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Breathing Free: Environmental Violence and the Plantation Ecology in Hannah Crafts's The Bondwoman's Narrative

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2020

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Abstract

This essay presents an ecocritical analysis of Hannah Crafts's The Bondwoman's Narrative, the 1850s manuscript novel by a formerly-enslaved African American woman that was recovered by Henry Louis Gates in 2001. Examining Crafts's extensive engagement with Charles Dickens's Bleak House, it argues that Crafts's fictionalized narrative of enslavement and self-emancipation re-imagines a Victorian politics of environmental health as a critique of environmental racism. Showing how Crafts presents the material ecology of the plantation South as a site and vector of violence, it reads The Bondwoman's Narrative as resisting nineteenth-century scientific discourses of racialized immunity that sought to legitimize the systemic neglect of enslaved people in the antebellum United States.

Type
Disturbance
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 48 , Special Issue 1: Open Ecologies , Spring 2020 , pp. 91 - 126
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2020

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