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Bondage: Slavery, Marriage, and Freedom in Nineteenth-Century America. Author: Tess Chakkalakal University of Illinois Press, 2011 Price: $17.99 ISBN-13: 978-0-25203-6330
Novel Bondage by Tess Chakkalakal offers a new way to study the institution of marriage between both black and white people prior to the 21st century. As Chakkalakal states, there has been little scholarship done on the marital experiences of slaves and the influence slave marriages have had on the nation. To this end, not only will scholars of early African American literature discover ChakkalakaPs engagement with the research, history books, and archival texts of, among others, Stephanie Coontz, Claudia Tate, and Ann duCille fascinating and significant to their own projects, but folklorists will also find the work goes beyond dominant narratives about the customs of slavery and slave marriages to present the stories of the people themselves and how they see marriage functioning within the black community and the larger plantation community. Thus, ChakkalakaPs book provides a new perspective on the central figures within the black family and the ways in which that aspect of family helps create meaning within the community and identity in the individual.
In Novel Bondage, Chakkalakal explores the representation of slave marriages in historical slave narratives. She is most concerned with how "these nonlegal unions challenged what it meant to be husband and wife in nineteenth-century America" ( 1 ). Because marriage between the enslaved was not based on legal grounding, they grounded marriage bonds in their spousal relationship rather than in the dominant society's proscribed meanings. Consequently, the couple viewed the legitimacy of their coupling in how it spoke to freedom and how it aligned with their spirituality. Chakkalakal argues that actual slave marriages and their literary representations shined a spotlight on slavery's power over black people, who were forced to mate according to someone else's will, as well as a spotlight on white women's complaint that marriage was a source of imprisonment for them.
Chakkalakal considers the trope of slave marriages through texts written prior to the Civil War and after. While including the novels written during the slavery era is obviously done because these novels illustrate marriages drawn during the antebellum period discussed, Chakkalakal explains that the novels written after Emancipation offer insight on the impact...