“The confessions of Nat Turner”: the origins and the place of the enigmatic text in the American literary tradition

The Confessions of Nat Turner (1831), a pamphlet written down by Thomas Gray and published shortly after the trial and execution of Nat Turner, who led a successful slave revolt in Virginia, remains one of the intriguing and enigmatic texts in American literary history. Its syncretic genre combines elements of criminal confessions, spiritual autobiographies, slave narratives, sermons and sensational journalism. In this double-voiced text, created by the narrator Nat Turner and his amanuensis, Thomas Gray poses a serious problem connected with its authorship and authenticity. The strategies of the narrator and the amanuensis are very different; the image of the protagonist is ambivalent: Nat Turner is characterized as a gloomy fanatic - and a self-styled prophet, butcherly murderer - and a slave leader fighting for freedom. The genre syncretism, stylistic originality, and weirdness of The Confessions... made it an important text for the American literary tradition. Nat Turner was the prototype for Dred, the protagonist of H. Beecher Stowe’s novel Dred: a Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856). The legendary slave preacher and a mastermind of the 1831 insurrection attracted attention of Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823-1911), a Unitarian minister, who graduated from Harvard Divinity School, an abolitionist, who pondered over the veracity of Turner’s account. In the 20th century Robert Hayden wrote The Ballad of Nat Turner (1962). The enigmatic Turner-Gray narrative combining two different styles inspired William Styron: in his Pulitzer prize winning novel The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) the protagonist is a “black Hamlet” suffering from the schism, and unable to reconcile a prophet and a military leader, a preacher and a rebellion of his split personality. The white Virginia-native writer’s novel published at the height of the Black Power movement provoked an outrageous reaction of Black militant radicals and launched an impassioned debate that raised questions of accuracy, authenticity of the historical interpretation of the past, while Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin and the well-known historian Eugene Genovese defended Styron and his “meditation on history”. The debates went on in the African American studies of the 1990-2000s (W.L. Andrews, H.L. Gates Jr.). However, the novel has demonstrated the power of the literary work to shape popular perceptions of the historical facts. Styron’s novel had a profound impact on both research and fiction itself: the genre of slave narratives enjoyed a scholarly renaissance in African American studies, while neo-slave narratives- a new genre called to existence by Styron’s book, were becoming increasingly popular at the turn of the 21st century.