HARRIET JACOBS: TITLE COMMENTARY

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

JOANNE M. BRAXTON (ESSAY DATE SUMMER 1986)

SOURCE: Braxton, Joanne M. "Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: The Re-Definition of the Slave Narrative Genre." The Massachusetts Review 27, no. 2 (summer 1986): 379-87.

In the following essay, Braxton explores the impact of Jacobs's slave narrative on the male-dominated genre.

"Rise up, ye women that are at ease! Hear my voice, ye careless daughters! Give ear unto my speech."

Isaiah, XXX, original epigram from Incidents in the
Life of a Slave Girl

"reader, be assured this narrative is no fiction." Preface by the Author,
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

I believe, with James Olney, that students of autobiography are themselves vicarious autobiographers, and I know that I read every text through my own experience, as well as that of my mother and my grandmothers.¹ As black American women, we are born into a mystic sisterhood, and we live our lives within a magic circle, a realm of shared language, reference, and allusion within the veil of our blackness and our femaleness.² We have been as invisible to the dominant culture as rain; we have been knowers, but we have not been known. This paradox is central to what I suggest we call the Afra-American experience.

It was in the world of Afra-American autobiography that I first met her on the conscious plane, but then I realized that I had known the outraged mother all my life. With her hands on her hips and her head covered with a bandanna, she is the sassiest woman on the face of the earth, and with good reason. She is the mother of Frederick Douglass travelling twelve miles through the darkness to share a morsel of food with her mulatto son and to reassure him that he is somebody's child. She travels twelve miles back again before the dawn. She sacrifices and improvises for the survival of flesh and spirit, and as mother of the race, she is muse to black poets, male and female alike. She is known by many names, the most exalted being "Momma." Implied in all of her actions and fueling her heroic ones is outrage at the abuse of her people and her person.

She must be the core of our black and female experience, this American Amazon of African descent, dwelling in the moral and psychic wilderness of North America. Yet when I surveyed the literature of the critical wilderness proliferated from that moral and psychic one, I found her absent. I imagined our ancestor mothers lost forever in that fearsome place in search of a tradition to claim them.

The treatment of the slave narrative genre has been one of the most skewed in Afro-American literary criticism. It has been almost always the treatment of the narratives of heroic male slaves, not their wives or sisters. By focusing almost exclusively on the narratives of male slaves, critics have left out half the picture.

In general, the purpose of the slave narrative genre is to decry the cruelty and brutality of slavery and to bring about its abolition. In addition, the genre has been defined as possessing certain other characteristics, including a narrator who speaks in a coherent, first person voice, with a range and scope of knowledge like that of an unlettered slave and a narrative movement which progresses from South to North, and culminates in an escape from slavery to a freedom which is both an inner and outer liberation. The prevalent themes of the genre include the deprivation of food, clothing, and shelter, the desire for instruction (frequently for religious instruction, which is thwarted), physical brutality, the corruption of families (usually white), the separation of families (usually black), the exploitation of slave workers and, in some narratives, especially those written by women, abuse of the sexuality and reproductive powers of the slave woman.

The resistance to a gynocritical or gynocentric approach to the slave narrative genre has been dominated by male bias, by linear logic, and by either/or thinking. We have been paralyzed by issues of primacy, and authorship, and by criteria of unity, coherence, completion, and length. Academic systems, which do not value scholarship on black women or reward it, have told us that we are not first, not central, not major, not authentic. The suggestion has been that neither the lives of black women nor the study of our narratives and autobiographies have been legitimate.

I want to supplement the either/or thinking that has limited the consideration of evidence surrounding the narratives of women, and the inclusion of such works in the slave narrative genre. Instead of asking "Is it first? Is it major? Is it central? Does it conform to established criteria?" this study asks, "How would the inclusion of works by women change the shape of the genre?"

To begin with, the inclusion of works by women would push the origin of the slave narrative genre back by two years, and root it more firmly in American soil, for the genre begins, not with The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, published in London in 1789, but with the narrative of a slave woman entitled "Belinda, or the Cruelty of Men Whose Faces Were Like the Moon," published in the United States in 1787, a narrative of a few pages which would be considered too short by conventional standards.³

Traditionally, the 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself, has been viewed as the central text in the genre, and based on this narrative, critic Robert Stepto has defined the primary Afro-American archetype as that of the articulate hero who discovers the "bonds among freedom, literacy, and struggle."⁴ Once again, the narrative experience of the articulate and rationally enlightened female slave has not been part of the definition. Stepto, in his otherwise brilliant work on the Narrative of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself (1845), makes no attempt to define a corresponding female archetype; I propose that we consider as a counterpart to the articulate hero the archetype of the outraged mother. She appears repeatedly in Afro-American history and literary tradition, and she is fully represented in Harriet "Linda Brent" Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself (1861).

Although Thayer and Eldridge published Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl in Boston in 1861, not until 1981 did Jean F. Yellin publish evidence establishing Jacobs' historical identity and the authorship of her narrative. Marion Starling, a black woman, had argued for the authenticity of the Jacobs narrative as early as 1947, but male critics like Sterling Brown and Arna Bontemps contested that authorship.⁵ The issue was complicated by the fact that Lydia Maria Child had edited the Jacobs narrative, which was published under the pseudonym, Linda Brent.

In general, the kinds of questions asked about the text prohibited scholars from seeing Incidents as part of the slave narrative genre and prevented them from looking for historical evidence to establish Jacobs' authorship. Yellin found such evidence readily available in the form of letters from Jacobs to Lydia Maria Child, from Jacobs to her confidante, Rochester Quaker Amy Post, and also in letters from Lydia Maria Child to John Greenleaf Whittier and William Lloyd Garrison, as well as the apprentice pieces Jacobs published in the New York Tribune.⁶

Another piece of external evidence overlooked by many scholars is a May 1, 1861 review of Incidents which appeared in the London Anti-Slavery Advocate written by a reviewer who had knowledge of the manuscript in both the original and published versions and who also had talked with the author. This Anti-Slavery Advocate review contains a wonderful description of Jacobs and her text:

We have read this book with no ordinary interest, for we are acquainted with the writer; and have heard many of the incidents from her own lips, and have great confidence in her truthfulness and integrity. Between two and three years ago, a coloured woman, about as dark as a southern Spaniard or a Portuguese, aged about five-and-forty, with a kind and pleasing expression of countenance, called on us, bearing an introductory letter from one of the most honoured friends of the anti-slavery cause in the United States. This letter requested our friendly offices on behalf of Linda, who was desirous of publishing her narrative in England. It happened that the friends at whose house we were then staying were so much interested by this dusky stranger's conversation and demeanour, that they induced her to become their guest for some weeks. Thus we had an excellent opportunity of becoming acquainted with one of the greatest heroines we have ever met with. Her manners were marked by refinement and sensibility, and by an utter absence of pretense or affectation; and we were deeply touched by the circumstances of her early life which she then communicated, and which exactly coincide with those of the volume now before us.⁷

This kind of evidence establishes both the authenticity and primacy many critics have denied Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Had these scholars asked the same questions of Incidents they asked of male narratives, had they looked for external evidence and examined it carefully, they would have come to the conclusion that Linda Brent wrote this narrative herself.

But as I have suggested, questions about unity, length, primacy and authorship are not the most important ones we can ask of such a narrative. We can more profitably ask how reading the work modifies an understanding of the slave narrative genre. However, the fact remains that the established criteria used to define the slave narrative genre have systematically excluded women; this paper calls those criteria into question.

When viewed from a gynocritical or gynocentric perspective, Incidents arrives at the very heart and root of Afra-American autobiographical writing. Although other works appear earlier, this full-length work by an Afra-American writing about her experiences as a slave woman is indeed rare. Yet despite its rarity, Incidents speaks for many lives; it is in many respects a representative document.

Incidents is descended both from the autobiographical tradition of the heroic male slaves and a line of American women's writings that attacks racial oppression and sexual exploitation. It combines the narrative pattern of the slave narrative genre with the conventional literary forms and stylistic devices of the 19th century domestic novel in an attempt to transform the so-called "cult of true womanhood' and to persuade the women of the north to take a public stand against slavery, the most political issue of the day. The twin themes of abolition and feminism are interwoven in Jacobs' text.

Like Harriet Beecher Stowe's hybrid, Uncle Tom's Cabin,Incidents focuses on the power relationships of masters and slaves and the ways in which (slave) women learn to manage the invasive sexuality of (white) men. Unlike Stowe, who demonstrates her anxiety about the authorship of Uncle Tom's Cabin by saying that God wrote it, the author of Incidents claims responsibility for every word, and yet she publishes under the pseudonym "Linda Brent."

Although I had read the critical literature on women's autobiography, it was Incidents that taught me that the silences and gaps in the narrative of women's lives are sometimes more significant than the filled spaces.⁸ "Linda Brent" obscures the names of persons and places mentioned in the text, and although she denies any need for secrecy on her own part, she writes that she deemed it "kind and considerate toward others to pursue this course."⁹ Thus she speaks as a disguised woman, whose identity remains partly obscured. A virtual "madwoman in the attic," Linda leads a veiled and unconventional life. Her dilemma is that of life under slavery as a beautiful, desirable female slave, object of desire as well as profit.

Linda adheres to a system of black and female cultural values that motivate her actions and inform the structure of this text. First of all, the author's stated purpose is to "arouse the woman of the North to a realizing sense of the condition of two millions of women at the South" (Jacobs, p. 1). If the white women of the North know the true conditions of the slave women of the South, then they cannot fail to answer Jacobs' call to moral action.

