Harriet Jacobs and the Language of Autobiography
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8895815 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Sarah Emsley (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1998 |
| Volume | 28 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 145-162 |
| Publication date | 1998-08-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Canadian Review of American Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0007-7720 • E-ISSN: 1710-114X |
| Publisher | University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.3138/cras-028-02-06 |
| OpenAlex | W2025310639 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 6 |
Harriet Jacobs is in many ways a reluctant autobiographer. In the eyes of nineteenth-century southerners, she is rightfully a slave, and therefore has no claim to her own identity or to "a life." By northern standards, she is a fallen woman, whose life story is best kept a secret. And even among other slave narratives, her story will prove to be unusual. Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl ([1861] 1987) is not just the story of a slave's escape to freedom; it is complicated by her ties to the children whose very existence is proof of her sexual transgressions. Telling the story of her escape necessarily involves explaining her sexual history, and, in fact, it is precisely Jacobs's experience of sexual oppression that her abolitionist friends want her to reveal. Autobiography is concerned with making the private life public; as Jerome Bruner notes, "one's reflections on both one's self and one's world cannot be one's own alone: you and your version of your world must be public, recognizable enough to be negotiable in the 'conversation of lives'" (1993, 43). But Jacobs does not want to make her private life recognizable as part of a public conversation—"it would have been more pleasant to me to have been silent about my own history" ([1861] 1987, 335)—because she cannot write her life without including her sexual experience. She writes her story not as a way of attracting attention to her own life, but as a political statement, a way of "arous[ing] the women of the North to a realizing sense of the condition of two millions of women at the South" (335). Written for the specific cause of abolition, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is more a political work than an autobiography, and thus Jacobs must negotiate the tension between her private life and her political purpose. While the cause of abolition is acceptable to her audience, the story of sexual sin is not. Writing directly to an audience of white, northern women, Jacobs must find a way of establishing a sisterhood of all women who will fight for abolition, without sacrificing her own life and self-respect to her cause
Aesthetics · Art · Biography · Conversation · Girl · Identity (music · Literature · Narrative · Oppression · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Public life · Sociology · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Literature: history, themes, analysis · Philosophy · Psychology · Race, History, and American Society
| Highly cited | No |
|---|