Who’s Afraid of Virginia’s Nat Turner?

Abstract

Stowe learned from Douglass about the preemptive violence that could be generated through emotional relays and Chapter 2 shows how her second abolitionist novel Dred recasts The Confessions of Nat Turner through her unique use of the mesmeric crisis. That she does so by turning away from her familiar sentimental focus in Uncle Tom’s Cabin tells us something about the shadow archive that she begins to explore after reading “The Heroic Slave.” With its titular pun, Dred attempts to defuse the white fear of black supremacy that came with the legacy of Haiti and the tradition of Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner. In the process Stowe steps beyond her usual resort to personal feeling, with its familiar dyadic structure, to take up the collective and electric properties of the “crisis state” where sentimental distance is collapsed in uncontained transmissions of terror. The influence of Douglass is manifest in Stowe’s reconsideration of the word “thing” and her understanding of the contaminating power of a threat that always comes from the future.