In order to balance our understanding of the slave narrative genre, we need first to read those narratives written by women (and to read them closely), and secondly to expand the range of terms used in writing about those narratives. An analysis of the imagery, thematic content, uses of language, and patterns of narrative movement in Incidents in the Life of A Slave Girl moves us closer to a characterization of the behavior of the outraged mother and to a more balanced understanding of the slave narrative genre.

As one who is small and relatively powerless in the face of her oppression, the outraged mother makes use of wit and intelligence to overwhelm and defeat a more powerful foe. In her aspect as trickster, "Linda" employs defensive verbal postures as well as various forms of disguise and concealment to outwit and escape Dr. Flint, the archetypal patriarchal rapist slavemaster:

She must conceal her quest for literacy and her ability to read in order to prevent the master from slipping her foul notes in an attempt to seduce her.
She must conceal her love for a free black man she eventually sends away for his own good, as well as the identity of the white man who becomes the father of her children and who eventually betrays her.
She conceals her pregnancy from everyone.
She must conceal her plans to run away, working hard and attempting to appear contented during the time she formulates these plans.
When Linda "runs away," she is disguised as a man and taken to the Snaky Swamp, a location she finds more hospitable than landed slave culture.
She is then concealed in the home of a neighboring white woman (a slaveholder sympathetic to her plight), and, finally, in a crawl space in her grandmother's house for seven years.
While concealed in her grandmother's house, Linda deceives the master by writing letters a friend mails from New York. When Flint takes off to New York to look for the fugitive, she is practically in his own back yard.
Linda is taken to the North in disguise, and even after she arrives there, she must conceal her identity with a veil, which she only removes when her freedom is purchased by a group of Northern white women. Through quick-thinking, the use of sass and invective, and a series of deceptions, Linda finally realizes freedom for herself and her children.

"Sass" is a word of West African derivation associated with the female aspect of the trickster figure. The OED attributes the origin of "sass" to the "sassy tree," the powerfully poisonous Erythophloeum quineense (Cynometra Manni). A decoction of the bark of this tree was used in West Africa as an ordeal poison in the trial of accused witches, women spoken of as being wives of Exu, the trickster god. According to the 1893 Autobiography of Mrs. Amanda Smith,

I don't know as any one has ever found what the composition of this sassy wood really is; but I am told it is a mixture of certain barks. There is a tree there which grows very tall, called the sassy wood tree, but there is something mixed with this which is very difficult to find out, and the natives do not tell what it is. They say that it is one of their medicines that they use to carry out their law for punishing witches; so you cannot find out what it is.

"The accused had two gallons to drink. If she throws it up, she has gained her case," Mrs. Smith wrote.¹⁰ So "sass" can kill.

Webster's Third International Dictionary defines "sass" as talking impudently or disrespectfully to an elder or a superior, or as talking back. Throughout the text, Linda uses "sass" as a weapon of self-defense whenever she is under sexual attack by the master; she returns a portion of the poison he has offered her. In one instance Dr. Flint demands: "Do you know that I have a right to do as I like with you,—that I can kill you, if I please?" Negotiating for respect, Linda replies: "You have tried to kill me, and I wish you had; but you have no right to do as you like with me" (Jacobs, p. 62). "Sass" is an effective tool that allows "Linda" to preserve her self-esteem and to increase the psychological distance between herself and the master. She uses "sass" the way Frederick Douglass uses his fists and his feet, as a means of expressing her resistance.

It is a distinctive feature of the outraged mother that she sacrifices opportunities to escape without her children; Linda is motivated by an overwhelming concern for them, a concern not apparent in the narratives of the questing male slaves. This concern is shown in chapter titles like "A New Tie to Life," "Another Link to Life," "The Children Sold," "New Destination for the Children," and "The Meeting of Mother and Daughter."

The outraged mother resists her situation not so much on behalf of herself as on behalf of her children. She is part of a continuum; she links the dead, the living, and the unborn. "I knew the doom that awaited my fair baby in slavery, and I determined to save her from it, or perish in the attempt. I went to make this vow at the graves of my poor parents, in the burying ground of the slaves" (Jacobs, pp. 137-38). In the case of Jacobs' narrative, the sense of the continuum of women's oppression is also clear.

It is the prospect of her daughter's life under slavery that finally nerves Jacobs to run away. "When they told me my new-born babe was a girl, my heart was heavier than it had ever been before. Slavery is a terrible thing for men; but it is far more terrible for women," Jacobs wrote. "Superadded to the burden common to all, they have wrongs, and sufferings and mortifications peculiarly their own" (Jacobs, p. 119).

Another important difference between this narrative and those of the heroic male slaves is that Linda celebrates the cooperation and collaboration of all the people, black and white, slave and free, who make her freedom possible. She celebrates her liberation and her children's as the fruit of a collective, not individual effort.

The inclusion of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself in the slave narrative genre and the autobiographical tradition of black Americans, permits a more balanced view of that genre and that tradition, presenting fresh themes, images, and uses of language. Incidents occupies a position as central to that tradition as the 1845 Narrative of Frederick Douglass. Only in this perspective does the outraged mother emerge as the archetypal counterpart of the articulate hero.

Further study of all such texts and testimonies by women will allow us to fill out an understanding of that experience and culture which I have designated as Afra-American, and help us correct and expand existing analyses based too exclusively on male models of experience and writing. The study of black women's writing helps us to transform definitions of genre, of archetype, of narrative traditions, and of the African-American experience itself.

Notes

See James Olney, "Autobiography and the Cultural Moment" in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980), p. 26.
See Robert Stepto's "Teaching Afro-American Literature: Survey or Tradition," in Afro-American Literature: The Reconstruction of Instruction, ed. Dexter Fisher and Robert B. Stepto (New York: Modern Language Association, 1979), pp. 8-25. Within the "continuum of [black] artistic endeavor" described by Stepto as a temenos or "magic circle" exists yet another realm of artistic expression and meaning, that of the black woman, the Afra-American.
A woman called "Belinda" wrote "The Cruelty of Men Whose Faces Were Like the Moon: the Petition of an African Slave to the Legislature of Massachusetts." The title of the text suggests an awareness of racial and sexual oppression that is both race and sex specific. Belinda speaks to the cruelty of men, white men, whose moon-like faces symbolize strangeness, spiritual barrenness and death. See "Belinda: or the Cruelty of Men Whose Faces Were Like the Moon" in American Museum and Repository of Ancient and Modern Fugitive Pieces, Prose and Poetical Volume I (June, 1787).
See Robert B. Stepto, "Narration, Authentication, and Authorial Control in Frederick Douglass' Narrative of 1845," in Afro-American Literature: The Reconstruction of Instruction, pp. 178-91. See also Robert B. Stepto, Beyond the Veil (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1979), chapters 1-3.
See Arna Bontemps, "The Slave Narrative: An American Genre," Introduction to Great Slave Narratives (Boston: Beacon, 1969), vol. XV; John W. Blassingame, "Critical Essay on Sources," in The Slave Community (New York: Oxford UP, 1972), pp. 233-34; and Jean F. Yellin, "Written by Herself: Harriet Brent Jacobs' Slave Narrative,"in American Literature 53 (November, 1981), 480-85.
Jean Yellin first disclosed the existence of Jacobs' autobiographical apprentice piece, "Letter From a Fugitive Slave," in "Written by Herself: Harriet Brent Jacobs' Slave Narrative." "Letter From a Fugitive Slave," published in the New York Tribune, 21 June 1853, treats the subject matter which later becomes Incidents in Mrs. Jacobs' distinctive style. Mrs. Jacobs' correspondence with Rochester Quaker Mrs. Amy Post verifies her claim to authorship of these letters to the Tribune.
Rev. of Incidents, Anti-Slavery Advocate, London, England, May 1, 1861.
In "Women's Autobiographies and the Male Tradition," her introduction to Women's Autobiography (Bloomington: U of Indiana P. 1980), Estelle Jelinek discusses some of the differences between the autobiographies of men and women.
Harriet "Linda Brent" Jacobs, "Preface by the Author," Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself (Boston: Thayer and Eldridge, 1861), p. 1. Subsequently referred to in the text as "Jacobs."
See Amanda Smith's Autobiography (Chicago: Meyer and Brother, 1893), pp. 386-89.

SIDONIE SMITH (ESSAY DATE 1992)

SOURCE: Smith, Sidonie. "Resisting the Gaze of Embodiment: Women's Autobiography in the Nineteenth Century." In American Women's Autobiography: Fea(s)ts of Memory, edited by Margo Culley, pp. 75-110. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992.

In the following excerpt, Smith explores how Jacobs asserts her selfhood in her narrative, staking her claim to humanness despite her status as a slave, an African, and a woman.

Making herself into a "talking book" entitled Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, Jacobs engaged the mythology of "race" in order to give "voice" to herself and "face" to her people through alternative myths of empowerment (Gates 11-12). In the process she struggled to break the chains of slavery by breaking the chain of being which would relegate her as an "African" to the lowest rung of the ladder and by intervening in the constraints of generic expectations which would reappropriate her "life" in narrative. Engaging the conventions of self-mastery and authority, she staked her claim in the territory of the "human." The black woman, however, had a far more complex struggle for "selfhood" on her hands than either the white woman or the black man. Doubly the site of Western culture's totalizing representations, doubly "embodied" as "African" and "woman," doubly colonized in the territory of rape and enforced concubinage, the slave woman confronted conflated destinies, discourses, and identifications. Marginalized vis-àvis both "metaphysical" and "embodied [white]" selfhoods, Jacobs travels arduously toward both territories as she narrates a paradigmatic tale of spiritual and rhetorical as well as physical journeys from bondage to "freedom."

