Slavery and American Gothic: The Ghost of the Future

Abstract

This chapter begins with a structural analysis of the relation between slavery and American gothic, examined through current approaches in American gothic criticism. It then explores an understudied figure: the uncanny spectre of freedom that haunts representations of slavery, but that also reframes these gothic portrayals as forward-looking agents of change and healing which respond generatively to the otherwise endless repetition of slavery as America’s primal scene. Among the works discussed are Harriet Jacobs’ slave narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) and Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979).