This paper surveys recent studies in antebellum African American novels and theories on 19th century domesticity. Early canonization of 19th century American literature focused on novels written by white male writers. Particularly, in the 1950s, while establishing an American exceptionalist view of American culture, critics tried to invoke certain myths to define the American experience. White feminist critics of the late 1970s and 1980s have opposed to this male-dominant narrative that had been detached from specific socio-economic conditions of the literary sphere and reinstated the neglected works by white female writers into the literary canon. In this process, critical issues such as the problem of sympathetic identification in sentimental culture and the definition of woman and womanhood have come under scrutiny. In the recent scholarship, the notion of womanhood and domesticity have been reexamined, especially by black critical theory. In work done by Hortense Spillers, Hazel Carby, Ann duCille, Claudia Tate, and Robert Reid-Pharr, domesticity has been redefined by a process in which subjects are constructed by both race and gender. Domesticity, in the historical context of chattel slavery, was used to protect white genealogy and property rights while subjugating slaves marked by their raced corporeality. In this regard, literary representations of motherhood, womanhood, marriage, and family have had different political implications in African American novels. In particular, the African American novels written by William Wells Brown, Frank J. Webb, Martin Delany, and Harriet Wilson in the 1850s grapple with the literary representation of domesticity in relation to the question of slavery, black subjectivity, and the possibility of black citizenship.