Unwilling to accept the conditions of slavery, "Linda Brent" (the name of Jacobs' protagonist) determines to escape her circumstances, eluding her master by hiding in her grandmother's attic for seven years and then fleeing north to New York where she finds work, regains her children, and achieves freedom, not through self-agency but through the agency of her employer. At the center of Jacobs' escape story is "Brent's" will, her determination to figure life on her own terms. Agency functions as the sign of her resistance to her status as slave, subjected always to another's will. Describing her struggle with her master, Doctor Flint, "Brent" foregrounds this agency, figuring the struggle in metaphors of warfare, that quintessential masculine domain: "The war of my life had begun; and though one of God's most powerless creatures, I resolved never to be conquered" (Jacobs 19).¹ Through this "hand-to-hand" combat, "Brent" literally and figuratively wrests agency from the master as her prerogative, beating the master at his own game, outwitting "the man." The narrative presents "Brent" as an avatar of the "self-made man," bent on achieving freedom by means of iron will, intelligence, courage, self-sacrifice, and perseverance as well as moral purposefulness. Both story and text affirm her "individuality" and "metaphysical selfhood" despite her qualified achievement in the North and her continuing struggle "to affirm the self in a hostile, or indifferent, environment" (Genovese 172).

As a narrative of self-determining agency, Jacobs' text participates in the tradition of the male slave narrative. But other positionings toward "selfhood" in the text cause Jacobs' narrative to deviate from that androcentric paradigm. For unlike the male slave narrator Jacobs has to attend as she writes to another story of "selfhood." Not only does she confront "Brent's" estrangement from "metaphysical selfhood"; she confronts synchronously her estrangement from "true [white] womanhood" and its sentimental narrative frames. The ideology of "true womanhood" elaborated by feminist historians looking at the nineteenth century, assigned to the "true woman" what Barbara Welter has described as "four cardinal virtues—piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity" (Welter 21).² But that assignment implied another assignment—one directed at unprivileged women, women of color and working-class women. Hazel V. Carby argues that while the establishment of "what constituted a woman and womanhood" may have brought "coherence and order to the contradictory material circumstances of the lives of women," it did so by "balancing opposing definitions of womanhood and motherhood [for white and black women], each dependent on the other for its existence" (Carby, Reconstructing Black Womanhood 24, 25). For instance, the fragile physique characteristic of the "true woman" contrasted markedly to the bodily strength desirable in the black female slave.³ Moreover, the fierce purposefulness of a slave woman's efforts to escape her bondage violated the code of submissiveness so central to "true womanhood." Any effort by a black woman to establish her consonance with "true womanhood" involved a crossing over from one definitional territory to another's definitional territory, a crossing over to a place whose boundaries depended on keeping black woman in their place.⁴

Inevitably, black and white women experienced differing relationships to their bodies. A white woman exercized some control over her body. Despite the discourse labeling her naturally lustful, despite the implicit fear of her sexuality evidenced in the most elaborate defenses of her goodness and purity, she could achieve some modicum of power by resisting the temptations of the flesh and keeping her body clean, chaste. By maintaining her virginity and her "reputation," she could secure marriage and with it social legitimacy. After marriage she could fulfill her duty by bearing legitimate children for the patrilineage. Or she could maintain her virginity and serve her family as dutiful daughter or her cause as selfless evangelist. Enshrined in her "separate sphere," she could secure a certain cultural status and currency (literally and figuratively).

While neither male nor female slaves had control over their own bodies, the female slave suffered physical violation of her body beyond what the male slave suffered, a reality to which Jacobs painfully alludes: "When they told me my new-born babe was a girl, my heart was heavier than it had ever been before. Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women. Super-added to the burden common to all, they have wrongs, and sufferings, and mortifications peculiarly their own" (77). Within that "peculiar institution" the fate of woman was itself "peculiar." If in the discursive regimes of "embodied selfhood" the white woman always carried in her the potential for illicit and disruptive sexuality, the black woman lived in that crawlspace of sexual lasciviousness by virtue of the mark that was her skin color. Her black body condemned her to an inescapable essentialism since in the mythology of "race," it served as her defining characteristic, the very sign of her unrepressed and unrepressible sexuality, her licentiousness and insatiability. From the less authoritative discourse of the chain of being to the more scientifically respectable discourse of medical pathology, black female sexuality became synonymous with abnormal sexual appetite.⁵ Effectively, her body stood as an invitation to white male desire. And so the white master satisfied his "purient" sexual desire and his desire for human capital on the female slave's body in one act. In this way her body functioned as the vessel for reproducing "chattel" for the system (since children followed the mother) and for shielding the white woman from "uninhibited" sexual practices; both uses maintained colonial relationships of power.

Despite these apparently intractable cultural obstacles, Jacobs seeks to establish in her narrative some relationship (albeit partially contestatory as I will argue later) to "true womanhood" by situating "Brent" inside shared boundaries with white women. Perhaps the recognition of a shared community with white northern women was abetted by the feminist politics of the two women with whom she worked and corresponded during the writing of her narrative, Lydia Maria Child and Amy Post. "The publication of Jacobs's autobiography," suggests Andrews, "constituted a double opportunity, for as woman and slave, Jacobs dramatized the feminist analysis of the parallel slavery ofraceandsex.…From the feminist point of view, which labeled true womanhood white slavery and submissive wifehood prostitution, Jacob's multiply marginal identity qualified her amply as one of the most truly representative women of her time" (247-48). And yet her "representative" status was undermined by other positionings. She was after all, as Andrews reminds us, a domestic servant, a woman on the margins of the domestic domain of woman. And the narrative inevitably revealed certain postures antithetical to the postures of the "true woman": her wil-fullness noted above, her not always suppressed anger, her independent critique of both southern and northern society, and her revelation of sexual concubinage.

In response to the great irony of her situation—"the more enormous the crimes committed against her, the less receptive people are to hearing about them, especially from the victim herself"—Jacobs, according to Andrews, seeks to "forestall the wrong kind of reading of her book" by constituting in her text a "woman-identified reader" and "remodeling" through the text the kind of enlightened community that would "offer a truly familial kind of fellowship" (Andrews 249, 253). To this end "Brent" speaks directly to white middle-class northern women, comfortable in their status as "true women." Speaking as a woman to other women whose sympathy, understanding, and action she would enlist in the antislavery crusade, she asks that they identify with her sufferings as a woman who shares their concerns for home and children. This desire to gain common ground with her reader determines the emphases in the narrative on the struggle to achieve control over her body and the related struggle to establish a home for the children of that body.

In tracing the former struggle, however, Jacobs reveals not only her determination to escape sexual exploitation but also her surrender to concubinage, confessing that in resisting her master's will she entered deliberately into liaison with another white man by whom she bore two children. Thus the narrator must position herself as the "fallen" woman whose very utterances, because unspeakable, threaten the sanctity of that protected space of "true womanhood." The reality of this threat is acknowledged by Lydia Maria Child in her introduction:

I am well aware that many will accuse me of indecorum for presenting these pages to the public; for the experiences of this intelligent and much injured woman belong to a class which some call delicate subjects, and others indelicate. This peculiar phase of Slavery has generally been kept veiled; but the public ought to be made acquainted with its monstrous features, and I willingly take the responsibility of presenting them with the veil withdrawn. I do this for the sake of my sisters in bondage, who are suffering wrongs so foul, that our ears are too delicate to listen to them.
(4)

There is no room for Jacobs' experience as a black woman inside the borders of "true womanhood." Since "silence" surrounds the "indecorous" subject matter and marginalized speaking position of the narrator—"It would have been more pleasant to me to have been silent about my own history" (2)—Jacobs/"Brent" risks rejection by her reader in order to tell the story of her fall from virginity into concubinage, in order to insist on the legitimacy of her experience.

The narrative strategies Jacobs/"Brent" uses to stake her claim as a black woman to a place within the community of "true women" are fascinating and provocative. In tracing her struggle for physical self-determination she appeals rhetorically to her audience by appropriating the very language and narrative conventions of popular fiction, most particularly invoking (and rewriting) the tale of seduction.⁶ Presenting herself as a resisting victim of Doctor Flint's sexual aggression, "Brent" figures a story about the forced loss of innocence and the long, anguished struggle to achieve bodily integrity in the face of unremitting emotional and physical abuse. Chronicling her experiences in slavery and out, she foregrounds especially the emotional and physical consequences of her decision to resist sexual victimization, the superhuman self-sacrifice necessary. She suffers separation from her children. Harassed, exhausted, feverish, infected, contorted by the seven-year enclosure inside her grandmother's attic, her body bears the marks of the master's brutality, bares the price of "virtue." At the same time that she testifes to the horrors of that "peculiar institution," therefore, she positions herself as victimized heroine inside the narrative space of "white" fiction.

Jacobs also appeals to white women as mothers by creating "Brent" as the heroic mother whose steel purpose is to achieve freedom and a home for her children and by figuring her story in the rhetoric of domestic fiction with its celebration of the domestic virtues. Presenting herself in what Jean Fagan Yellin reminds us was "the most valued 'feminine' role" of the century" (xxvi), Jacobs emphasizes how hard fought the achievement must be for the female slave, precisely because "motherhood" posed significant problems for the black woman caught in a system that intervened ruthlessly and purposefully in family relationships.⁷ Amassing detailed accounts of the difficulties of motherhood in slavery, Jacobs insists on "Brent's" total commitment to her children, to the point of self-sacrifice: "My friends feared I should become a cripple for life; and I was so weary of my long imprisonment that, had it not been for the hope of serving my children, I should have been thankful to die; but, for their sakes, I was willing to bear on" (127). Moreover, Jacobs surrounds "Brent's" struggle as a mother with the struggle of her larger family, a family whose members—grandmother, father, mother, aunts, uncles—she figures as powerful, physically resilient, spiritually hearty, loving, courageous, loyal. She thereby places herself in a noble family lineage, a lineage embodying the highest values of a civilized society, a lineage characterized by spiritual, moral, and social heroism despite the degrading circumstances of slavery. And even as she concludes with an acknowledgment that she can never achieve that "separate sphere" available to white women, she maintains the legitimacy of her desire for equal access: "I still long for a hearthstone of my own, however humble," she concludes, "I wish it for my children's sake far more than for my own" (201).

