Other(ed) Ghosts: Gothicism and the Bonds of Reason in Melville, Chesnutt, and Morrison

Abstract

Some few years before, a negro woman, who had incurred Legree's displeasure, was confined [in garret] for several weeks. What passed there we do not say; negroes used to whisper darkly to each other; but it was known that body of unfortunate creature was one day taken down from there, and buried; and, after that, it was said that oaths and cursings and sound of violent blows, used to ring through that old garret, and mingled with wailings and groans of despair. (Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin 565) 1 Gothic representations of slavery, like Simon Legree's garret in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, imagine a social evil that has not been laid to rest. While staged haunting of Legree's plantation predates Civil War, gothic images of slavery recur in American literature to present, marking uncanny persistence of traces of slavery long after its abolition. One important reason that slavery continues to haunt American literary imagination is its problematic involvement with one of most authoritative strands of American culture, and Western culture generally: rational discourse that comprises both abstract reason and empirical observation. In decades before and after Civil War, Western rational discourse in United States lent prestige to factual genres like history writing. In its requirements for documentable evidence, same discourse set limits on genres like slave narrative (Olney 150). Gothic fiction may seem far removed from normative genres: gothic images of slavery defy reasoned descriptions of that social institution, and imply that truth of slavery is unspeakable within normative terms. Nonetheless, gothic representations of slavery often grapple with dominant discourse they disrupt. In Herman Melville's Benito Cereno, Charles Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman, and Toni Morrison's Beloved, gothic elements expose complicity between a Western scientific world view and slavery; they reveal distortions in lens through which rational discourse views world, indicating features of life and lives of Others for which Western empiricism fails to account. In recent years critics assessing modern project have called attention to link between rise of Western science and Western domination of other cultures, which is most visible in slave trade. Many find that conjunction is not accidental. Paul Gilroy describes slavery as unacknowledged premise of modern Western project (53-54). David Harvey traces roots of modern European project back to Renaissance and rediscovery of Ptolemaic maps that set viewer in an abstract position outside globe (249). Renaissance maps, Harvey argues, also laid a uniform Euclidian grid over earth, locating all places in a single space and allowing fairly accurate prediction of distances, even between places Europeans had never seen (246). Together, construct of homogeneous space and an emergent concept of linear time, which linked cause and effect, produced a strong Western sense of control (Harvey 246). Harvey argues that Renaissance maps, whose viewer's gaze could command entire earth, helped to shape a conception of nature as something to be dominated: the conquest of space [the earth] requires that it first be conceived as something useable, malleable and capable of domination through human action (254). A Western discourse that associates non-European peoples with nature places only a small step between control of nature and control of other peoples. Much as Western maps abstract viewer from world and lay an abstract grid over diverse places, scientific experiments abstract a small part of nature from multifarious interactions that naturally occur, as experiments lay scientific theory over natural events. Claude Alvares argues that while empiricism may be concerned with measuring facts, it never measures facts as they are actually found in nature or history. …