15
Philathia Bolton and Venetria K. Patton
The subject of slavery has engaged the literary imagination of writers across time, from former slaves during the antebellum period to contemporary authors of neo‐slave narratives. Two generations of audiences have now witnessed televised versions of Alex Haley’s novel about the enslaved African Kunta Kinte and his descendants, Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1976), suggesting how central a role slavery and its aftermath has played in the development of the United States. To fully understand why we are continually drawn to the slave’s story, we must understand the history of slave narratives, especially those written before 1865. In fact, Charles Davis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. would limit slave narratives to “written works published before 1865, after which time de jure slavery ceased to exist” (1991: xii). Other critics distinguish between the purposes of antebellum and postbellum slave narratives, suggesting that the latter tend to focus on the reconciliation of the races rather than on proving the slave’s humanity.
The rhetorical aim of antebellum slave narratives, argues James Olney, is to indict the institution of slavery, and their emphasis is consequently not the uniqueness of a particular slave’s experience. Olney outlines several shared features of those narratives, including an emphasis on birth and familial context, the selling off of family members, the cruelty and violence of working conditions and masters, the challenges faced when seeking literacy, the details of patrols and attempts at escape, and the efforts made to retain a sense of cultural identity. As he notes, these features “not only describe […] rather loosely a great many lesser narratives,” they also describe “quite closely the greatest of them all, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself (1845), which paradoxically transcends the slave narrative mode while being at the same time its fullest, most exact representative” (Olney 1991: 153–154). At the opening of his account, Douglass thus emphasizes that his own experiences are typical of the experiences of other slaves:
I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it. By far the larger part of the slaves know as little of their ages as horses know of theirs. […] I do not remember to have ever met a slave who could tell of his birthday. […] My father was a white man […] My mother and I were separated when I was but an infant – before I knew her as my mother. It is a common custom, in the part of Maryland from which I ran away, to part children from their mothers at a very early age.
(1982: 47–48)
Slave narratives written by men tend to follow the pattern outlined by Olney and illustrated by Douglass’s famous Narrative. For example, the Narrative of William Wells Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Written by Himself (1847) published two years later, not only has a similar title, it also has similar scenes. Like Douglass, Brown is not sure of his birth date and is separated from his mother, though he does know that his white father is a relative of his master.
Another central concern of the slave narrative is education and the quest for literacy. Douglass is initially taught to read by his mistress, Mrs. Auld, until her husband discovers what she is doing and forbids her from continuing because it is both dangerous and illegal to educate a slave: “‘A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master – to do as he is told to do. Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world. […] if you teach that nigger (speaking of myself) how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave’” (1982: 78). Overhearing this injunction spurs Douglass’s desire to become literate, and he begins tricking white children into teaching him their lessons. But not all slaves were denied an education. For example, in the History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave (1831), she describes learning to read from the kind daughter of her mistress, who has Mary repeat the lessons immediately after she has finished them. Other female slave narrators – including Elizabeth Keckley, author of Behind the Scenes: Or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House (1868) and Harriet Jacobs, writing under the pseudonym Linda Brent in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) – are also literate, as they refer to letters exchanged during their enslavement. In fact, literacy is regularly shown to be an important tool in attaining freedom.
The illiterate slave’s movement from orality to literacy is a trope that can be traced back to one of the earliest slave narratives, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, The African, Written by Himself (1789). Early in the narrative, the youthful Equiano does not even understand the process of reading, though he comes to understand its value: “I had often seen my master and Dick employed in reading; and I Had a great curiosity to talk to the books, as I thought they did. […] For that purpose I have often taken up a book, and talked to it, and then put my ears to it, when alone, in hopes it would answer me” (Equiano 1987: 43). Equiano not only comes to learn how to read and write, but also learns some navigation while out at sea with his master, Captain Pascal. These navigation lessons are reminiscent of Douglass’s account of learning to read with Mrs. Auld: “he [the Captain] used now and then to teach me some parts of Navigation himself. But some of our passengers, and others, seeing this, found much fault with him for it, saying it was a very dangerous thing to let a negro know Navigation; and thus I was hindered again in my pursuits” (1987: 90). Over the course of his narrative, Equiano moves from a naive understanding to a full command of literacy, which aids his quest for freedom. Equiano’s rhetorical strategy of linking his journey to freedom with his journey from orality to literacy became a powerful trope echoed in later slave narratives, including Douglass’s. In fact, Gates goes so far as to refer to Equiano’s narrative as a “silent second text” for Douglass’s narrative, which also includes the subtitle “Written by Himself” (Equiano 1987: xiv).
