Interior Travelogues and “Inside Views”: Gender, Urbanity, and the Genre of the Slave Narrative

Abstract

In US culture, slavery is remembered as an agricultural system bound to expansive territory rather than as an ideological system bound to urban spaces. This fixed notion persists despite the fact that nearly a fifth of all American slaves were captive in cities, where African African women were significantly overrepresented among those who did both physical and emotional labor. The elision of urban slaves is particularly curious because of the centrality of Frederick Douglass, who labored on both a plantation on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and on the docks of Baltimore, to national narratives of slavery. “Interior Travelogues and ‘Inside Views’: Gender, Urbanity, and the Genre of the Slave Narrative” explores the elision of urban slavery as a gendered phenomenon, critiquing the still-present fetish for both great men and great books in studies of the slave narrative. This essay reads The Octoroon—a narrative told to Hiram Mattison by Louisa Picquet, a woman held in sexual slavery in three Southern cities: Columbia, South Carolina; Mobile, Alabama; and New Orleans, Louisiana—as a resistant text that upends conventions of both remembering and failing to remember urban slavery.