The Dual Dynamic:
An Exploration of
the Author/Narrator Relationship in
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Holly Riedelbach
Shutup in an airless, 9 x 7 garret compressed between ceiling and roof of her grandmother’s shed, fugitive slave Linda Brent expresses feelings of asphyxiation—"there was no admission for either light or air," she laments, "no hole, no crack through which I could peep" (Jacobs 114). This excruciating situation is somewhat alleviated when Brent, through the inadvertent discovery of an abandoned ‘gimlet,’ ekes out a peephole for herself. Miniscule portions of light and air now filter in and allow her a modicum of outward view as well— "Now I will have some light. Now I will see" (Jacobs 115). Contemporary critics of Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl have made much of this section, aptly titled "The Loophole of Retreat." They assign varied metaphorical interpretations to both the garret and its inhabitant. Valerie Smith, for instance, imparts a two-fold, almost paradoxical definition of the confined space. On one hand, she argues, the retreat adds yet another level of oppression to Brent’s original slave condition, for even "voluntary confinement" imposes a significant degree of passivity. Yet it is this same loophole that can potentially lead to legal, physical freedom and has already led to Brent’s "spiritual" freedom from her depraved master (28-9). The garret, then, serves as both tyrant and redeemer.
Crouching within this construction is yet another edifice of confinement, Harriet Jacobs herself. Within her textual parameters, Jacobs is accessible to her audience only as the created Linda Brent. Just as the author chose to inhabit a confining space for the sake of achieving corporal freedom, so she likewise chooses to inhabit a persona other than her own in order to obtain freedom in expression. Further, this projected self presents a paradox parallel to Smith’s by allowing a fugitive slave girl a protected literary voice while at the same time initiating the author’s anonymity. To what extent, then, does Jacobs actually succeed in expressing the "Herself" she gives as the true author of her account? Does she, in effect, forfeit her own voice for the sake of a larger, politically informed agenda? Confusing these questions is the author’s own risqúe subject matter. Reluctant to expose the demeaning details of her sexual harassment as well as her deviance from nineteenth century moral precepts, Jacobs grapples with pragmatic issues grounded in her sense of reality, not necessarily her sense of self. Nevertheless, in attempting to reconcile her expressionary needs (for surely the subtitle leaves little doubt about Jacobs’s desire to receive credit for her achievement) with her aversion towards revealing humiliating episodes, Jacobs decides to offer her audience a public projection of her private self. A thorough examination of each persona’s development, author/narrator interactions, and relationship to the text within an ultimately larger literary tradition will prove Jacobs’s success in writing herself.
Although admittedly degraded by the "peculiar institution," Jacobs retains a remarkable sense of identity throughout her slavehood. This self-knowledge sets her narrative apart from more conventional (and predominantly male) ex-slave accounts whose protagonists discover identity only after procuring freedom. Through her created Brent, Jacobs "depicts herself as a . . . slave girl who knows herself to be an individual of value and who is decidedly aggressive in defending her right to self-determination against those who claimed otherwise" (Foster 95). As her staunch belief in this value proves a powerful weapon against Dr. Flint’s advances and becomes an invaluable tool for attaining liberty, it is central in discussing the Harriet Jacobs persona. Therefore, understanding how Jacobs’s formidable, highly individualized personality formed in spite of the suffocating surrounding circumstances is a primary consideration.
Contemporary psychology has long testified to the extreme importance a person’s early influences and experiences bear on determining adult personality. These aspects of Jacobs’s formative years are largely positive. Her narrator describes the family’s home as "comfortable," young Harriet as "fondly shielded," and the first six years of her life as "happy" (Jacobs 5). Just as influential are the people inhabiting this early realm of existence. Every primary adult influencing young Harriet exhibits a firm character that remains, on a level visible to the immature girl, unmarred by slavery’s moral and spiritual degradation. Jacobs’s father is her principal masculine authority and exemplifies this role with traditionally desirable "manly" traits. Overseeing most of his own affairs instills a substantial degree of independence in her father, and he consequently has "more of the feelings of a freeman than is common among slaves" (Jacobs 9). Strict adherence to his marriage vows also epitomizes his laudable character and, when coupled with the aforementioned autonomy, provides an important contrast to the debauched Dr. Flint. Jacobs’s eventual disgust at the latter’s corrupt, ironically inferior masculinity is rooted in this contrast. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese corroborates this interpretation, asserting that Jacobs "sought, however mutedly, to underscore the contrast between the slave man who was a true father and the slaveholder who was none at all" (378).