Finally, "Brent" assumes the narrative posture of the "true woman" who sacrifices herself and her privacy by telling her tale to others for the benefit of her people and their cause, as she earlier sacrifices herself and her comfort for her children and their freedom. Moreover, as Andrews argues, she sacrifices her privacy to benefit her readers: "Jacobs approaches her woman-identified reader with a personal history of secrets whose revelation, she hopes, will initiate that reader into the community of confidence and support that nineteenth-century women needed in order to speak out above a whisper against their oppression" (254).⁸

The closing reference to her failed effort to gain her own "home" underscores the grim reality of Jacobs'/"Brent's" status as exile in her own country and in the country of "ideal [white] womanhood." Ex-slaves, however much they celebrated their freedom, remained second-class citizens, remained strangers in their own land, variously homeless. Pointedly, "Brent" is not even "free" to claim the legitimacy of her experience for herself. Rather she is dependent upon the testimony of Lydia Maria Child, the white abolitionist whose necessary authorization of Jacobs' text points to the ex-slave's reinscription within certain appropriative structures.⁹ Moreover, she is dependent upon Child for the editing and marketing of her narrative. As Alice A. Deck suggests, Child's imprint upon the narrative is multiple (33-40). Child herself wrote to Jacobs that she "transpos[ed] sentences and pages, so as to bring the story into continuous order, and the remarks into appropriate places"; she requested that Jacobs send her more materials about "the outrages committed on the colored people, in Nat Turner's time," thus emphasizing dramatic details even when they were not a part of Jacobs' personal story: she deleted a last chapter on John Brown because "it does not naturally come into your story and the M.S. is already too long" (quoted in Meltzer and Holland 357). Like other ex-slave narrators, Jacobs finds her narrative and her self-representation subject to and subject of a certain amount of white "paternalistic" control.¹⁰ Yet despite this editorial colonization, the narrative maintains the fierce integrity of an oppositional vision.

Literally as well as figuratively homeless, Jacobs/"Brent" speaks from a position very different from the one Elizabeth Cady Stanton achieves at the conclusion of her narrative. Indeed, she stands in the speaking position of the "deterritorialized," to use the current phrase of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (17).¹¹ From her position on the margins, however, Jacobs can "see" both inside and outside white culture, inside and outside "true womanhood" and its supporting ideology. She can "see" the reality of both margin and center more vividly than Stanton who vis-àvis Jacobs remains in the center of her culture. She has what bell hooks calls a kind of doubled sight.¹²

This doubled sight characterizes Jacobs' stance toward the culturally legitimated discursive regimes she invokes to gain credibility for the "truth" of her tale: those of the seduction novel, domestic fiction, the more common male slave narrative, biblical tropes, picaresque narratives, and the spiritual narrative of the movement of the soul toward salvation and freedom. Since these loci of authority are white and/or male-identified, she engages them from her oppositional position at the margins, often uncomfortably. Negotiating the intersections of multivalent discourses, Jacobs effectively troubles all these centering rhetorics simultaneously. For her deterritorialized vision leads her to probe, unconsciously and consciously, certain gaps in those conventions, certain disturbances in the surfaces of narrative.

From the perspective of the homeless, Jacobs interrogates even as she imitates the ideology of true womanhood, foregrounding its inherent racialized nature. As Carby argues, "Incidents demystified a convention that appeared as the obvious, commonsense rules of behavior and revealed the concept of true womanhood to be an ideology, not a lived set of social relations as she exposed its inherent contradictions and inapplicability to her life" (Reconstructing Black Womanhood 49). She does so through her figuration of both the northern women whom she addresses and the southern women whom she describes. On the one hand, she suggests that certain white southern women transcend the privileges of their class and status in identifying with her plight and flight, giving her shelter and support. She challenges thereby the totalized vision of white southern women as proslavery. On the other, she condemns the complacency and indifference of northern women, even those associated with the abolitionist cause, revealing her perception of the absence of sisterly concern among them by quoting from the Bible: "Rise up, ye women that are at ease! Hear my voice, ye careless daughters! Give ear unto my speech" (Isaiah 32.9). Or she manifests, albeit mutedly, a certain bitterness toward her northern reader in her comparisons of their life with hers.

But more directly, she unmasks the ideology of "true womanhood" as a fiction in her characterization of southern women who collude in the degradation of other women and deny the primacy of conjugal bonds: "The qualities of delicacy of constitution and heightened sensitivity, attributes of the Southern lady, appear as a corrupt and superficial veneer that covers an underlying strength and power in cruelty and brutality" (Carby, Reconstructing Black Womanhood 53-54). In contrast to the ruthless and uncivilized familial relationships of whites, she creates a world of nurturing, supportive black women, a world of strong black relationships. Incorporating episodes that make of white men sexual profligates and moral pigmies, that make of white women uncaring, jealous, petty tyrants, this slave narrator provides a contrast of cultures that reverses ideological notions of "civilized" and "uncivilized," hierarchized as white and black.

Jacobs/"Brent" also challenges the very notion of American "freedom" and "democracy" and in doing so contests the presence of the agency and autonomy associated with American notions of bourgeois individuality. For instance, in a passage cited for its unveiled, assertive voice (Washington 12), "Brent" comments directly on the fact that her "freedom" has been bought for her by a white woman:

So I was sold at last! A human being sold in the free city of New York! The bill of sale is on record, and future generations will learn from it that women were articles of traffic in New York, late in the nineteenth century of the Christian religion. It may hereafter prove a useful document to antiquaries, who are seeking to measure the progress of civilization in the United States. I well know the value of that bit of paper; but much as I love freedom I do not like to look upon it. I am deeply grateful to the generous friend who procured it, but I despise the miscreant who demanded payment for what never rightfully belonged to him or his.
(200)

Assuming the authoritative stance of a biblical prophet, Jacobs ("Brent") defiantly, unsentimentally, scorns the hypocrisy of the nation and its founding documents.¹³

Contrary to the conventional figuration and fate of the antagonist of the seduction tale, Jacobs presents her seducer not as any kind of Byronic figure whose power is attractive and redeemable if lethal but rather as a dehumanized pervert, brutalizing and bestial.¹⁴ Turning the tables on the ideology supporting the slave system, Jacobs renders the white man as less than fully human and assigns him a position low on the chain of being. Moreover, she presents herself not as the passive victim but as the iron-willed antagonist who fights her victimization with bravado. "Jacobs' narrator," suggests Yellin, "asserts that—even when young and a slave—she was an effective moral agent" who "takes full responsibility for her actions" (xxx). And she further differentiates between a "selfhood" synonymous simply with bodily chastity and a "selfhood" emanating from self-esteem and integrity as she "abandon[s] her attempt to avoid sexual involvements in an effort to assert her autonomy as a human being" (Yellin xxx; Carby, Reconstructing Black Womanhood 60). For instance, she makes a careful distinction between being forcibly raped by her master and choosing her lover: "It seems less degrading to give one's self, than to submit to compulsion" (55). Ironically, she inverts the tale of seduction; the passive victim chooses her lover, chooses her fall. Moreover, and obviously, her tale of seduction does not end conventionally in death. It ends in a rise to moral integrity and freedom as she transforms her fall into the story of real integrity, persistence, and a moral vision that challenges the simplistic notions of morality associated with "true womanhood." "Still, in looking back, calmly, on the events of my life," she reflects, "I feel that the slave woman ought not to be judged by the same standard as others" (56). Later, when she describes how "Brent" reveals the truth of her past to her daughter Ellen and wins Ellen's acceptance, Jacobs reveals her own narrative priorities: she cares more for a daughter's forgiveness than for the reader's (and larger culture's) forgiveness. As Carby suggests, Jacobs places slavery on trial rather than "Brent's" social deviancy (Reconstructing Black Womanhood 61). For these reasons, argues Yellin, Jacobs might be calling for "a new definition of female morality grounded in her own sexual experience in a brutal and corrupt patriarchal racist society" (xxxi). Such a notion of morality would be dependent not solely upon woman's sexual purity but on more complicated, contextual grounds. Such morality would be morality historicized rather than essentialized.

Jacobs/"Brent" rewrites every narrative convention that shadows her text. She rewrites the fiction of domesticity by calling for direct political action and intervention rather than the more limited "influence" of domesticated feminism being promoted by certain white feminists of the period. As a "homeless" woman she sees the self-satisfied complacencies of a feminism that would limit its area of concern to reform and celebration of that separate sphere when political, economic, and social forces limited the access to that sphere to white middle-class women.¹⁵ She rewrites the conventions of sentimental fiction whose heroine's fate is marriage, celebrating instead her achievement of "freedom." She rewrites that other scenario of sentimental fiction, the narrative of death by seduction or captivity, by critiquing the platitudes of a morality that erases the specificities of the slave woman's experience. She also rewrites the conventions of the "male" slave narrative which assumes the representative privilege of the male slave's experience of bondage and escape. Unlike a Frederick Douglass who in his several narratives acknowledges neither the woman who helped him escape (and who later became his wife) nor other networks assisting him as he fled, Jacobs/"Brent" eschews the representation of herself as the isolato, self-contained in her rebellion, figuring herself instead as dependent always on the support of family and friends, particularly her grandmother (see Andrews 253-58; Foster, "'In Respect to Females'" 66-70; McKay 177; Washington 3-15).