As a genre, the slave narrative has traditionally distinguished itself by virtue of its focus on literacy, its appeal to Christian values, and, most centrally, its chronicling of the author’s arduous journey from slavery to freedom. Drawing on Gates’s research, Kimberly Rae Conner argues that such works “offered convincing evidence in making a case for the humanity of people of African descent by setting forth a particular image of ex‐slaves that emphasized commonly admired human traits and virtues.” Moreover, as she notes, “demonstrating their proficiency in language arts became a form of resistance – a literal and literary way to articulate the humanity of black Americans” (1996: 36–37). As Gates and others have suggested, arguments about the presumed sub‐humanity of Africans intensified this focus on literacy. Ex‐slaves were confronting an audience influenced by ideas promulgated during the Enlightenment, including the belief that reason and intellect were the chief markers of humanity. In particular, literacy was used as evidence of intelligence. This created a major hurdle for slaves in the United States, most of whom were denied education and many of whom confronted laws banning them from learning how to read and write. The path to freedom, paradoxically, necessitated proof of full humanity that in turn demanded literacy. Well aware of the obstacles and risks they faced, ex‐slaves persisted in pursuit of literacy and the right to tell their own stories.
Their desire to do so was encouraged and facilitated by the abolitionist movement. Critics such as Houston Baker and Charles Nichols attribute burgeoning slave narratives to aggressive campaigns mounted by northern white abolitionists seeking to develop antislavery literature and, in the words of Nichols, an “eager public” ready to read them (Nichols 1959: 151). In his introduction to the 1982 Penguin edition of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Baker notes that speeches were effective but not as far‐reaching as “a written mode of presentation […] [that could be spread] to the largest and most diverse audiences” (11). He mentions Henry Bibb, whose 1849 slave narrative reveals a similar awareness. Noting that he wrote in order “that light and truth might be spread on the evils of slavery as far as possible,” Bibb continued: “I also wanted to leave my humble testimony on record against this man‐destroying system, to be read by succeeding generations when my body shall lie moldering in the dust” (quoted in Baker 1982: 12). Bibb was one of many former slaves who, between the years of 1820 and 1860, wrote and published their firsthand accounts of slavery. During this period, such slave narratives became a significant body of literature with an “immense readership,” as Baker points out:
Selling for twenty‐five or fifty cents in paper‐bound pamphlets and for a dollar and a half in more elegant issue, slave narratives provided ready evidence for the arguments of antislavery spokesmen. The stories of ex‐bondsmen not only offered testimony of the cruelties of American slavery but also gave warrant that Afro‐Americans possessed the higher intellectual power granted to all human beings.
(1982: 10)
Interesting to note here is Baker’s privileging of a masculinist voice, as both those calling for antislavery material, the “spokesmen,” and those writing it, “ex‐bondsmen,” are gendered male. Even though this could well be attributed to accepted rhetorical conventions of a time not tasked with adopting the use of gender‐neutral terms, more recent scholarship reveals that this attention to gender could be meaningful in differentiating narratives by men from those produced by women. The most salient difference was men’s focus on literacy as a means of achieving full personhood and freedom. Although the slave narrative as a genre is characterized by certain key features, variations in the ways in which these features are manifested can be seen along gender lines. We will examine those distinctions more fully in the rest of this chapter, with specific attention to the roles of audience, gender, and race in the crafting of narratives by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs.