Two decidedly maternal authorities shaping Jacobs’s early sense of self include her mother and grandmother. Though both exemplify competence and independence within nineteenth century notions of femininity, the latter commands a greater degree of overall influence because of her longer contact with Jacobs. She is able to maintain her dignity even while enslaved and commands respect from black and white communities alike —" ‘Aunt Marthy,’ as she was called, was generally known, and every body who knew her respected her intelligence and good character" (Jacobs 11). The grandmother also supplies young Jacobs with food, clothing, shelter (both physical as well as emotional), and nurturance apart from what any owner allocates. These typical maternal cares become central to Jacobs’s development in two fundamental aspects. First, in attaining a moderately comfortable situation, Aunt Marthy allows her granddaughter a glimpse into a better life. Though constantly urging her enslaved relations to practice patience, endurance, and humility, she unintentionally speeds them towards even dangerous liberation by daily testifying to the discrepancy between their abject servitude and her free prosperity. Secondly, in Karen Sanchez-Eppler’s words, "these acts of nurturance provide a degree of autonomy sufficient to affirm for [Jacobs] that her body and her identity are not completely subsumed into her position as slave" (91).
In addition to modeling fortitude, providing motherly attentions and protection, and maintaining a somewhat stable home atmosphere, the "good grandmother" also indoctrinates her young charge with all the fiercest facets of Christianity. This "service" results in Jacobs’s early, and exceptionally pervasive, concept of virtue and proves central in the author’s later battles with her master. Although her formidable inner strength and will already revile Flint’s proposed domination, the threat of celestial punishment clearly reinforces her resistance. Even after Jacobs’s will triumphs over this instilled chastity, she feels the sting of leaving its strict precepts and frequently mourns its loss though never to the extent of regretting her decision. This victory, however, does not decrease the level of influence that Jacobs’s grandmother has exerted. The struggle itself, Jacobs’s extended grief over the eventual forfeiture of her moral principles, and her continued observance of Christianity after slavery all testify to the matriarch’s unyielding religious clout.
Finally, Jacobs’s first mistress plays a vital role in molding the young girl’s identity when she permits her literacy. As reading and writing are valuable skills in the development and preservation of one’s sense of self, slaveholders traditionally feared literate servants. Those with well-formed, independent characters, after all, realize the inequality inherent in any slave/master relationship and will not go quietly under the yoke. This trepidation is manifest in Advice Among Masters, a compilation of slave-regulating edicts collected from antebellum slaveholders. One owner claims that teaching slaves to read proves injurious to the slaves themselves. Readily available abolitionist texts, he contends, might well lead slaves into falsely thinking themselves above their birthrighted positions, or, as he puts it, "disseminate a spirit of insubordination in the bosom of the slave, by the circulation of incendiary publications, inducing him to throw off the authority of those to whom his services are due" (Breeden 11-12). The slaves recognized this apprehension towards their education as well. Victoria Adams, a former slave interviewed after her liberation as part of an extensive journalistic project, speculates that "De reason they wouldn’t teach us to read and write, was ‘cause they was afraid de slaves would write their own pass and go over to a free country" (Rawick 11). Jacobs also acknowledges the relative scarcity of an educated slave and credits her mistress for allowing such a singularity—"for this privilege, which so rarely falls to the lot of a slave, I bless her" (Jacobs 8).
Other slaves, under circumstances even less fortunate than Jacobs’s, were virtually denied access to their own identities. Contrasting these slaves’ accounts with Jacobs’s own articulations enables us to understand exactly how imperative this self development is in achieving triumph over slavery’s degradation. One of the most significant commonalties manifest in these first-hand accounts is each slave’s ignorance of her/his age. This fact, though taken for granted by freeborn citizens, is purposefully kept from the servants in an attempt to deny them individuality. Similarly, while almost every interviewee can name master, mistress, plantation title, and even many of their owners kinfolk, very few can name any of their own blood relations. What little perception of self-identity and worth they possess comes directly from white holders and relates only to their slave status. One ex-slave, Victoria Adams, admits the only time her mistress ever whipped her was when she was "so bad." Adams’s entire concept of good/bad is determined by her owner. When the latter decides to whip her, then, Adams deems her own actions "bad." Despite this mistress-imposed identity, Adams still expresses a preference for freedom over servitude—"I like being free more better. Any niggers what like slavery time better, is lazy people dat don’t want to do nothin"’ (Rawick 10-12). Former slave Ezra Adams maintains a much different opinion. Unlike Victoria, he chooses to stay with his master even after liberation— "Us didn’t want no more freedom than us was gittin’ on our plantation already. Us knowed too well dat us was well took care of. . . . Yes, sir, they soon found out dat freedom ain’t nothin’" (Rawick 5-6). As his entire identity is contained within his position as slave, Ezra Adams did not know what to do with his freedom once it was given to him. Conversely, Jacobs employs every particle of her commanding personality to break through her oppression and cement this hard-won self into history.