Finally, Jacob contests the notion of "selfhood's" fixedness. "I was born a slave; but I never knew it till six years of happy childhood had passed away" (3), writes "Brent" in opening her narrative. Early in the narrative Jacobs introduces the distinction between a "fixed" idea of "self-hood" and a culturally and historically contextual notion of "selfhood" (Genovese 170). By doing so she challenges the mythology of "racial" identity as an essentialized phenomenon. Providing character, nobility, full humanity to her black family, and complex humanity to herself, she deconstructs the stereotypes of black identity spawned in the ideology of "race." Refusing to be figured as the sexually unrepressed primitive black woman whose body constitutes her identity, refusing to be figured as the "mammy" of white children, refusing to be figured as morally and spiritually bankrupt, refusing therefore to be figured as less than fully human, she destabilizes colonial notions of "African-ness."

Moreover, Jacobs foregrounds throughout her text not only the intertextualities of self-representation but also the discursive staging of identity. The discourse of the text resists the finalizing impact of the history in the text. The mutual constitution of "reader" and "narrator" marks the text and its self-representational project as simultaneously fluid and contextual. Novelistic passages introduce the dialogic nature of "self-representation," the indeterminacies of role-playing and multiple voicings (Andrews 280). Life-storytelling becomes the site of "selfhood," now understood as discursive, contextual, communicative, and ultimately "fictive." Thus Jacobs' narrative testifies to the ambiguities of any core of irreducible, essentialist "selfhood."

From her position of "homelessness" at the margins of both slave and white societies, Jacobs interrogates in more complex ways than does Stanton conventional pieties of woman's "embodied selfhood" in the nineteenth century as well as conventional empowerments of "metaphysical selfhood." Out of the friction generated as she engages competing and contradictory discourses that never quite fit the parameters of her historically specific experience in slavery, Jacobs experiments with the elasticities of "self"-representation.

Hers is a particularly provocative narrative, one which adumbrates those disturbances of the territorial boundaries of both "metaphysical" and "embodied" "selfhood" characterizing autobiographies written by women in the twentieth century.

Notes

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese (171) explores Jacobs' struggle of wills.
For further discussions of "true womanhood," see Spruill; Scott; Clinton; Berg.
"Strength and ability to bear fatigue, argued to be so distasteful a presence in a white woman, were positive features to be emphasized in the promotion and selling of a black female field hand at a slave auction" (Carby, Reconstructing Black Womanhood 25).
What Carby claims for black women after the Civil War applies even more certainly to female slaves before emancipation: "Black women were relegated to a place outside the ideological construction of 'womanhood.' That term included only white women; therefore the rape of black women was of no consequence outside the black community" ("On the Threshold of Woman's Era" 308-9). Carby is elaborating the theories of the black feminist Ida B. Wells who explored the politics of lynching at the end of the nineteenth century. See, for instance, Wells, On Lynching (New York, 1969), for a collection of her essays. Carby also explores the politics of the black female body in Reconstructing Black Womanhood (26-32).
"In the nineteenth century," writes Gilman, "the black female was widely perceived as possessing not only a 'primitive' sexual appetite but also the external signs of this temperament—'primitive' genitalia" (232). Fascination with this phenomenon of physical and physiognomic abnormality reveals itself in the century's preoccupation with the "Hottentot Venus" whose visual characteristics—large buttocks, flat nose, strange labia—function as signs of her phylogenetic place. The critical significance of establishing the difference of black female anatomy lay, according to Gilman, in the following rationalization: "If their sexual parts could be shown to be inherently different, this would be a sufficient sign that the blacks were a separate (and, needless to say, lower) race, as different from the European as the proverbial orangutan" (235). In the catalogue of defining physical characteristics of the female Hottentot, the century read the signs of regression to an earlier state of human evolution. Moreover, in identifying some of those same characteristics as markers of prostitutes (the most sexualized of white women) and in describing the sexual practices of primitive tribes as forms of prostitution, medical anthropologists linked black sexuality and prostitution as two sources of social corruption and disease (syphilis in particular). Sexuality as the dark force in civilized "man" was thus identified with, projected onto, the prostitute and the black female (240-57).
Jean Fagan Yellin explores Jacobs' use of the conventions of sentimental fiction in her Introduction (xxix xxx).
Slave marriages were not legally valid. The indiscriminate use of the slave woman's body by white men made fatherhood an absence. Moreover, the subjection of the female body to the will of the white master, functioning as an effective means of "unmanning" the black male, in one more way destabilized the family and, as Elizabeth Fox-Genovese suggests, left black women with "no satisfactory social definition of themselves as women" (169).
See Andrews' extended discussion of the thematics of secrecy in the narrative (254-59).
The history of the text's fate at the hands of white abolitionists, critics, and literary historians, however, adds yet another story to her story. The text is legitimized by Lydia Maria Child's attestation that it is the authentic story of the author. Recognizing that "it will naturally excite surprise that a woman reared in Slavery should be able to write so well" (Jacobs 3), Child both explains the author's circumstances and assures the reader that she has acted as editor only. This attestation notwithstanding, the text was labeled fictional by subsequent generations until Jean Fagan Yellin recently verified the authenticity of the places, people, and experiences narrated by "Linda Brent." Ironically, the text as "technology of reason" spoke against itself. See Yellin's Introduction to the text (xiiixxxv).
Deck (34-36) explores the formulaic patterns imposed by white abolitionists on the experiences and narratives of ex-slaves. See also Yellin, Intricate Knot; and Stepto.
For an elaboration of the deterritorialized nature of women's autobiographical writing, see Kaplan.
"Living as we did—on the edge—we developed a particular way of seeing reality. We looked both from the outside in and from the inside out. We focused our attention on the center as well as the margin. We understood both" (hooks preface).
See Mary Helen Washington's comments on Jacobs' empowered and assertive voice (11-12).
See Andrews (251); and Niemtzow (106). Andrews takes issue with Niemtzow's analysis.
Yellin argues that "instead of dramatizing the idea that the private sphere is women's appropriate area of concern … Incidents embodies a social analysis asserting that the denial of domestic and familial values by chattel slavery is a social issue that its female readers should address in the public arena" (Introduction xxxii). For a discussion of nineteenth-century versions of "domestic feminism" see Baym.

Works Cited

Andrews, William L. To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986.

Carby, Hazel V. Reconstructing Black Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Clinton, Catherine. The Plantation Mistress: Woman's World in the Old South. New York: Pantheon, 1982.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. "What Is a Minor Literature?" In Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan, 16-27. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

Foster, Frances Smith. "'In Respect to Females …': Difference in the Portrayals of Women by Male and Female Narrators." Black American Literature Forum, 15 (Summer 1981), 66-70.

Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. "To Write My Self: The Autobiographies of Afro-American Women." In Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship, ed. Shari Benstock, 161-80. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. "Editor's Introduction: Writing 'Race' and the Difference It Makes." In "Race," Writing, and Difference, ed. Gates, 1-20. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.

Gilman, Sander. "Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature." In "Race," Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., 223-61. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986.

hooks, bell. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Boston: South End Press, 1984.

Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself. Ed. Lydia Maria Child. New ed. Jean Fagan Yellin. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987.

Kaplan, Caren. "Deterritorializations: The Rewriting of Home and Exile in Western Feminist Discourse." Cultural Critique, 6 (Spring 1987), 187-98.

McKay, Nellie Y. "Race, Gender, and Cultural Context in Zora Neale Hurston's Dust Tracks on a Road. "In Life/Lines: Theorizing Women's Autobiography, ed. Bella Brodzki and Celeste Schenck, 175-88. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988.

Meltzer, Milton, and Patricia G. Holland, eds. The Collected Correspondence of Lydia Maria Child, 1817-1880. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982.

Niemtzow, Annette. "The Problematic of Self in Autobiography: The Example of the Slave Narrative." In The Art of the Slave Narrative, ed. John Sekora and Darwin T. Turner, 96-109. Macomb: Western Illinois University Press, 1982.

Scott, Ann. The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830-1930. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970.

Spruill, Julia Cherry. Women's Life and Work in the Southern Colonies. 1938; rpt. New York: W. W. Norton, 1972.

Stepto, Robert B. From behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979.

Washington, Mary Helen. "Introduction, Meditations on History: The Slave Woman's Voice." In Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women, 1860-1960, ed. Mary Helen Washington, 3-15. New York: Doubleday Anchor Press, 1987.

Welter, Barbara. Dimity Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1976.

Yellin, Jean Fagan. The Intricate Knot: Black Figures in American Literature. New York: New York University Press, 1972.

Yellin, Jean Fagan. Introduction to Jacobs.

JANICE B. DANIEL (ESSAY DATE SPRING 1997)

SOURCE: Daniel, Janice B. "A New Kind of Hero: Harriet Jacobs's Incidents." The Southern Quarterly 35, no. 3 (spring 1997): 7-12.

In the following essay, Daniel argues that the new type of hero that Jacobs presents in her autobiographical account is an innovative variation on the traditional male hero of the romance genre.

Harriet Ann Jacobs's autobiographical account of her personal experiences has survived despite its controversial reception. For decades, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself was believed to be either a false slave narrative penned by a white abolitionist or the work of Maria Child, her white collaborator. Because of the efforts of Jean Fagan Yellin, however, the literary world has recently acknowledged its authenticity, and its true author has taken her place among other important antebellum writers and Afro-American women authors.