Many scholars, including Olney, Valerie Smith (2001), Jill LeRoy‐Frazier (2004), and Deborah McDowell (1991), have noted the primacy of literacy in slave narratives by men, citing the Narrative of Frederick Douglass as a classic example. Discussing differences between the narratives of Douglass and Jacobs, Winifred Morgan observes: “As the single most widely read slave narrative, Douglass’s Narrative has often come to represent the entire genre. Despite its impressive craft, however, it presents problems as a representative text. […] its implicit assumption that literacy provides the power leading to individual freedom does not characterize women’s narratives” (1994: 81; see also Drake 1997). Morgan goes on to note, in contrast, that “the structural core for Incidents emerges from a series of encounters through which Jacobs learns to rely on some relationships and painfully discovers how unreliable others can prove,” whereas Douglass’s narrative caters to “what his nineteenth‐century white male audience valued” (1994: 86, 81). She quotes Valerie Smith, who observes that the effectiveness of Douglass’s narrative was due in part to his “demonstrating a slave can be a man in terms of all the qualities valued by his northern middle‐class reader – physical power, perseverance, [and] literacy” (1994: 81). Morgan appears to align with Smith, who believes that Douglass reinforces a “patriarchal structure largely responsible for his oppression.” Interpreting his depiction of women in ways that support this reading of the Narrative, she argues that they are essentially portrayed as victims, subordinate to and at the behest of men, regardless of race (1994: 81–82).
Although we would agree that certain passages in Douglass’s narrative invite such readings, particularly his account of the brutal flogging of his Aunt Hester, there are nonetheless similarities between his treatment of women and their role in Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. If one distances the male gaze and instead attends to issues of gender and the cult of true womanhood,1 these narratives converge, offering convincing arguments against slavery through their emphasis on family, motherhood, and piety. Barbara Welter in her pivotal essay “The Cult of True Womanhood” identifies “piety” among the four tenets of this doctrine, which also consists of “purity, submissiveness, and domesticity” (1966: 152). These tenets are inextricably tied to the roles women play within the familial structure as “mother, daughter, sister, wife – woman” (1966: 152). Accordingly, to be woman, a “true” woman, one must fit within one of these roles. Welter indicates that she arrived at what the doctrine entails, in part, from “a survey of almost all of the women’s magazines published for more than three years during the period 1820–60” (1966: 151n), coincidently the same period that Houston Baker marks as witnessing the proliferation of slave narratives.
This detail suggests that inasmuch as arguments can be made about a presumed white male audience for Douglass’s narrative, a compelling case can be made that his target audience also included northern white women. Nichols supports that view in his essay analyzing audience during the antebellum period. “By 1850 almost any book by or about a Negro was in great demand,” he reports. “So successful were the narratives from a commercial point of view that free Negroes and whites took up the pen and wrote on similar subjects” (1959: 151). Harriet Beecher Stowe was one of the most famous of those writers, and her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) was in part inspired by the slave narratives she read, including Douglass’s. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin was received by a public whose appetite had already been whetted by the slave narratives,” states Nichols. “In the millions of copies of Mrs. Stowe’s book, sold all over the world, the demand for this type of literature reached its apogee” (1959: 151). Whether such works were read for entertainment, curiosity, or in support of abolition, it is certain that slave narratives gained a significant white female audience.
Considering this audience, the focus on what slavery does to the family and its assault on the virtues of women, who are deemed society’s moral center, became a powerful rhetorical tool wielded by former slaves, regardless of gender. “If anyone, male or female, dared to tamper with the complex virtues which made up ‘True Womanhood,’” explains Welter, “he was damned immediately as an enemy of God, of civilization and of the Republic.” She then underscores the “true” woman’s commission to “uphold the pillars of the temple [or society] with her frail white hand” (1966: 152). With an awareness of white women reading these narratives, and the influence of those women on white men in society, writers of slave narratives could invoke this doctrine to “right” society by having women save their slaveholding men from destruction. This charge would only register if this particular audience viewed slaves as de facto members of society, having the same hopes and desires as their own families, rather than as chattel.
