Gender Roomours I

Works Cited

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space: The Classic Look at How We Experience Intimate Places. 1964. Boston: Beacon P, 1994.

Bhabha, Homi K. "Introduction: Locations of Culture." The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. 1-18.

Camp, Stephanie M.H. "The Pleasures of Resistance: Enslaved Women and Body Politics in the Plantation South, 1830-1861." Journal of Southern History 68.3 (2002): 533-72.

Chandler, Marilyn R. Dwelling in the Text: Houses in American Fiction. Berkeley: U of California P, 1991.

Crafts, Hannah. The Bondwoman's Narrative. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Warner, 2002.

Davidson, Cathy N. and Jessamyn Hatcher, eds. No More Separate Spheres! A Next Wave American Studies Reader. Durham: Duke UP, 2002.

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave; Written by Himself. Boston: Anti-Slavery Office, 1845. Accessed via Documenting the American South. 1999. University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. 1 June 2006. <http://docsouth.unc.edu/douglass/menu.html>.

Downing, Andrew Jackson. 1850. The Architecture of Country Houses. Intro. J. Stewart Johnson. New York: Dover, 1969.

Dudden, Faye E. Serving Women: Household Service in Nineteenth-Century America. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1983.

Elbert, Monika M., ed. Separate Spheres No More: Gender Convergence in American Literature, 1830-1930. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2000.

Frank, Ellen Eve. Literary Architecture: Essays Toward a Tradition. Berkeley: U of California P, 1979.

Gleason, William. "'I Dwell Now in a Neat Little Cottage': Architecture, Race, and Desire in The Bondwoman's Narrative." In Search of Hannah Crafts: Critical Essays on The Bondwoman's Narrative. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Hollis Robbins. Cambridge: Basic Civitas, 2004. 145-74.

Gray, James L. "Culture, Gender, and the Slave Narrative." Proteus 7.1 (1990): 37-42.

Jacobs, Harriet A. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Written by Herself. Ed. Lydia Maria Child. Boston: Published for the Author, 1861. Accessed via Documenting the American South. 2003. University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. 1 June 2006. <http://docsouth.unc.edu/jacobs/menu.html>.

Leveen, Lois. "Dwelling in the House of Oppression: The Spatial, Racial, and Textual Dynamics of Harriet Wilson's Our Nig." African American Review 35.4 (2001): 561-80. Accessed via Literature Online. <http://lionreference.chadwyck.co.uk/>.

Merish, Lori. Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Durham: Duke UP, 2000.

Morgan, Winifred. "Gender-Related Differences in the Slave Narratives of Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass." American Studies 35.2 (1994): 73-94.

Romero, Lora. Home Fronts: Domesticity and Its Critics in Antebellum United States. Durham: Duke UP, 1997.

Sanchez-Eppler, Karen. "Gothic Liberties and Fugitive Novels: The Bondwoman's Narrative and the Fiction of Race." In Search of Hannah Crafts: Critical Essays on The Bondwoman's Narrative. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Hollis Robbins. Cambridge: Basic Civitas, 2004. 254-75.

Shamir, Milette. "Divided Plots: Interior Space and Gender Difference in Domestic Fiction." Genre 29 (1996): 429-72.

Stern, Julia. "Excavating Genre in Our Nig." American Literature 67.3 (1995): 439-66.

Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom's Cabin. 1851-52. New York: Bantam, 1981.

Vlach, John Michael. Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1993.

Welter, Barbara. "The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860." American Quarterly 18.1 (1966): 151-74.

Wilson, Harriet E. Our Nig, or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, in a Two-Story White House, North; Showing that Slavery's Shadow's Fall Even There. 1859. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Vintage, 1983.

Notes

• 1) Cf., for example, the various essays anthologized in Elbert and in Davidson and Hatcher.
• 2) Neither Bhabha nor Freud explicitly address the gender connotations of the private home vis-à-vis public history. The oblique quality of unhomely moments may partly owe to the prisms of gender through which colonial experiences travel on their way from 'public' to 'private.'
• 3) As Vlach points out, plantations make for only a fraction of slavery's workplaces (7). In the popular imagination, however, especially that vented in an abolitionist context, plantation slavery has become established as the quintessential form of bondage (Sanchez-Eppler 260).
• 4) Camp and Vlach sometimes use the terms architecture, landscape and geography interchangeably. When I speak of (literary) architecture, I wish to denote (the literary representation of) built structures along with the uses that map them. While my focus rests on homes, sometimes other 'architectured' spaces need to be considered alongside them, such as gardens or outbuildings. Especially Southern plantations, Vlach reminds us, need to be understood as ensembles of 'Big House,' slave quarters, and workspaces (1-3).
• 5) Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, to which I return throughout my argument, may serve as the most widely known representative of this tradition, and so do the many texts written in response to Stowe's novel.
• 6) Gleason offers an intriguing reading of the human figures featured in Downing's sketches of the design, which, he argues, pinpoint Downing's ambivalence about representing the "ostensibly unseen labors of the southern slave" (157).
• 7) Typically, the 'feminine' quality of Jacobs' narrative is located in the strategies of escape it narrates (hiding inside domestic settings rather than fleeing, geared toward liberating her children rather than just herself) and in the generic conventions it employs (sentimental fiction). Cf. Morgan and Gray.
• 8) Note, for instance, the sacramental mis-en-scène of the meal Rachel Halliday serves in Uncle Tom's Cabin.
• 9) Texts as different as Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Hannah Crafts' The Bondwoman's Narrative feature eavesdropping scenes at key moments in their plots.
• 10) Cf. Leveen; Stern.
• 11) Cf. Dudden's depiction of familial hierarchies in her discussion of the "blur[red] […] line between paid and unpaid housework" (18) in early 19th-century US households.
• 12) Cf. Stern for a discussion of the novel's maternal politics.
• 13) Cf. Dudden for a discussion of the bound-out orphan's "ambiguous position between servant and nonservant" (20).
• 14) The novel's preface and appendices most explicitly identify the protagonist with the author.
• 15) The novel's conflicted authorship adds to other moments of ambivalence in the text. Leveen explores some of its key ambiguities, e.g., in the narrative's slippages between first and third person, or in its choice of 'our nig' as both title, protagonist, and pseudonym for the author.