Today Jacobs's work continues to survive amid mixed reactions. Some readers place it in the category of slave narrative, many regard it in the genre of sentimental domestic or seduction novel, and some view it simply in the autobiographical tradition. Also, many scholars place it in historical perspective as another antislavery novel, and others appreciate its more modern radical feminist content. Although the work has no difficulty in fulfilling all of these classifications, attempting to justify any one of them can result in dealing with the tension of ignoring many of the novel's obvious meritorious qualities in order to focus narrowly on a single interpretation. This same type of tension is present when one endeavors to analyze (with intentions to label) the status of its pseudonymous protagonist Linda Brent. She is simultaneously a heroic slave who strives against formidable odds to obtain freedom, a desperate mother who is engulfed in a desperate struggle for the survival of her children, and a woman who openly acknowledges and endures the sexual tribulations of being both a slave and a female. However, there is yet another type of female hero into whom Jacobs successfully combines all of these without the difficulties inherent in ignoring or disqualifying any one category. Jacobs presents in Linda Brent a female version of the hero of the romance mode, a woman who effectively portrays the requirements for this type of hero—requisites that were present in fiction long before the appearance of slave narratives or sentimental novels or feminist tracts. To consider Brent in this role is to be consistent with readers who suggest that Jacobs "projects a new kind of female hero" (Yellin xiv), yet this new kind, upon closer inspection, is actually an innovative rendering of a long-established literary persona.

ON THE SUBJECT OF…

INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL

It [The narrative] presents features more attractive than many of its predecessors purporting to be histories of slave life in America, because, in contrast with their mingling of fiction with fact, this record of complicated experience in the life of a young woman, a doomed victim to America's peculiar institution—her seven years' concealment in slavery—continued persecutions—hopes, often deferred, but which at length culminated in her freedom—surely need not the charms that any pen of fiction, however gifted and graceful, could lend. They shine by the lustre of their own truthfulness—a rhetoric which always commends itself to the wise head and honest heart. In furtherance of the object of its author, LYDIA MARIA CHILD has furnished a graceful introduction, and AMY POST, a well-written letter; and wherever the names of these two devoted friends of humanity are known, no higher credentials can be required or given. My own acquaintance, too, with the author and her relatives, of whom special mention is made in the book, warrants an expression of the hope that it will find its way into every family, where all, especially mothers and daughters, may learn yet more of the barbarism of American slavery and the character of its victims.

Nell, Wm. C. From "Linda the Slave Girl." The Liberator, 24 January, 1861.

This "new" kind of hero is a credible version of the "old" male hero identified by scholars of the romance genre. The pattern of Brent's experiences closely parallels that of the traditional hero of the romance as the "incidents" in her quest for freedom lead her down his same mythical path. The parallel is especially striking if we examine Brent's quest in light of special characteristics of the romance mode as explained by Northrop Fryein The Secular Scripture. Frye profiles the romance quest with elements such as ascent, descent, double identity, allies, enemies, alienation and trials. Jacobs's labels are different: her destination is "a home found" (168), and her journey is "a perilous passage" (53) filled with "continued persecutions" (80) and "competition in cunning" (128); but her quest is the same search for identity as that of the traditional hero of romance.

Linda Brent's confirmation as a romance hero commences with her earliest remembrances of childhood, in a situation that parallels the romance requirement for the protagonist's questionable origin (Frye 101-03). The first sentence of her narrative affirms her lack of identity as a slave: "I was born a slave; but I never knew it till six years of happy childhood had passed away" (5). Although she knows her parental unit and the origin of her existence, her uncomplicated life in a comfortable home keeps her oblivious of her slave status for the first years of her life. "I was so fondly shielded that I never dreamed I was a piece of merchandise" (5).

In the romance, the hero's status must have a definitive beginning; thus Brent's conscious life as a slave begins with a significant event. "When I was six years old, my mother died; and then, for the first time, I learned, by the talk around me, that I was a slave" (6). Brent soon begins to comprehend the implications of her station in life, and the reader continues to recognize additional parallels to the romance hero. The garment of identity for him has become for her the annual gift of attire from her mistress. "I have a vivid recollection of the linsey-woolsey dress given me every winter by Mrs. Flint. How I hated it! It was one of the badges of slavery" (11).

Her life as a slave, however, is not without the romance hero's pastoral rapport with nature. When her mistress sends her out to play, she runs and jumps and bounds "to gather berries or flowers to decorate her room" (7). Even in her grief for her mother, she finds solace in nature:

The graveyard was in the woods, and twilight was coming on. Nothing broke the deathlike stillness except the occasional twitter of a bird. My spirit was overawed by the solemnity of the scene. For more than ten years I had frequented this spot, but never had it seemed to me so sacred as now. A black stump, at the head of my mother's grave, was all that remained of a tree my father had planted.
(90)

Any realization of a conscious personal quest, however, does not occur until she has progressed through a period of rebellion.

After the deaths of many loved ones, Brent's "heart rebelled against God, who had taken from me mother, father, mistress, and friend" (10). When the child cannot find comfort in the long-term assurance of an abstract God, she seizes upon the short-term goal of good behavior: "But we, who were slave-children, without father or mother, could not expect to be happy. We must be good; perhaps that would bring us contentment" (18).

Under the ownership of a demanding new master, however, Brent finds that exemplary deportment is impossible, as she encounters the formidable dragon or monster of the romance. Not only does Dr. Flint endeavor to make her life miserable as a servant, but when she begins to grow into young womanhood at the age of fifteen, he suddenly commences sexual harassment:

My master met me at every turn, reminding me that I belonged to him, and swearing by heaven and earth that he would compel me to submit to him. If I went out for a breath of fresh air, after a day of unwearied toil, his footsteps dogged me. If I knelt by my mother's grave, his dark shadow fell on me even there. The light heart which nature had given me became heavy with sad forebodings.
(28)

She considers herself "struggling alone in the powerful grasp of the demon Slavery" (54). The dragon that guards the treasure hoard in the romance has materialized for her into the form of an institution which grants ownership of her to a man who stands sentry between her and her legal freedom—and her sexual freedom. She even extends the metaphor of demon into a menacing animal form: "O, the serpent of Slavery has many and poisonous fangs" (62). Later, when one of her hiding places is in Snaky Swamp, she has to fend off real snakes, but they are only partially as monstrous as the human perpetrators of slavery: "But even those large, venomous snakes were less dreadful to my imagination than the white men in that community called civilized" (113).

Consequently, in Brent's "quest" for identity as a free person, she must conquer the menacing monster however it materializes. Therefore, Dr. Flint's sexual attentions force her into desperate means. After he refuses to allow her free black lover to marry her, and realizing that her childhood is over anyway, she gives herself sexually to another white man whose compassionate nature may lead him to buy her and subsequently to grant her freedom. Reminding her reader that "the condition of a slave confuses all principles of morality, and, in fact, renders the practice of them impossible" (55), she maintains that "the slave woman ought not to be judged by the same standard as others" (56). Thus, she "continues to rebel by rejecting the right of others to apply their standards to her" (Becker 417). Brent also achieves a significant step in her quest for personal freedom by initiating her sexual experience with a man of her own choice: "It seems less degrading to give one's self, than to submit to compulsion" (55). While exhibiting a romance hero's self-reliance, she also "asserts liberty and autonomy as alternative values for slave women" (Nudelman 940).

At this point in the narrative, Brent's quest toward self-actualization is consciously active, but her endeavors do not assume the actual movement of a journey motif until a later time. After the births of her two children, she realizes she must physically relocate herself into free territory where she can take them in order to spare them the experiences of slavery. The news that her son and daughter are to be "broke in" at the plantation motivates her to speak the words that prove to be the pivotal point in her quest: "It nerved me to immediate action" (94). Her decision moves her into a flight that is parallel to the journey of the romance hero, a passage filled with obstacles and trials.

Frye explains that the romance hero's passage must move him into a dangerous descent pattern, into a place where he is isolated, immobile and almost mechanical in behavior (129). In the romance, this place is often a cave, labyrinth, or prison; ironically, Linda Brent's lower region is actually an elevated area—a tiny garret in her grandmother's attic. To get to this hiding place, she must don the traditional romance "disguise," in her case, sailor's clothes and charcoal for her light complexion, and she must survive a terrifying obstacle—concealment in a snake-infested swamp.

Finally, Brent is temporarily safe from her relentless master in a space only nine feet long, seven feet wide, and three feet high—"a dismal hole [that] was to be my home for a long, long time" (113). Enduring these cramped quarters for seven years, she experiences the romance hero's isolation from his social community and demonstrates the stamina required to survive forza, violence that threatens the hero's successful quest (Frye 65-66). Whereas Brent has escaped the physical violence typically inflicted on slaves, she must now tolerate the bodily discomfort and pain caused by her restricted environment. A thin roof of shingles exposes her to the intense heat of summer that creates suffocating conditions and to the dreadful chill of winter which numbs and frostbites her extremities. "My limbs were benumbed by inaction, and the cold filled them with cramp. I had a very painful sensation of coldness in my head; even my face and tongue stiffened, and I lost the power of speech" (122). Occasionally, storms soak her clothing and bedding; sometimes hundreds of little red insects "fine as a needle's point" (115) torment her skin with intolerable burning; often, rats and mice running over her bed prohibit rest and sleep; and always, stifling air, total darkness, limited movement and tedious monotony are constant trials that compose "long, gloomy days, with no object for my eye to rest upon, and no thoughts to occupy my mind, except the dreary past and the uncertain future!" (117).

Along with forza is the corresponding concept of froda, or fraud, involving elements of guile and craft that can be used against the hero to hinder progress or that can assist survival and eventual continuation of the quest (Frye 68-70). Fortunately, Brent is well-equipped, in spite of her physical difficulties, to use her own froda to her advantage against her shrewd pursuer. First of all, her hiding place is wisely chosen; her own grand-mother's house, in the same neighborhood as her master's, is the last place he would consider searching: "there was no place, where slavery existed, that could have afforded me so good a place of concealment" (117). Also, her resourcefulness leads her to create a one-inch hole, her "loophole of retreat" (114), through which to view any activities in the yard below. This opening not only provides her with a psychological balance of reality outside her isolated sphere but also gives her courage and mental stamina to survive by providing visual and aural access to her children who play nearby.

