Department of English
Writing the Journey: June 1999
"The Veiled Lady: Nancy Prince and Her Gothic Odyssey"
Sarah Brusky
Department of English, Michigan State University
bruskysa@pilot.msu.edu
The attention paid to Narrative of the Life and Travels of Mrs. Nancy Price is something of a paradox. Recognizing that the narrative offers one of the few opportunities to examine a black woman's writing of the pre-civil war era, scholars have simultaneously paid it only superficial or brief attention. One of the most problematic claims is that Nancy Prince's character is elusive, lurking just beyond the pages of her narrative. But what a gothic analysis of the narrative reveals is a complex yet clear view of this persona. Indeed, from a gothic perspective, Prince's travels prove metaphysical as well as physical as she finds voice in travels spanning almost twenty years. Relating her almost ten years in Russia, the Prince of seventeen years later makes gothic selections, choosing to present only those events with unusually dark and catastrophic consequences. Such descriptions draw our attention to Prince's more subtle comments about being alone and without a purpose. In contrast, her return to the U.S. and subsequent journey to Jamaica reveal an absence of the gothic. Not surprisingly, we find Prince's character in this section markedly different from the first. Prince becomes more authoritative as she becomes involved with anti-slavery circles, boldly voicing opinions where earlier readers only found brief and careful suggestions. But this persona changes too when Prince returns to Jamaica a second time after a one-year trip to the U.S. to raise money. As she becomes disillusioned with the abolitionist movement upon her return to an agitated Jamaica, the gothic returns to the narrative in scenes of horror and destruction similar to those found in the first section. By the end of the narrative, the religious Prince emphasizes not worldly rewards such as immediate and tangible changes in Jamaica, but the comfort she finds in the belief that "the sufferings of this present life are not worthy to be compared with the glory that shall be revealed hereafter." Her focus on her next life and her removal of herself from specific anti-slavery causes illustrate her disillusionment with her ability to make changes in this world. The end of the narrative gives us a Prince who is neither the inexperienced young woman in Russia searching for "usefulness" nor the energetic anti-slavery activist in a changing Jamaica with unbounded hope. Rather, she is somewhere in between: experienced and wiser for her travels but also disappointed with the amount of visible progress she was able to make in Jamaica. Prince's use of the gothic, then, allows us insight into her "elusive spirit," opening her physical travels to a psychological reading.
Department of English,
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48824
bruskysa@pilot.msu.edu
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