The Strange Career of Love and Slavery: Chesnutt, Engels, Masoch

Abstract

At a moment when scholars avoid the paradigm of US exceptionalism that would seek a core national meaning possessed by the US alone, one observer—speaking seriously and waggishly in equal measure—suggests that the question of what distinguishes US culture may be answerable after all: Americanness, Werner Sollors argues, is the “prohibiting [of] black-white heterosexual couples from forming families and withholding legitimacy from their descendants” (5). The protracted ban on black-white unions, Sollors contends, may well be the US’s most pronounced national difference from other Western societies.1 By itself the distinction tells us little, but the exceptional instance can be a critical spur: what collective need or demand sustained two centuries of legal restriction on such marriages, against the historical pressures effective in virtually every comparable nation? Questions of freedom and slavery are obviously germane to the reason for the US ban. Yet the language of freedom as it operated in a good deal of nineteenth-century writing may not offer much illumination. Among early liberal thinkers, the antonyms of freedom and slavery were such strong, almost hermetic conceptual categories that they could remain impervious to the historical facts of chattel slavery.2 Alongside the freedom-slavery opposition, however, we can place a second but not quite parallel conceptual axis: not freedom and slavery, but love and slavery. This pairing, too, provides one of the structural oppositions for liberal thought; to feel the highest love is to abhor the smallest inclination toward the forced subjugation of another. Any person who heeds Harriet Beecher Stowe’s imperative to “feel right,” it is assumed, will necessarily feel slavery is wrong. In much of the written record in this era, however, ideas of love and slavery fail to remain securely in place as opposing poles. To explore the mutual articulation of love and slavery is to open a history of intimacy, antipathy, and belonging that exists in syncopated counterpoint to the abstracted political thought of citizenship and liberal contract theory.