Understanding Brent’s role in securing this historical niche requires an examination of her specific functions within both Incidents and Jacobs’s own cultural reality. In the most practical terms, the pseudonym protects the author and her family from Flint’s vengeful posterity. Brent also insulates Jacobs’s relations against scandal once the book’s sensational subject matter is made public. Jacobs portrays her rigid morality, after all, as a source of great pride to her family. "But now that the truth was out," Brent mourns, "and my relatives would hear of it [i.e.,her loss of virginity irrevocably illustrated by pregnancy], I felt wretched. Humble as were their circumstances, they had pride in my good character" (Jacobs 56). Jacobs’s already generous despondency over her own small town’s censure certainly presages an even greater desolation once her dishonor becomes public fare.
Beyond these basically simple considerations, Brent’s functions become much more complex as we move into the text itself. Jacobs consciously intends her narrator to work primarily as a political mouthpiece in furthering the abolitionist agenda. Yet she also acts as a mediator between Jacobs and the painful revelations she details. By distancing herself from the shameful recollections, Jacobs is free to speak as candidly as she chooses. SanchezEppler equates Brent with the higher escape ultimately sought by Jacobs— "clearly Jacobs’s use of the pseudonym ‘Linda Brent,’ which provides a mechanism of escape highly valued by any fugitive, is not without advantages. She had, after all, admitted to finding the secrecy of whispers easier than public utterance" (86). Even behind this mask, however, Jacobs admittedly limits the details available in her memory, opting instead to describe Flint’s advances in essentially vague terms. As she tells Amy Post in a letter, "There are some things I might have made plainer I know" (Jacobs 242). Jean Fagan Yellin addresses this degree of reluctance as well, observing that "passages presenting her sexual history . . . are full of omissions and circumlocutions" (xxi). These nebulous disclosures do fulfill Brent’s purpose as propagandist, for allowing Brent to blithely expound upon all the abuses Jacobs faced would likely alienate a significant portion of the intended audience. By modestly concealing the more scandalous details, Jacobs endows Brent with enough supplicant demureness to placate the North’s most fastidious white females. Yet, does this obliqueness presented by Brent harm Jacobs’s personal desire to voice her indignation over the widespread sexual abuse slavery propagates? Yellin attributes Jacobs’s victory in this matter to the very creation of Brent herself— "By creating Linda Brent, by writing and publishing her life story, Jacobs gained her victory" (xxix). Ultimately, Jacobs shapes Brent to her own objectives within political, social, and even cultural (as demonstrated by her own family’s response to her premarital pregnancies) constraints. As Fox-Genovese puts it, "She struggled to create, in Linda Brent, a persona her readers could recognize and for whom they could feel pity. But woven through that discourse for others, Jacobs also constructed a discourse for herself" (394).
The dominant aspect of this discourse is Jacobs’s veiled condemnation of a moral standard that claims unjust jurisdiction over sexually vulnerable slave women. This issue betrays a fundamental difference between narrator and author. Both Yellin and Fox-Genovese (382-3) suggest that, as a primarily political persona vying for Northern female sympathy, Brent is the one seeking validation for Jacobs’s sexual choices: "Addressing the reader...Linda Brent transforms herself into a penitent supplicant begging forgiveness" (YeIlin xxi). The author herself, they propose, questions not her own morality, but rather the impossible code of conduct imposed on powerless slave women that makes such concessions of virtue necessary. Each critic cites Jacobs’s quietly stated opinion that "the slave woman ought not to be judged by the same standard as others" (Jacobs 55). Though Brent is the medium through which both validation and rectification are sought, Jacobs’s bold sexual choices enable us to credit her specifically with the latter statement. Denied access to an inequitable common standard because of her status, Jacobs "asserts a radical alternative to the sexual ideology that apparently informs her confession" (YeIlin xxxi). Such a division in the personas’ intentions does not undermine the duo’s shared goals, but rather serves as further evidence of Jacobs’s ingenious employment of her narrator.
