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Other Books
on Nathaniel Turner
(1800-1831)
Nat
Turner A
Slave Rebellion in History and Memory by Kenneth
Greenberg
Nat
Turner Before the Bar of Judgment by Mary Kemp Davis
Nat
Turner's Tragic Search by
Catherine Hermary-Vielle
The Rebellious Slave
Nat Turner in American Memory by Scot French
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Nat
Turner Before the Bar of Judgment
Fictional Treatments of the
Southampton Insurrection
By Mary Kemp Davis
An icon in African American history, Nat Turner
has generated almost every kind of cultural product, including
the historical, imaginative, scholarly, folk, polemical, and
reflective. In
Nat
Turner Before the Bar of Judgment.
Mary Kemp Davis offers an original, in-depth analysis of
six novels in which Turner figures prominently.
This Virginia rebel, she argues, has been re-arraigned,
retried, and re-sentenced repeatedly during the last century and
a half as writers have grappled with the social and moral issues
raised by his infamous 1831 revolt.
Though usually lacking a literal, the novels Davis examines
all have the theme of judgment at their center, and she
ingeniously unravels the "verdict" each author
extracts from or her plot.
Davis begins by dismantling the historical scaffolding that
surrounds her subject. She decodes Virginia governor John
Floyd's "official' assessment of the revolt, which, she
says, exemplifies the dialogism between the earlier texts about
the rebellion and the incipient novel tradition.
She also considers three classes of documents that
triangulate the trial trope: court records, selected newspaper
accounts, and Thomas Gray's seminal work, The Confessions of
Nat Turner (1831).
The remainder of her study treats in expansive detail the six
novels:
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The Old Dominion, or
The Southampton Massacre (1856), by the English
historical novelist George Payne Rainsford James;
Dred: A Tale of the
Great Dismal Swamp (1856), by Harriet Beecher Stowe;
Homoselle (1881),
by Mary Spear Tieman;
Their Shadows Before: A
Story of the Southampton Insurrection (1899), by
Pauline Carrington Rust Bouve;
Ol' Prophet Nat (1967),
by Daniel Panger; and best known,
The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), by
William Styron. |
Discussion of Dessa Rose (1986), Sherley Anne William's
response to Styron's novel, shapes the conclusion.
According to Davis, all of the novelists derive their
fundamental understanding about Turner from Gray's
overdetermined text, but they recreate it in their own image
In this fictional tradition that begins with a
nineteenth-century romance and ends with postmodern revisions of
the form, Davis shows the turner persona to be multivalent and
inherently unstable, each novelist laboring mightily and
futilely to arrest it within the confines of art.
--Fred Hobson, Editor, Southern Literary Studies
Source:
Nat
Turner Before the Bar of Judgment |
