"Rabid Slavery: Discourse of Rabies as Urban Expansion in Narratives of Slavery"
Sarah Schuetze
University Of Wisconsin - Green Bay
Sarah Schuetze has a PhD in American Literature from the University of Kentucky. She is an assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. Her work on disease in early American writing has appeared in recent issues of Common-Place and can be seen in a forthcoming issue of Early American Literature. She was recently awarded an NEH fellowship from the American Antiquarian Society in support of her book project tentatively entitled Calamity Howl, an exploration of the construction and circulation of the fear of disease in early American writing.
Abstract
Sarah Schuetze, University of Wisconsin-Green Bay “Rabid Slavery: Discourse of Rabies as Urban Expansion in Narratives of Slavery” One of the ways nineteenth-century urbanization affected the natural world was the... [ view full abstract ]
Sarah Schuetze, University of Wisconsin-Green Bay
“Rabid Slavery: Discourse of Rabies as Urban Expansion in Narratives of Slavery”
One of the ways nineteenth-century urbanization affected the natural world was the increase in hydrophobia or rabies. As city spaces extended into wildlife habitats, the zoonotic disease became more apparent and more threatening to city-dwellers. Anxieties about rabies and mad dogs, in particular, can be seen in (nonmedical) writing that was otherwise unrelated to the health scare. An especially salient application of the concerns over rabid dogs and rabid behavior is evident in narratives about slavery wherein both maniacal slaveholders and rebellious enslaved people could both be described using analogies to mad dogs, which drew upon readers’ fears about the disease. This application is perhaps surprising considering the city and the plantation are often presented as spatial contrasts. Since many narratives of slavery were written from the vantage point of northern urban settings, the use of rabies metaphors and the anxieties over the disease to describe slavery in the rural south functions as another artifact of spreading urbanization. Along with some nineteenth-century medical writing on hydrophobia, this essay will focus on Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of the Slave Girl to demonstrate the impact and effectiveness of rabies discourse as an emblem of the city in narratives about slavery.
Authors
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Sarah Schuetze
(University Of Wisconsin - Green Bay)
Topic Area
Individual paper
Session
P94 » Edge Effects (09:00 - Sunday, 25th March, Enchantment E)
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