Embodied Social Death: Speaking and Nonspeaking Corpses in Hannah Crafts’s <i>The Bondwoman’s Narrative</i> and Solomon Northup’s <i>Twelve Years a Slave</i>

Hannah Crafts and Solomon Northup share remarkable similarities in their constructions of social death portrayed through characters’ bodies in images that not only represent this social death but do so in ways that illuminate the forced inbetweenness of slave life in antebellum America. This study looks at how the authors represent social death with figures that I term “speaking corpses” and “nonspeaking corpses” and portray embodiments of a unique type of social nonexistence. In Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative, the author constructs these images of speaking corpses in characters that are trapped in states of liminality and an existence that forces them into physically deteriorating figures. However, these corpse-like characters continue to vocalize their trauma even as they approach actual death. Similarly, Northup’s corpse-like depictions of chattel persons in Twelve Years a Slave portray the same type of social death and physical deterioration. In contrast to the characters in Crafts’s fictionalized autobiography, the characters in Northup’s slave narrative cannot or do not vocally articulate their trauma, even while their bodies represent the trauma of social death. Of additional interest is how Crafts and Northup infuse the fictionalized autobiography and slave narrative, respectively, with these decomposing figures and thus call back to and resemble the authors’ initial portrayals of these tormented characters. Moreover, Crafts’s and Northup’s narrator and protagonist turn away from these figures at the end of the texts as they head towards the Northern states and freedom. Thus, the authors demonstrate how their protagonists must reject embodied social death while they progress towards freedom and away from slavery and chattel status.