Law and the Gothic In the Slaveholding South
Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
7-27-2016
Department
History
School
Humanities
Abstract
Surveying a variety of legal treatises, laws, judicial decisions, and anti-slavery narratives, Weinauer shows how the law emerges in such texts as a gothic villain, exerting a seemingly absolute and inescapable control over the lives of the enslaved. But even as these texts record the law’s suffocating power, they also simultaneously recognize that the effort to exorcise slave agency is doomed to be a futile one, for the slave’s humanity can only be repressed—it cannot be denied. In this way, the slave at law haunts the slave-holding south, bearing witness not only to the law’s abusive force but also to its inability to achieve its primary aim: the elimination of slave personhood.
Publication Title
The Palgrave Handbook of the Southern Gothic
First Page
271
Last Page
283
Recommended Citation
Weinauer, E. M.
(2016). Law and the Gothic In the Slaveholding South. The Palgrave Handbook of the Southern Gothic, 271-283.
Available at: https://aquila.usm.edu/fac_pubs/19580
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