Finally, understanding Dr. Flint's shrewd, persistent nature, Brent "resolves to match my cunning against his cunning" (128). She writes letters to him, dates them ahead and sends them to be mailed from New York and Boston by way of supportive friends and family members. Her garret is a safe haven from which to throw her pursuer off her trail, "from which to spy on her enemy and to wage psychological warfare against him" (Yellin xxviii), and through froda, she "challenges the masculine assumption that physical battle is the most effective and heroic" (Sale 708). Also, her letters provide the romance element of twins or double identity. They "project an alter ego in freedom up North" (Andrews 259) while the still-enslaved Brent awaits the appropriate time to continue her journey.

Also operating within her quest is the oracle of the romance, the voice of a god-like figure behind the action who expresses his will and speaks of the ultimate outcome (Frye 107). Brent's oracle is her grandmother who not only has always been her icon of goodness and strength but who also consistently "speaks" to her during her long sojourn in the attic. With a system of different knocks for different meanings, her grandmother comes to her as often as possible to whisper words of counsel, encouragement and assurance that someday Brent will be safe with her children.

The day does finally come when Brent becomes mobile in her quest, and with this forward movement comes the romance "ascent" phase. Even though she is not yet legally free, her relocation in Philadelphia places her at least in the improved condition of being on free soil and temporarily safe from her pursuer. Jacobs's rhetoric indicates an ascent pattern and underscores the momentous rise in Brent's situation; she comes up on the deck of a boat to view the sunrise, to see "the great orb come up slowly out of the water, as it seemed" (158). Here, also, continues the theme of double identity. Not realizing that Brent will be on the same boat, her friend has assumed her first name; and when the two meet on board, Fanny exclaims, "Linda, can this be you? orisit your ghost?" (156). When finally among people in the city streets, Brent's real identity is still in question: "My face was so blistered and peeled, by sitting on deck, in wind and sunshine, that I thought they could not easily decide to what nation I belonged" (160).

A trial scene is common near the end of a romance, usually an unjust trial created by society as a whole rather than by an individual (Frye 139). Brent's final trial is a composite of negative experiences brought about by racial prejudice in the northern states. Even though she inhabits free territory, she still must operate as a black person in a white society and as a light-complected female among blacks. Dismayed, she must continue to cope with "the same manifestations of that cruel prejudice, which so discourages the feelings, and represses the energies of the colored people" (176). Then, after sending for her children and living in New York, the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act exacerbates her trepidation:

All that winter I lived in a state of anxiety. When I took the children out to breathe the air, I closely observed the countenances of all I met. I dreaded the approach of summer, when snakes and slave-holders make their appearance. I was, in fact, a slave in New York, as subject to slave laws as I had been in a Slave State. Strange incongruity in a State called free!
(193)

Brent's trial period clearly parallels that of the romance where "it is much more frequently the individual … who has the vision of liberation, and the society they are involved with that wants to remain in a blind and gigantic darkness" (Frye 139).

Her vision of liberation achieves reality, however, when compassionate new friends procure freedom for her and her children. After years of "flying from pillar to post … as if the chase was never to end" (198), her journey is over and her quest is complete. Her persecution is ended, and the burden of a flight from slavery has been lifted from her weary shoulders: "I and my children are now free! We are as free from the power of slave-holders as are the white people of the north; and though that, according to my ideas, is not saying a great deal, it is a vast improvement in my condition" (201).

Linda Brent has indeed improved her condition by affirming her identity as a free human being, and her quest is parallel to that of the traditional romance hero. Harriet Jacobs portrays an engrossing protagonist who convincingly represents the composite role of heroic slave, heroic mother and heroic female; the persona of romance hero not only adds another dimension to this character but does so without detracting from the exemplary qualities of the others. Furthermore, Brent's capacity in this role convincingly crosses gender lines. Jacobs reverses the idea that heroism is accessible only by traditional male qualities of power and aggressiveness. In his analysis of female heroism, Lee R. Edwards suggests how this might be viable: "The possibility of the woman hero is contingent only on recognizing the aspirations of consciousness as human attributes.…Heroism thus read and understood is a human necessity, capable of being represented equally by either sex" (11). The "human necessity" prompting Brent's struggle and survival disregards gender requisites, and Brent emerges as a heroic human being, desiring the consciousness of identity.

Recognition of this "new kind of female hero" as a rendering of an "old" literary male type acquires special significance when we realize that Jacobs's romance hero is effective as a literary transition. Brent's search for identity forms a bridge between the traditional male figure of the past and the unconventional female protagonist of the future. "Jacobs's book may well have influenced Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's pioneering novel Iola Leroy; Or, Shadows Uplifted (1892), which in turn helped shape the writings of Zora Neale Hurston and other foremothers of black women writing today" (Yellin xxix). In fact, Hurston's Janie Crawford in Their Eyes Were Watching God has recently been considered as a convincing portrayal of the romance heroine (Daniel 66-76). Both Janie and Linda Brent acquire the same important quality of heroic female self-affirmation, the ability to survive on their own.

Critics are generally in consensus that contemporary female protagonists are portrayed with new forms of empowerment:

By the beginning of the twentieth century, novelists seem readier to abandon the project of entrapping the female heroic character and begin the task of inventing maneuvers whereby she can break out of familial, sexual, and social bondage into an altered and appropriate world.
(Edwards 16)

Undeniably, Brent is entrapped in traditional entanglements of female roles, but Jacobs gives her the "maneuvers" with which to "break out." Equipping her "new kind of hero" with the provisions of the romance hero, Jacobs gives literature a persona who is more appropriate for "an altered and appropriate world." Placing Jacobs's female protagonist in the role of romance hero in no way ignores the fact that Brent's narrative is actually Jacobs's own story. In fact, this persona extends into circumstances of her situation after her quest ends. With the romance hero's cyclical movement back to his place of origin, she eventually revisits the house of her childhood and concealment. Returning under extremely different circumstances, she writes to a friend that "the change is so great I can hardly take it all in" (249).

Because this narrative of "incidents" is not a fictional account does not prevent it from revealing similarities to a fictional genre and to a fictional hero prototype. After all, according to her friend Amy Post, Jacobs was operating in a society that "sanctions laws and customs which make the experiences of the present more strange than any fictions of the past" (204). Certainly, in penning her own story during the popularity of the antislavery novel, Jacobs used the form of narrative that "served as a conduit through which African American women could reach their Anglo sisters" (Foster 101), but her protagonist also provides writers after her with a "new kind of hero" who transcends race and class and gender and time.

Works Cited

Andrews, William L. To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1986.

Becker, Elizabeth C. "Harriet Jacobs's Search for Home." College Language Association Journal 35 (1992): 411-21.

Daniel, Janice. "'De understandin' to go 'long wid it': Realism and Romance in Their Eyes Were Watching God." Southern Literary Journal 24 (Fall 1991): 66-76.

Edwards, Lee R. Psyche As Hero: Female Heroism and Fictional Form. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1984.

Foster, Frances Smith. Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746-1892. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993.

Frye, Northrop. The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1976.

Jacobs, Harriet A. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself. Ed. Jean Fagan Yellin. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987.

Nudelman, Franny. "Harriet Jacobs and the Sentimental Politics of Female Suffering." English Literary History 59 (1992): 939-64.

Post, Amy. Appendix. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself. By Harriet Ann Jacobs. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987. 203-04.

Sale, Maggie. "Critiques from Within: Antebellum Projects of Resistance." American Literature 64 (1992): 695-718.

Yellin, Jean Fagan. Introduction. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself. By Harriet Ann Jacobs. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987. xiii-xxxiv.

Jacobs, Harriet: Title Commentary

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HARRIET JACOBS: TITLE COMMENTARY

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

JOANNE M. BRAXTON (ESSAY DATE SUMMER 1986)

SOURCE: Braxton, Joanne M. "Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: The Re-Definition of the Slave Narrative Genre." The Massachusetts Review 27, no. 2 (summer 1986): 379-87.

In the following essay, Braxton explores the impact of Jacobs's slave narrative on the male-dominated genre.

"Rise up, ye women that are at ease! Hear my voice, ye careless daughters! Give ear unto my speech."

Isaiah, XXX, original epigram from Incidents in the
Life of a Slave Girl

"reader, be assured this narrative is no fiction." Preface by the Author,
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

We have read this book with no ordinary interest, for we are acquainted with the writer; and have heard many of the incidents from her own lips, and have great confidence in her truthfulness and integrity. Between two and three years ago, a coloured woman, about as dark as a southern Spaniard or a Portuguese, aged about five-and-forty, with a kind and pleasing expression of countenance, called on us, bearing an introductory letter from one of the most honoured friends of the anti-slavery cause in the United States. This letter requested our friendly offices on behalf of Linda, who was desirous of publishing her narrative in England. It happened that the friends at whose house we were then staying were so much interested by this dusky stranger's conversation and demeanour, that they induced her to become their guest for some weeks. Thus we had an excellent opportunity of becoming acquainted with one of the greatest heroines we have ever met with. Her manners were marked by refinement and sensibility, and by an utter absence of pretense or affectation; and we were deeply touched by the circumstances of her early life which she then communicated, and which exactly coincide with those of the volume now before us.⁷

She must conceal her quest for literacy and her ability to read in order to prevent the master from slipping her foul notes in an attempt to seduce her.
She must conceal her love for a free black man she eventually sends away for his own good, as well as the identity of the white man who becomes the father of her children and who eventually betrays her.
She conceals her pregnancy from everyone.
She must conceal her plans to run away, working hard and attempting to appear contented during the time she formulates these plans.
When Linda "runs away," she is disguised as a man and taken to the Snaky Swamp, a location she finds more hospitable than landed slave culture.
She is then concealed in the home of a neighboring white woman (a slaveholder sympathetic to her plight), and, finally, in a crawl space in her grandmother's house for seven years.
While concealed in her grandmother's house, Linda deceives the master by writing letters a friend mails from New York. When Flint takes off to New York to look for the fugitive, she is practically in his own back yard.
Linda is taken to the North in disguise, and even after she arrives there, she must conceal her identity with a veil, which she only removes when her freedom is purchased by a group of Northern white women. Through quick-thinking, the use of sass and invective, and a series of deceptions, Linda finally realizes freedom for herself and her children.

