The black female slave takes literary revenge: Female gothic motifs against slavery in Hannah Crafts’s "The Bondwoman’s Narrative"

The Bondwoman’s Narrative is a novel that functions as a story made up from Hannah Crafts’s experiences as a bondwoman and thus merges fact and fiction giving a thoroughly new account of slavery both committed to reality and fiction. Following and taking over the Gothic literary genre that spread in Europe as a reaction toward the Romantic spirit, Crafts uses it to denounce the degrading slavery system and, mainly, to scathingly attack the patriarchal roots that stigmatize black women as the ultimate victims. It is my contention that Hannah Crafts uses the female Gothic literary devices both to attack slavery and also to stand as a proper (African) American citizen capable of relating to the cultural outlets that American culture offered aiming to counteract the derogatory stereotypes that rendered African American women at the very bottom of the social ladder.