Douglass seems to establish his entire story on the centrality of women, both as readers and as key figures in his narrative, in order to make a case for the full humanity of people of African descent. Consider, for example, the way he sets the tone for his narrative early in the first chapter, where he introduces his mother, Harriet Bailey. “I never saw my mother, to know her as such,” Douglass recalls, “more than four or five times in my life; and each of those times was very short in duration” (1982: 48). They were separated during his infancy, and she died while Douglass was still a young child, but he describes his mother’s visits to him. She was a field hand and would walk for 12 miles to be with him at night. Once there, Douglass recalls, “[s]he would lie down with me, and get me to sleep, but long before I was waked she was gone” (1982: 48). He could have provided a brief, passing note about his mother, particularly because he knew so little about her. Instead, he develops out of the paucity of information about her a story that would frame his own. Hers is his first story.
Its primacy struck an emotional chord for nineteenth‐century readers about the toll slavery takes on family. As Stephanie Smith puts it, “Douglass manipulated antebellum sentimental ideology […] to make a mother’s heart emblematic of a naturalized, ideal, social body ‘America’ who could embrace all her children. That Douglass should also imagine a horrific perversion of maternal love as an analogy to America slavery is not surprising” (1992: 193). Douglass couches the story of his mother within a larger one about what slavery does to those who insist they are human, with deep, familial connections, and especially to women, who are viewed as the nucleus of those relationships. For those attuned to the rhetoric of the cult of true womanhood, slavery in effect forces black women out of the cult, particularly as it pertains to the experience of motherhood. Douglass channels these familial sentiments through the story of his mother, arguing that slavery “hinders the development of the child’s affection towards its mother […] destroy[ing] the natural affection of the mother for the child” (1982: 48). One might read Smith’s argument as one that illustrates the ways in which Douglass evokes motherhood to invite an emphatic transfer of affection from white families to black families, underscoring America’s mistreatment of people of African descent.
As Smith argues, Douglass’s depiction of slavery also brings to light a metanarrative about a gendered, female America’s gross negligence of “her children.” As he opens chapter 1 with the story of his mother, he concludes it with the brutal beating of his Aunt Hester, which Douglass describes in vivid detail: “I have often awakened at the dawn of day by the most heart‐rending shrieks of an own aunt of mine, whom he [his master, Captain Anthony] used to tie up to a joist, and whip upon her naked back till she was literally covered with blood.” Douglass introduces this scene before going on to insinuate that the brutality his aunt faced was a result of Captain Anthony’s desire to keep her sexually to himself: “Why master was so careful of her may be safely left to conjecture. She was a woman of noble form, and of graceful proportions, having very few equals, and fewer superiors, in personal appearance, among the colored or white women of our neighborhood” (1982: 51, 51–52). It is important to note that he mentions Aunt Hester after touting the virtues of his mother, which shapes the ways in which the audience would view his aunt’s particular iteration of womanhood. Introduced shortly after Douglass’s mother, Aunt Hester emerges as a vulnerable woman at the mercy of her master instead of as one who fits the stereotype of seductress. This strategy of telling these stories of black women early in his narrative elucidates slavery’s violence against the black family, particularly its most vulnerable members – women and children.
Douglass strengthens this point by describing his aunt’s flogging from his perspective as a child and through his use of the modifying phrase “an own aunt of mine” (1982: 51). As is commonly known, the frequent separations of members of slave families occasioned a network of surrogacy wherein those who remained behind on plantations after a family member was sold would be “adopted” as family by other slaves on the plantation.2 Douglass’s phrasing “an own aunt of mine” within this context could be read as more than a simple description. He could be intentionally signaling his biological connection to this woman in hopes of intensifying rhetoric about violence against families during slavery. Before he reflects on the significance of literacy, Douglass situates himself as a member of a household of women, and he does so in ways that appeal to the fundamental values of the cult of true womanhood. His story is subsequently read through this lens.
Harriet Jacobs frames her narrative in similar ways, but with an even greater emphasis on family and ideals of the cult of true womanhood. In fact, the details of her account in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl make evident the way she dons the roles of daughter, sister, and mother to make her case against slavery. To be recognized as a woman, for Jacobs, would mean to be “humanized” in a way that would underscore the inhumanity of the institution of slavery. Her task would involve doing the paradoxical work of arguing for her virtues as woman while also revealing experiences that challenge those very virtues. Scholarship on her narrative, particularly essays written by Beth MacClay Doriani (1991), Sarah Way Sherman (1990), and Andrea Powell Wolfe (2008), indicate how fully Jacobs was informed about the discourse on what it means to be a true woman; she was keenly aware of what her candor might mean for the way she could be judged, and as a result she struggled to secure a suitable vehicle and venue to tell her story.