I don't know as any one has ever found what the composition of this sassy wood really is; but I am told it is a mixture of certain barks. There is a tree there which grows very tall, called the sassy wood tree, but there is something mixed with this which is very difficult to find out, and the natives do not tell what it is. They say that it is one of their medicines that they use to carry out their law for punishing witches; so you cannot find out what it is.

"The accused had two gallons to drink. If she throws it up, she has gained her case," Mrs. Smith wrote.¹⁰ So "sass" can kill.

Notes

See James Olney, "Autobiography and the Cultural Moment" in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980), p. 26.
See Robert Stepto's "Teaching Afro-American Literature: Survey or Tradition," in Afro-American Literature: The Reconstruction of Instruction, ed. Dexter Fisher and Robert B. Stepto (New York: Modern Language Association, 1979), pp. 8-25. Within the "continuum of [black] artistic endeavor" described by Stepto as a temenos or "magic circle" exists yet another realm of artistic expression and meaning, that of the black woman, the Afra-American.
A woman called "Belinda" wrote "The Cruelty of Men Whose Faces Were Like the Moon: the Petition of an African Slave to the Legislature of Massachusetts." The title of the text suggests an awareness of racial and sexual oppression that is both race and sex specific. Belinda speaks to the cruelty of men, white men, whose moon-like faces symbolize strangeness, spiritual barrenness and death. See "Belinda: or the Cruelty of Men Whose Faces Were Like the Moon" in American Museum and Repository of Ancient and Modern Fugitive Pieces, Prose and Poetical Volume I (June, 1787).
See Robert B. Stepto, "Narration, Authentication, and Authorial Control in Frederick Douglass' Narrative of 1845," in Afro-American Literature: The Reconstruction of Instruction, pp. 178-91. See also Robert B. Stepto, Beyond the Veil (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1979), chapters 1-3.
See Arna Bontemps, "The Slave Narrative: An American Genre," Introduction to Great Slave Narratives (Boston: Beacon, 1969), vol. XV; John W. Blassingame, "Critical Essay on Sources," in The Slave Community (New York: Oxford UP, 1972), pp. 233-34; and Jean F. Yellin, "Written by Herself: Harriet Brent Jacobs' Slave Narrative,"in American Literature 53 (November, 1981), 480-85.
Jean Yellin first disclosed the existence of Jacobs' autobiographical apprentice piece, "Letter From a Fugitive Slave," in "Written by Herself: Harriet Brent Jacobs' Slave Narrative." "Letter From a Fugitive Slave," published in the New York Tribune, 21 June 1853, treats the subject matter which later becomes Incidents in Mrs. Jacobs' distinctive style. Mrs. Jacobs' correspondence with Rochester Quaker Mrs. Amy Post verifies her claim to authorship of these letters to the Tribune.
Rev. of Incidents, Anti-Slavery Advocate, London, England, May 1, 1861.
In "Women's Autobiographies and the Male Tradition," her introduction to Women's Autobiography (Bloomington: U of Indiana P. 1980), Estelle Jelinek discusses some of the differences between the autobiographies of men and women.
Harriet "Linda Brent" Jacobs, "Preface by the Author," Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself (Boston: Thayer and Eldridge, 1861), p. 1. Subsequently referred to in the text as "Jacobs."
See Amanda Smith's Autobiography (Chicago: Meyer and Brother, 1893), pp. 386-89.

SIDONIE SMITH (ESSAY DATE 1992)

SOURCE: Smith, Sidonie. "Resisting the Gaze of Embodiment: Women's Autobiography in the Nineteenth Century." In American Women's Autobiography: Fea(s)ts of Memory, edited by Margo Culley, pp. 75-110. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992.

In the following excerpt, Smith explores how Jacobs asserts her selfhood in her narrative, staking her claim to humanness despite her status as a slave, an African, and a woman.

I am well aware that many will accuse me of indecorum for presenting these pages to the public; for the experiences of this intelligent and much injured woman belong to a class which some call delicate subjects, and others indelicate. This peculiar phase of Slavery has generally been kept veiled; but the public ought to be made acquainted with its monstrous features, and I willingly take the responsibility of presenting them with the veil withdrawn. I do this for the sake of my sisters in bondage, who are suffering wrongs so foul, that our ears are too delicate to listen to them.
(4)

So I was sold at last! A human being sold in the free city of New York! The bill of sale is on record, and future generations will learn from it that women were articles of traffic in New York, late in the nineteenth century of the Christian religion. It may hereafter prove a useful document to antiquaries, who are seeking to measure the progress of civilization in the United States. I well know the value of that bit of paper; but much as I love freedom I do not like to look upon it. I am deeply grateful to the generous friend who procured it, but I despise the miscreant who demanded payment for what never rightfully belonged to him or his.
(200)

Assuming the authoritative stance of a biblical prophet, Jacobs ("Brent") defiantly, unsentimentally, scorns the hypocrisy of the nation and its founding documents.¹³

Notes

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese (171) explores Jacobs' struggle of wills.
For further discussions of "true womanhood," see Spruill; Scott; Clinton; Berg.
"Strength and ability to bear fatigue, argued to be so distasteful a presence in a white woman, were positive features to be emphasized in the promotion and selling of a black female field hand at a slave auction" (Carby, Reconstructing Black Womanhood 25).
What Carby claims for black women after the Civil War applies even more certainly to female slaves before emancipation: "Black women were relegated to a place outside the ideological construction of 'womanhood.' That term included only white women; therefore the rape of black women was of no consequence outside the black community" ("On the Threshold of Woman's Era" 308-9). Carby is elaborating the theories of the black feminist Ida B. Wells who explored the politics of lynching at the end of the nineteenth century. See, for instance, Wells, On Lynching (New York, 1969), for a collection of her essays. Carby also explores the politics of the black female body in Reconstructing Black Womanhood (26-32).
"In the nineteenth century," writes Gilman, "the black female was widely perceived as possessing not only a 'primitive' sexual appetite but also the external signs of this temperament—'primitive' genitalia" (232). Fascination with this phenomenon of physical and physiognomic abnormality reveals itself in the century's preoccupation with the "Hottentot Venus" whose visual characteristics—large buttocks, flat nose, strange labia—function as signs of her phylogenetic place. The critical significance of establishing the difference of black female anatomy lay, according to Gilman, in the following rationalization: "If their sexual parts could be shown to be inherently different, this would be a sufficient sign that the blacks were a separate (and, needless to say, lower) race, as different from the European as the proverbial orangutan" (235). In the catalogue of defining physical characteristics of the female Hottentot, the century read the signs of regression to an earlier state of human evolution. Moreover, in identifying some of those same characteristics as markers of prostitutes (the most sexualized of white women) and in describing the sexual practices of primitive tribes as forms of prostitution, medical anthropologists linked black sexuality and prostitution as two sources of social corruption and disease (syphilis in particular). Sexuality as the dark force in civilized "man" was thus identified with, projected onto, the prostitute and the black female (240-57).
Jean Fagan Yellin explores Jacobs' use of the conventions of sentimental fiction in her Introduction (xxix xxx).
Slave marriages were not legally valid. The indiscriminate use of the slave woman's body by white men made fatherhood an absence. Moreover, the subjection of the female body to the will of the white master, functioning as an effective means of "unmanning" the black male, in one more way destabilized the family and, as Elizabeth Fox-Genovese suggests, left black women with "no satisfactory social definition of themselves as women" (169).
See Andrews' extended discussion of the thematics of secrecy in the narrative (254-59).
The history of the text's fate at the hands of white abolitionists, critics, and literary historians, however, adds yet another story to her story. The text is legitimized by Lydia Maria Child's attestation that it is the authentic story of the author. Recognizing that "it will naturally excite surprise that a woman reared in Slavery should be able to write so well" (Jacobs 3), Child both explains the author's circumstances and assures the reader that she has acted as editor only. This attestation notwithstanding, the text was labeled fictional by subsequent generations until Jean Fagan Yellin recently verified the authenticity of the places, people, and experiences narrated by "Linda Brent." Ironically, the text as "technology of reason" spoke against itself. See Yellin's Introduction to the text (xiiixxxv).
Deck (34-36) explores the formulaic patterns imposed by white abolitionists on the experiences and narratives of ex-slaves. See also Yellin, Intricate Knot; and Stepto.
For an elaboration of the deterritorialized nature of women's autobiographical writing, see Kaplan.
"Living as we did—on the edge—we developed a particular way of seeing reality. We looked both from the outside in and from the inside out. We focused our attention on the center as well as the margin. We understood both" (hooks preface).
See Mary Helen Washington's comments on Jacobs' empowered and assertive voice (11-12).
See Andrews (251); and Niemtzow (106). Andrews takes issue with Niemtzow's analysis.
Yellin argues that "instead of dramatizing the idea that the private sphere is women's appropriate area of concern … Incidents embodies a social analysis asserting that the denial of domestic and familial values by chattel slavery is a social issue that its female readers should address in the public arena" (Introduction xxxii). For a discussion of nineteenth-century versions of "domestic feminism" see Baym.