied to its "peculiar institution" and its moment of attempted nationalism.

The North American Slave Narrative began as a rhetorical form commandeered by the abolitionist movements in both Great Britain and America. Over a hundred of these stories of escape/pursuit/finding freedom, published between 1760 and 1865, have been identified. The rhetorical situation was well-defined: freed slaves or those who had escaped their owners were asked to tell of their experiences within bondage, emphasizing trials and tribulations, the cruelty of masters, the depths of their suffering, and the strength of their desire to be free. Slave narratives were potent weapons in the abolition arsenal, especially with the rise of organized abolition societies in the 1830s. No other rhetorical design had as much power as these eyewitness accounts to move opinion against the institution of slavery. The slave had endured what others could only imagine, and in his/her search for freedom struck a deep chord of sympathy in readers who saw themselves as guardians of the ideal of liberty for "all men."

Accuracy in the slave narrative was paramount. The few fictionalized accounts, when discovered, provoked accusations from the South's defenders that all of these publications were suspect. Thus the factual accounts almost always included extensive prefatory endorsements from well-regarded white sponsors. The slave narrator him or herself was encouraged to leave inner revelations, such as expressions of self-discovery and individuality, in the background and to foreground the verifiable facts of representative slave experience, without adornment.

Today we recognize in slave narratives both their didactic function as evidence in the abolitionists' cause and their artistic and expressive functions for the slave author whose identity as writer was especially ambiguous. The slaves' claims to humanity, to authority, to self-determination were enacted in taking up pen and paper, yet the tale to be told was pressed into a conventional format, and the generic plot returned them to the status of chattel. "You have seen how a man was made a slave," claimed Frederick Douglass in the 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave that has become the paradigmatic work for the genre. "You shall see how a slave was made a man." In the best of the narratives, such as Douglass's, the writer finds ways, through imagery, style, and voicing, to affirm selfhood and creativity within the prescriptions but often against the expectations of readers of the time.

Most of these narratives were produced during the first great era of American literature (1830-1860), side by side with such classics of American self-fashioning as Thoreau's Walden, Whitman's Leaves of Grass, and Melville's Moby-Dick. Once Stowe had published Uncle Tom's Cabin, Douglass (in his 1855 My Bondage and My Freedom) and Harriet Jacobs (in her 1861 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl) adopted novelistic techniques such as extensive dialogue between "characters" and thematic chapter headings. One especially intriguing example of the novelization of the slave narrative has been uncovered by Henry Louis Gates. In 2002 he re-published a novel by a slave woman probably named Hannah Crafts, entitled "The Bondwoman's Narrative," first published, again probably, in New Jersey sometime between 1853 and 1861. The narrative is named fiction and uses many fictional elements (including "borrowings" from Charles Dickens). Gates has pieced together fascinating speculations concerning the African American woman who wrote the fictional account of a slave woman's life and her final attainment of freedom. The definitive study of this genre is William L. Andrews's To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865. He chose for inclusion in his study "all the forms of first-person retrospective prose narrative that came from the mouths or pens of American blacks between 1760 and 1865."

The Historical Romance and the Domestic Novel. Plantation fiction as a rubric for southern literature has often included, even emphasized, literature written by local color writers after the Civil War. Yet we will be considering that grouping in a different light because its use of the "trappings" of the plantation served purposes related to the Reconstruction South's racial agenda, and not the institutionalization of slavery itself. The plantation fiction described below belongs to the antebellum period and was ideologically motivated to render a vision of southern society as a slavocracy in all its relations. Considerations of southern men and women’s fiction of this period have traditionally run on very different tracks. The novels of the early nineteenth century were often labeled "romances" by the men who wrote them (George Tucker, John Pendleton Kennedy, William A. Caruthers, and William Gilmore Simms). These works usually dealt with very specific historical moments (Bacon's Rebellion, the Revolutionary War) and stressed what has become known as "the cavalier myth" which touted the heroics of aristocratic types. The plantation was most often a backdrop, but a crucial one—a credential indicating the nobility of class that paralleled the nobility of spirit that the heroic male character must exemplify.

