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Circles of Freedom and Maturation in Hannah Crafts’ The Bondwoman’s Narrative

University of Buea, maijua{at}yahoo.co.uk

Posthumously published in 2002 and providentially so according to Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s account, Hannah Crafts’ The Bondwoman’s Narrative, written circa 1855, seems to possess more than one life. It simply refused to die in obscurity or, as Marcia Ann Gillespie has opined, to be "shrouded in silence." Does the narrative simply converge with other slave narratives of the 19th century as it depicts Hannah’s flight from slavery to freedom, or can Crafts’ novel be situated at the very beginnings of Black feminism? Further interrogation of the narrative discloses that Crafts weaves themes of growth and embraces symbols such as houses, sleep, and journeys in the typical 19th-century manner of mainstream writers like Samuel Richardson, Daniel Defoe, and Charles Dickens in England and Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman in America to situate her work within the American literary renaissance.

Key Words: Hannah Crafts • African American women’s 19th-century fiction • autobiography • freedom and maturation • slave narrative

This version was published on November 1, 2009

Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 40, No. 2, 310-326 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/0021934708314275


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