Both Jean Fagan Yellin and Frances Smith Foster have emphasized the ways in which this awareness influenced Jacobs’s story. In her essay “Written by Herself: Harriet Jacobs’ Slave Narrative” (1981), Yellin includes several valuable excerpts from letters written by Jacobs to her friend Amy Post. In one such letter, Jacobs conveys her fear about laying bare a story that would make her seem suspect as a model woman: “I have thought that I wanted some female friend to write a preface or some introductory remarks […] yet believe me, dear friend, there are many painful things in […] [my book] that make me shrink from asking the sacrifice from one so good and pure as yourself” (1981: 485–486). This apprehension illustrates Jacobs’s awareness of the cultural milieu in which she was writing and especially of societal expectations about upholding certain gender norms. Worthy of note is her rejection of the idea that expectations for her as a woman would differ greatly from those for white women. An awareness of her status and power as woman adds additional weight to the care she would take to shape her story for a particular audience.
Perhaps this anxiety is what caused Jacobs initially to appeal to Harriet Beecher Stowe. Jacobs asked Stowe to tell her life’s story, but her request was met with suspicion and was ultimately dismissed. Stowe said that she might use details from Jacobs’s story for a current project she was working on, “if [her life’s story] was true.” According to Yellin, this rejection, as well as the rebuff of Jacobs’s request to have her daughter accompany Stowe on a trip to England, led Jacobs to feel “denigrated as a mother, betrayed as woman, and threatened as a writer” (1981: 482). One could read Jacobs’s response as a sincere desire to be validated as a member of the group to whom she would direct her narrative. For Jacobs, Stowe’s rejection felt like a condemnation and was evidence that she was perceived as a “fallen” woman with illegitimate children. There is much irony in the negotiations black women made in seeking to locate themselves within society. On one hand, their legal status as chattel would seem to deny them expectations of wifedom and motherhood as perceived within the conventional family structure; for many, a slave was not considered fully human. On the other hand, a recognition of the humanity of a slave, and by extension her status as woman, could open such a slave to being judged by similar standards as her white counterparts.
Jacobs’s feelings of betrayal highlight this irony. However, she did not let these and other challenges keep her from writing and publishing her narrative. Frances Smith Foster states,
As a fugitive slave, [Jacobs] […] knew that friends or employers who were willing to adhere to the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” philosophy in her case might not be as supportive if she went public about her status. And if Jacobs had not known about professional jealousy and competition, she soon learned that she had to fight to protect her story and to establish her right to determine what should be told and how to tell it.
(2001: 317–318)
Foster acknowledges the politics involved in slaves seeking to tell their own stories, which includes a general sense about audiences’ assumptions of their unreliability. In the years leading up to and during the four years of the Civil War, white abolitionists were writing about people of African descent caught in the vice of slavery. They wrote fiction that took slavery as its theme, as did Stowe, and they also served as ghostwriters for illiterate slaves who depended on them to tell their stories.
In some other cases, white abolitionists functioned as liaisons for ex‐slaves writing their own stories, providing letters, prefaces, and introductions designed to authenticate the author and the narrative in the eyes of the white audience. In his Preface to Douglass’s narrative, for example, William Lloyd Garrison praises Douglass for being “[c]apable of high attainments as an intellectual and moral being” and for his conviction to “write his own Narrative, in his own style and according to the best of his ability, rather than to employ some one else” (Douglass 1982: 34, 37–38). The introduction by Lydia Maria Child, editor of Jacobs’s narrative, has a similar effect. She esteems Jacobs for being able to “write so well,” having been “reared in Slavery”; and she admonishes a potentially reluctant northern audience of white women to engage Jacobs’s shocking story of sexual abuse: “I am well aware that many will accuse me of indecorum for presenting these pages to the public, but the public ought to be made acquainted with its monstrous features” (Jacobs 2001: 6). Child takes responsibility for any offense, framing the entire apology with an explicit note of support: “The author of the following autobiography is personally known to me, and her conversation and manners inspire me with confidence” (2001: 5). Even as such statements testified to the character of the ex‐slave, they also reinforced – even if unintentionally – ideologies that relegated people of African descent to a subservient status. Without the authority of their white spokespersons, stories by ex‐slaves might not have gained traction on their own independent merit.