In both the mid-nineteenth century North and South, women writers were not long in entering the book-writing business. Their works almost always bear the labels "domestic" or "sentimental," and those labels have usually been pejorative. The labeling of women’s fiction as "domestic" reflects the idea that women belonged in the home, that politics and public life were inappropriate for women, and that their natural "sphere" was to inculcate, in their children, the morals needed for gendered roles in society. True to form, white women’s writing in the plantation South created stories of women that centered on "the marriage plot," turning belles into mistresses of the house who know and do their duty. Still it is important to see, in southern white women's antebellum fiction, the political value of the plantation as a social organization involving the ideal of slavery as a "domestic institution." Caroline Hentz, E.D.E.N. Southworth, Caroline Gilman, and Augusta Jane Evans Wilson were interested in white upper-class women's experience within this ideal of planter society, just as the male romancers were interested in upper-class masculinity within the same paradigm. The fictional worlds of both white southern men and women writers privileged the lives of slaveholders, even if plantation settings and slaves are seldom center-stage. Caroline Gilman's Recollections of a Southern Matron (1837) and John P. Kennedy's Swallow Barn (1832) are the most explicit of this genre in exploring directly the workings of the plantation as a theme. In these novels the plantation is the ideal home, where slaves and slaveholders are part of one patriarchally ordered family that combines economic and social responsibilities. African American writers Frederick Douglass, in The Heroic Slave (1853), William Wells Brown in Clotel or The President's Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States (1853), and Frances Watkins in fictional narratives such as "The Slave Mother: A Tale of the Ohio" (1856) rebuke the genre and gender positions of plantation literature in dramatic ways, appropriating virtues associated with the cavalier hero and the plantation belle for African American characters who actively work against or who are victims of the slave system.

The Anti-Tom Novel. Before the last installment of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin appeared in The National Era in 1851, and before the ink was dry on the book version that came out in March of 1852, southerners were sharpening their pens into knives. The South found no shortage of writers of both genders eager to refute Stowe's villainization of slave owners and her romantization of slaves. Dozens of works of fiction and epic narrative poems were published in counter-attack before the end of the Civil War. For many years after the war had settled the book's major question, white southerners continued to try to undo the damage to their social image that her novel had inflicted. John P. Kennedy and William Gilmore Simms, the South's two most well known romancers, might be said to have anticipated Stowe more than directly confronted her. Kennedy brought out a second edition of his popular plantation work, Swallow Barn, in 1852, adding a chapter in which the kindly master details his plan to make slavery, a necessary evil even to him, more equitable for the slave. William Gilmore Simms's Woodcraft was published (originally as The Sword and the Distaff) only a few months after Uncle Tom's Cabin's debut in book form, but it contains some discussions that are clear refutations of Stowe's views. Set at the end of the Revolutionary War, Woodcraft embellishes the career of a colorful character, army officer Captain Porgy, to develop a plot hinging in part on the master's close relationship to his manservant (notably named Tom).

