ABSTRACT
Against the pervasive racism of the nineteenth century that restricted the personal and political freedom of African Americans and a patriarchy within the African American community that sought to restrain women’s voice and mobility, a number of African American women nonetheless dared to test spatial and ideological boundaries. The claim that Doreen Massey makes, that “The limitations of women’s mobility, in terms both of identity and space, has been . . . a crucial means of subordination,” is very much evident in the case of nineteenth-century African American women. Because, as Massey also points out, social relations occur in space, in a “social geometry of power,” confi ning women to the “domestic sphere was both a specifi cally spatial control, and through that, a social control on identity.” Particularly in antebellum America when the ideology of separate spheres and women’s domesticity informed ideas of women’s place and identity, and racism with its accompanying race laws defi ned the African American’s place in society, mobility became a crucial test of freedom. Constructing what Rosi Braidotti calls “nomadic cartographies” provided some African American women ways of testing the boundaries on their freedoms and asserting new powers, discourses, and identities as they enacted their geographic, ideological, and subjective mobility. Called and authorized by God to spread His word, to bring social improvement to those in need, and to expose the wrongs of slavery and racism, women like public lecturer Maria Stewart and the itinerant preacher Jarena Lee defi ed social and spatial constraints to take their messages abroad, enacting in their journeys the issues of freedom and civil rights that informed their discourses. Most often the narratives of these and other nineteenth-century African American women like Julia Foote and Zilpha Elaw have been considered as spiritual narratives that detail the self’s conversion experience and attempt to do God’s will in the world.1 As Stewart announced of her conversion, “From the moment I experienced the change, I felt a strong desire, with the help and assistance of God to devote the remainder of my days to piety and virtue. . . .” While their spiritual conversion was certainly a life-changing event, I am interested in the literary productions of Stewart and Lee as travel narratives
propelled by conversion. William Andrews describes the connection between conversion and journey when he claims, “American spiritual autobiography chronicles the soul’s journey not only from damnation but also to a realization of one’s true place and destiny in the divine scheme of things.” Additionally, the spiritual narratives of these African American women chronicle their actual physical and geographical movement-into male arenas of power, across thresholds and into new territories-as they chart their authors’ intellectual, spiritual, and political movement. Called by a higher power to exercise their voice, they claimed God’s authority for the transgression of spatial and political boundaries their narratives relate and advocate. As Lee said, “I felt an exercise of mind to take a journey to Reading, Pa., to speak to the fallen sons and daughters of Adam.” For Stewart and Lee, then, their religious belief “became a source of self-empowerment, an authorization to act in this world”2 that sent them out into the wider world.