Like Douglass, Jacobs was well aware of these challenges but sought to circumvent them in ways that privileged her voice. She thus placed her own Preface before Child’s Introduction to Incidents: “Reader, be assured this narrative is no fiction,” Jacobs affirms:
I am aware that some of my adventures may seem incredible; but they are, nevertheless, strictly true. […] I have not written my experiences in order to attract attention to myself; on the contrary, it would have been more pleasant to me to have been silent about my own history. Neither do I care to excite sympathy for my own sufferings. But I do earnestly desire to arouse the women of the North to a realizing sense of the condition of two millions of women at the South, still in bondage, suffering what I suffered, and most of them far worse.
(2001: 5)
Anticipating objections from her audience, Jacobs confronts them directly and seeks to enlist her female readership in her cause by appealing to gender. She thus develops a powerful argument against slavery by demonstrating the ways in which it assaults the very core of true womanhood, an argument then reinforced in Child’s Introduction.
Whereas Douglass emphasizes motherhood to make a case against slavery, Jacobs spans the full arch of womanhood in Incidents. She pays particular attention to the power dynamics between her and her master to show the ways in which slavery undermines a woman’s attempts at piety and purity. Jacobs makes it clear how she felt about being denied the possibility of achieving proper womanhood, but she is more discreet than Douglass in her descriptions of what slave women experience. In the chapter “The Trials of Girlhood,” Jacobs recounts how her passage from girl to woman is marred by the licentiousness of her master. He forces upon her a sexual awareness that disrupts her orientation towards a womanhood founded on piety and purity: “I […] entered […] my fifteenth year – a sad epoch in the life of a slave girl. My master began to whisper foul words in my ear. Young as I was, I could not remain ignorant of their import” (2001: 26). She then poignantly suggests the conflict black women confront when seeking to uphold the virtues of submissiveness and piety:
He tried his utmost to corrupt the pure principles my grandmother had instilled. He peopled my young mind with unclean images, such as only a vile monster could think of. I turned from him with disgust and hatred. But he was my master. I was compelled to live under the same roof with him – where I saw a man forty years my senior daily violating the most sacred commandments of nature. He told me I was his property; that I must be subject to his will in all things. My soul revolted against this mean tyranny. But where could I turn for protection?
(2001: 26)
In ways that reflect other, similar rhetorical choices made when telling her story, Jacobs veils the details of her encounters with her master. Her body is not on display, even as it is acknowledged as an “object” of obsession.
This strategy differs from Douglass’s depiction of his aunt – half‐naked with her back exposed – or, to draw additional contrast, Solomon Northup’s portrayal of a female slave named Patsey in his narrative Twelve Years a Slave (1853). Northup devotes significant attention to her body and actions in ways that underscore the differences between her status and that of his white readers. In chapter 13 of his autobiography, Northup describes Patsey as “slim and straight,” as one who could “leap the highest fences […] [and who] no horse could fling […] from his back” and as one who had “such lightning‐like motion […] in her fingers as no other fingers ever possessed. […] Patsey was queen of the field.” Northup ascribes mythic‐like qualities to Patsey. Even as he approaches the subject of her sexual abuse, his presentation of her person remains the same; he continues to characterize Patsey in ways that set her apart from a white audience. “She had a genial and pleasant temper […] was faithful and obedient,” he states (2014: 134). He follows this description with a comment about her being a “naturally […] joyous creature, a laughing, light‐hearted girl, rejoicing in the mere sense of existence.” His use of both “faithful and obedient” and “joyous creature” reflects stereotypical conceptions of “good” slaves held by paternalistic whites. When Northup later describes Patsey’s “back [that] bore scars of a thousand stripes,” noting the way she “shrank before the lustful eye” of her master, the proffered argument appears to be one about “noble servants” who need protection from those abusing power under the auspices of slavery (Northup 2014: 133, 134).
