Nat Turner before the bar of judgment: Fictional treatments of the Southampton Slave Insurrection.

Mary Kemp Davis. Nat Turner Before the Bar of Judgment: Fictional Treatments of the Southampton Slave Insurrection. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1999. 272 pp. $30.00.

Mary Kemp Davis's Nat Turner Before the Bar of Judgment is a meticulously researched study of the different subjectivities that novelists, historians, politicians, journalists, and others since the 1830s have (re)invented for the historical figure Nat Turner. The book's focus is a literary analysis of six novels published between 1856 and 1967. To establish a framework for this analysis, Davis devotes the book's first two chapters to an intense examination and cross-examination of a variety of early "nonfictional" texts of the Nat Turner Revolt. Chief among these are (Virginia) Governor John Floyd's "paradigmatic" and "official" assessment of Nat Turner and the revolt (ch. 1) and Thomas Gray's The Confessions of Nat Turner (ch. 2).

A trial as trope is the organizing principle Davis uses in her critical examination of the intertextual relationships between this group of six novels and the nonfictional texts as well as among the novels themselves. Each novel (re)invents Nat Turner within the sociopolitical context of the time the novel was published. Each centers him either in its main plot or its subplot. Each novel then "contrives to exact a 'verdict' from its plot." And most of them impose a sentence on their Nat Turner.

C. P. R. James's romance The Old Dominion; or, The Southampton Massacre (1856) is the first novel in this study to try Nat Turner, who is the focus of its subplot. Using a series of oppositions--female and male, white and black, free and slave--James interfaces plot and subplot and examines the status of (white) women and blacks in America. He (re)invents Nat Turner, tries him on moral grounds, and through "poetic justice" in the novel's plot structure allows Turner to "escape."

Harriet Beecher Stowe (Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, 1856) culls from various subjects and subject matter to create Nat Turner as an "antihero" whom she names Dred. She calls several subjects (persons, texts, incidents) to "witness" against slavery and "the horrors of the legal system" that sustained the peculiar institution. Davis maintains that Stowe excluded fugitive slaves as speaking subjects from her pool of witnesses because she was "fearful of the former slave as speaker." Legal cases and biblical paradigms are Stowe's principal sources for her configuration of the novel's plot structure and the Nat Turner she constructs. Davis is quite astute in her cross-examination of Stowe and the sources Stowe uses. She demonstrates "how Stowe's text is an ingenious amalgam of literary ventriloquism and parodic discourse."

Davis draws upon Rene Girard's concept of the scapegoat to inform her analysis of Mary Spear Tiernan's Homoselle (1881) and Pauline Bouve's Their Shadows Before (1899). Like Stowe, Tiernan uses a composite of different subjects for her Nat Turner, whom she names Gabriel. Responding intertextually to Stowe, to Gray, and especially to James, Tiernan calls numerous witnesses against slavery. She "arraigns antebellum Virginia in the contemporary court of the 1880s [and] finds the state guilty as charged, though deserving of a suspended sentence." Her treatment of the rebellious slaves, especially Turner, is much harsher. She constructs them all as scapegoats and proceeds to "castrate" Gabriel/Turner. Tiernan sacrifices the rebellious slaves, for she holds them "'responsible for the sickness' and 'responsible for the cure.'"

Pauline Bouve's Nat Turner is similar to and yet different from the other authors' Nat Turners. Bouve endows her Nat Turner with special powers, a narrative "strategy" that "legitimizes Turner somewhat." Through the novel's plot structure she "offers a devastating critique of [antebellum] social structure," and she "acquits [her] Nat Turner of [being] a cold-blooded murderer of innocents."

In Part III of her book Davis concentrates on two twentieth-century novels that (re)invent and center Nat Turner as subject, Daniel Panger's Ol' Prophet Nat and William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner, both published in 1967. Both novels shift "the reader's attention from the problem of slavery to Turner's psychology," and both authors shift their "attraction to the presumed psychosexual dimensions of the Nat Turner Revolt." Employing tenets of psychoanalytic theory in her examination of these two texts, Davis convincingly shows that both authors are driven to know (biblically and otherwise) the Nat Turners they (re)invent.

In Davis's study all novelistic and critical/theoretical/historical roads lead to Styron's Confessions. To be sure, Styron's novel contains a "philosophical and psychological depth" unmatched in the other Nat Turner novels. Davis extracts Styron's "confessions" about his obsession with the historical Nat Turner from two of Styron's essays. He confesses "that in his youth he was fascinated by 'blackness' and sexually anxious about his attraction." This psychosexual anxiety comes to bear heavily on the subject he (re)invents and centers in a novel that both Styron and Davis call "mythologized historiography."

Davis informs her readings of these six white authors, their texts, and their Nat Turners by astutely applying a variety of tenets from critical theorists, historians, analytic psychologists, and literary critics. The result is a very detailed, well-researched, and fascinating study of how the historical Nat Turner has captured the literary imagination of white writers for well over a century. In her conclusion Davis shows how African American novelist Sherley Anne Williams (Dessa Rose, 1986) redirects the discursive road away from Styron's Confessions.