In 1854 appeared two of the most significant novels to directly take on Stowe's arguments: Thomas B. Thorpe's The Master's House and Caroline Hentz's The Planter's Northern Bride. Two of the most popular and sentimental as well as unrealistic Anti-Tom novels were Mary Eastman's Aunt Phillis's Cabin (1852) and Maria McIntosh's The Lofty and the Lowly (1853), which contained the telling sub-title, "Good in All and None All Good." Slaves in the Anti-Tom works are generally the happy, singing, childlike stereotypes that Stowe herself helped to cement, yet sometimes, as in The Planter's Northern Bride, there are portraits of evil, rebellious servants who plot insurrection and murder. The vision that these novels promote is of a South in which slaves and masters enjoy a mutually supportive, familial bond that is only severed by the ignorant or greedy machinations of abolitionists. The North's capitalistic labor structure is indicted, while the master is cast as the enlightened descendant of the southern heroes of the Revolution, and the guarantor of the rights of (land and slave owning) man. None of the refutations had anywhere near the persuasive impact of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Yet the huge popularity of an early twentieth century southern novelist, Thomas Dixon, who followed Stowe's footsteps as a master propagandist, reflects an ironic, even tragic, shift in public will. Thomas Dixon made use of many of Stowe's effective fictional and rhetorical strategies in his white supremacist novels, works such as The Clansman (1905) and The Leopard's Spots (1902) that found wide audiences, especially when D.W. Griffith transformed them into the landmark film Birth of a Nation in 1915.

Of the many literary works that grew out of the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 70s, one interesting group is the epic novels that return to slavery for plots and characters in order to give the struggle for African American political freedom and socioeconomic justice an extensive historical dimension. African American writers Margaret Walker in Jubilee (1965), Ernest Gaines in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), and Alex Haley in Roots (1976) published sweeping historical novels that covered the freedom struggle across generations beginning with a realistic portrayal of their heroes' early lives in slavery. A forerunner to these is Arna Bontemps's 1936 novel, Black Thunder, which drew upon Gabriel Prosser's abortive slave rebellion near Richmond in 1800. Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (1977) and Beloved (1987), as well as Gloria Naylor's Mama Day (1988) and Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1992), continue the Civil Rights Era interrogation of the American promises of freedom and equality when they implicitly reference contemporary situations of struggle within plots of slave experience. William Styron argued that his novel The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) grew out of his own personal wrestling with civil rights issues. As a narrative cast within the first-person voice of the slave Nat Turner, Styron drew, as did the writers considered below, upon the slave narrative form, although his novel shows much less awareness of the original slave narratives than do other neo-slave narrative fiction writers.

Neo-Slave Narratives are first-person fictional novels that adopt the form of the pre-Civil War, first-person retrospective slave narratives. Like the civil rights epics, they have grown primarily as a response of African American writers to the 1960s political struggles for equal opportunity. Some of these novels are set completely within the historical period of slavery, while others use features of science fiction time travel (Octavia Butler's Kindred, 1979) or magic realism techniques allowing fantastic, often anachronistic plot elements (Charles Johnson's Oxherding Tale, 1982; Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada, 1976). The neo-slave narratives are usually very self-conscious in their imaginative borrowings of the actual slave autobiographies, which constitute a kind of parent form for all African American literature. Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada, for instance, directly references the narrative of Josiah Henson, one of the sources that Stowe appropriated for Uncle Tom's Cabin. William Styron's Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) draws from the wording of the slave revolt leader's Confession, taken from and published by his lawyer after the 1831 revolt. Styron's work, a white writer's appropriation and fictionalizing of a major African American figure's life, was very controversial. African American writers and critics objected strongly to Styron's lack of research into the actualities of slave life and more particularly to his distortions of the known facts of Turner's life. The Confessions of Nat Turner heightened the awareness both within and beyond the African American community of the need for well-grounded efforts to recover and interpret the slave's experience in history and literature. Sherley Anne Williams's novel Dessa Rose (1986), in response to what she called Styron's "travesty," took up this challenge with a plot that follows the life of a woman slave who, after an unsuccessful slave rebellion, is able to escape and take charge of her life. The neo-slave narrative celebrates the forceful witness of the fugitive slaves, particularly their will to freedom and their courage in escaping and confronting oppressive, racist institutions, and applies their perspectives to contemporary African American life.

Introduction | Literatures of Slavery | Literatures of Pastoral | Counter-Pastoral Literatures | Recommended Resources

Originally Published: 16 February 2004| Last Revised: 01 Aug 2005| Revision History

© 2005 Lucinda MacKethan and Southern Spaces