Despite the differences between the ways in which male and female writers treat the black woman’s body in their texts, all of these writers mute sexuality, providing no explicit details of what actually happens to women in slavery. However, the characterization of the woman’s body in the context of a larger story about her sexual abuse suggests a particular reading of that abuse. Take, for example, the description of Aunt Hester’s “nakedness” during her whipping. This detail, added to indications about why she receives punishment, has the effect of eroticizing her flogging. Such eroticization of the body does not appear in Incidents, even though Jacobs directly engages experiences of sexual abuse. Instead of offering her body to be gazed upon, she shifts attention from herself to the tyranny of her master. Ann Taves argues that “Jacobs’s narrative reveals that in a context where women were literally the sexual property of their masters, her religious convictions about purity were a powerful, albeit ultimately limited, weapon in service of female autonomy” (2001: 217). By stressing the unrelenting advances of her master, her innocence as a youth, and her desire to uphold the religious guidance of her grandmother, Jacobs counters perceptions of her as property with details that elicit a sympathetic reading of her as a vulnerable woman in need of protection.
Male authors of slave narratives have been charged with seeming to uphold the patriarchal system that keeps them oppressed, and Jacobs appears to do much the same in her portrayal of the woman’s experience. But her employment of similar strategies supports Taves’s reading: Jacobs writes herself into the cult of true womanhood in ways that project “female autonomy” through her defiant insistence on defining herself as woman. Andrea Wolfe adds, “Much Jacobs scholarship deals with the roles that gender and motherhood played in her life, especially her escape from slavery, and the ways in which Jacobs complicates nineteenth‐century notions of female sexuality by relating her story of sexual abuse and ‘immorality’” (2008: 518).
Ultimately, Jacobs crafts her story with attention to the cult of true womanhood in ways that support the view that slave narratives by women are more concerned with familial dynamics than those written by men. Even so, her narrative also clearly reflects features customarily attributed to texts such as the Narrative of Frederick Douglass. Jill LeRoy‐Frazier makes the point in an essay that traces Jacobs’s attention to literacy in developing her narrative, arguing that Jacobs “manipula[tes] […] her own, sometimes feigned, illiteracy” in order to prove that “the slave is fully capable of feeling and thinking as a human being even in the absence of white instruction and influence, and long before the fact of literacy makes it possible to express those thoughts and feelings in written form” (2004: 153, 155). LeRoy‐Frazier places Jacobs’s text among others that reveal the centrality of literacy in claims about the humanity of slaves. Even though she makes the argument in ways that distinguish Jacobs’s treatment of literacy from those of her male counterparts, one could also read LeRoy‐Frazier’s argument as one that works in subversive ways. In other words, her interpretation of Jacobs’s treatment of literacy nonetheless centers literacy as a focus for writers of slave narratives, even if – as in the case of Jacobs – literacy was addressed in ways that deemphasized its significance as a marker of humanity; taking up the topic of literacy, however it was done, remained paramount.
What we have sought to demonstrate through this comparative analysis of narratives by Douglass and Jacobs is that their respective stories are not as dissimilar as much of the burgeoning scholarship on slave narratives during 1980s and 1990s would attest. Both authors display a keen sense of audience, and the arguments they make against slavery reveal that awareness. New directions for study could provide deeper analyses of the antebellum audience as a way back into reading the development and constitution of the slave narrative. Another promising approach that suggests similarities between slave narratives by men and women is offered by a recent study by Felix Haase (2015), who examines the ways in which Douglass and other male slaves were subjected to surveillance as an intense form of control. This type of attention has often been part of the analysis of stories of slave women, particularly as it relates to assumptions about their sexuality and the significance of their body as a means for securing the planter’s wealth. Examining the ways in which the bodies of slaves, regardless of gender, have been policed and watched would prove fruitful in continued studies of slave narratives, one of the most vital genres of the antebellum period.
References
Further Reading
SEE ALSO: CHAPTER 12 (THE LITERATURE OF ANTEBELLUM REFORM); CHAPTER 14 (PROSLAVERY AND ANTISLAVERY LITERATURE).
Notes