Sparing the Rod: Discipline and Fiction in Antebellum America

Abstract

CORPORAL PUNISHMENT HAS BEEN one of the most perennially vexed of questions in American cultural history. Discipline performed on the body became an issue in America as early as the importation of Lockean educational thought in the eighteenth century. Since then, attitudes toward the practice have remained both passionate and sharply divergent, and the issue of the corporal continues to be reignited through the frictions of local cultural conflict. (The Supreme Court was adjudicating one such conflict when it ruled in 1977 that corporal correction as practiced in Florida schools is not an unconstitutional form of cruel and unusual punishment.)' But if the issue of the corporal is by no means confined to one period, it is still fair to say that it has its historical center of gravity in America in the antebellum decades. In the 1830s, then even more prominently in the 1840s and early 1850s, the picturing of scenes of physical correction emerges as a major form of imaginative activity in America, and arguing the merits of such discipline becomes a major item on the American public agenda. Noting this fact, we might ask: What is at issue in corporal punishment when it is most intensely at issue in American cultural history? What is being thought when the lash becomes a figure of thought in the antebellum years? The antislavery movement is one obvious headquarters for the antebellum imagination of the lash. Frederick Douglass's searing accounts of whippings witnessed and endured in his Narrative (1845); the other slave narratives of the 1840s and 1850s that, like Douglass's, make whipping notjust a memorably experienced scene but specifically the scene of initiation into slavery itself; Theodore Dwight Weld's compendium of documentary horror stories American Slavery As It Is (1839), in which whipping scenes are multiplied with truly Boschian iteration: such examples remind us how compulsively the scene of corporal correction is repeated in American antislavery writing, and how central it is made to the image of slavery that writing constructs.2 We could analyze the particular contours that these picturings give to their subject-could note how they foreground the embodiedness of whipping, the bodily enacted and bodily received nature of its