ABSTRACT
The discovery of Hannah Crafts' novel The Bondwoman's Narrative has deepened, but also complicated, understanding of antebellum African-American writing. Slavery, in Crafts' text, involves both a confrontation with physical suffering but also a kind of 'marriage' with death itself. In order to articulate for their readers the horror of slavery, Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown and Harriet Jacobs began displacing the affective rituals and language of mourning onto their representations of African-American bondage. The public act of mourning the dead – in their texts – modulated into generalized scenes that extended their sense of mourning to the living and to the nation as a whole. One final moment solidifies William Wells Brown's representation of the cultural politics of mourning. In vain the author struggled to free himself, by that perversity common to dreams he was unable to move. He could not shriek, but remained spell-bound under the hedious sic benumbing influence of a present embodied death.
