Novel Bondage unravels the interconnections between marriage, slavery, and freedom through renewed readings of canonical nineteenth-century novels and short stories by black and white authors. Situating close readings of fiction alongside archival material concerning the actual marriages of authors such as Lydia Maria Child, Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Wells Brown, and Frank J. Webb, Chakkalakal examines how these early novels established literary conventions for describing the domestic lives of American slaves in describing their aspirations for personal and civic freedom. Exploring this theme in post-Civil War works by Frances E.W. Harper and Charles Chesnutt, she further reveals how the slave-marriage plot served as a fictional model for reforming marriage laws. Chakkalakal invites readers to rethink the "marital work" of nineteenth-century fiction and the historical role it played in shaping our understanding of the literary and political meaning of marriage, then and now. | Cover Title page Copyright page Contents Introduction: The Slave-Marriage Plot 1. Between Fiction and Experience: William Wells Brown's Clotel 2. Dred and the Freedom of Marriage: Harriet Beecher Stowe's Fiction of Law 3. Free, Black, and Married: Frank J. Webb's The Garies and Their Friends 4. "A Legally Unmarried Race": Frances Harper's Marital Mission 5. Wedded to Race: Charles Chesnutt's Stories of the Color Line Conclusion: Reading Hannah Crafts in the Twenty-First Century Notes Selected Bibliography Index | Selected as one of two winners of the Robert K. Martin Prize for Best Book, sponsored by the Canadian Association for American Studies (CAAS), 2012. — the Canadian Association for American Studies (CAAS)
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Tess Chakkalakal is an assistant professor of Africana studies and English at Bowdoin College.