Besides conveying Jacobs’s radical, albeit subtle, feminist philosophy, Brent also bears witness for Jacobs against not only the perpetrators of slavery and abuse, but the destructive effects such abuse wreaked upon Jacobs’s own psyche. It is this active, empowering condemnation of heretofore silently accepted sexual abuse that finally gives closure to Jacobs’s long healing process. Without the sympathetic anonymity Brent assures, this closure never would have manifest itself. As a female slave, Jacobs is, essentially, twice removed from societal considerations. Her experiences, perceptions, and deepest convictions, however striking, command no attention outside her own marginalized reality. Judith Lewis Herman substantiates this claim in "A Forgotten History," an examination of general psychological trauma: "When the victim is already devalued (a woman, a child), she may find that the most traumatic events of her life take place outside the realm of socially validated reality. Her experience becomes unspeakable" (2). The strength of the perpetrator, the weakness of the victim, and the distastefulness of the trauma itself all combine in reinforcing citizens’ tendencies to ‘look the other way.’ These averted countenances ensure the abusers’ victory and the victims’ continued oppression. In order for her suppressed voice to be heard above the white majority’s din, Jacobs had to secure both a speaker and a receptive audience two central components, Herman stresses, in a socially ‘devalued’ victim’s personal triumph over traumatic experience (3). Jacobs, who already had access to a relatively responsive audience through her ties to the abolitionist movement, now needed this witness.
Though determined to make her story heard, Jacobs did not initially intend it to be "written by herself." She instead planned to seek the assistance of a more influential (or at least less degraded) voice and offered her tale to novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe. Stowe’s offer to merely include Jacobs’s history in her upcoming novel, however, devastated the former slave and prompted her to undertake the task of creating her own witness. She announced this new commitment to honest self-expression in a note prefacing the anonymous "Letter from a Fugitive Slave," an "apprentice piece" published in the New York Tribune. ‘Poor as it may be, I had rather give [my story] from my own hand, than have it said that I employed others to do it for me" (Yellin xix). After completing the narrative, however, Jacobs faced yet another obstacle in the absence of willing publishers. One company finally agreed to print the manuscript if it featured an introduction from eminent abolitionist Lydia Maria Child. Though Stowe’s disappointing reaction left Jacobs reluctant to seek celebrity assistance, she realized the advantage such an endorsement would provide and acquiesced to the publisher’s demands.
Child’s subsequent involvement, however, poses yet another threat to Jacobs’s accurate self-expression. From her position as editor, Child could have easily imposed, through extensive textual changes and language grooming, a white understanding over the black woman’s words. Indeed, critical speculation about the extent of Child’s involvement eventually led to virtually naming her as Incidents’s primary author. Jean FaganYellin offers her first experience of the novel as testament to this assumption. "I read Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl . . . and, accepting received opinion, dismissed it as a false slave narrative" (Yellin vii). In this respect Child potentially serves as one more level of confinement, one more removal from Jacobs herself. Later research, however, proves that claiming authorship or even significantly changing Jacobs’s work was never Child’s intention. Commenting on her role in the book’s evolution to a friend, Child emphasizes her minimalist role. "I abridged, and struck out superfluous words sometimes; but I don’t think I altered fifty words in the entire volume" (Yellin xxii). She did help secure an essential book contract, though, thereby transforming Jacobs’s unknown manuscript into a readily available book. Rather than acting as another wall further muffling the author’s experience, Child instead bridges the gap between a slave girl’s culturally hushed experience and the conventional publishing world. As a result, Jacobs’s witness finally robs Flint of his last (and first) line of defense, namely, his victim’s silence.
Though bearing witness to Jacobs’s very personal pain validates it on an important, individual level, expanding this concept further allows us to define both personas’ contributions within a larger literary tradition. Lawfully denied access to any sense of a collective, cultural identity by decades of slavcry and its lingering racism, African Americans sought an alternate assertion of their singularity inside white America. Significantly, these assertions took the individualistic form of autobiography. The principal motivation in selecting this form, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., suggests, stems directly from the aforementioned white veto—"If the individual black self could not exist before the law, it could, and would, be forged in language" (4). Through this particularized medium, African Americans challenged prevailing white assumptions of what it meant to be black. Instead of typical white ‘Sambo’ and ‘Mammy’-esque portrayals, writers like Jacobs offer articulate, insightful, and, most important, accurate depictions of African American experience. They bear witness, in other words, to both the genuine merit of their own lives and the false, negative images propagated by non-blacks. Countering these damaging stereotypes with representations of their own informs white culture while creating a black American identity rich with positive examples of triumph. Shaping and projecting this resilient self also asserts a defiance that resists white attempts at suppression. According to Gates, "The ultimate form of protest, certainly, was to register in print the existence of a ‘black self’ that had transcended the limitations and restrictions that racism had placed on the personal development of the black individual" (3). From the tortured silence of sexual harassment within the confines of her grandmother’s garret, through her first careful years as a free citizen, and, finally, above the vociferous paradigms of white Northern discourse, Harriet Jacobs consigns her created self to a long-sought African American consciousness. Emancipated at last from even Brent’s restraints, she stands next to her emissary in a new self large enough to contain them both . . . with room to spare.
Works Cited
Breeden, James O., Ed. Advice Among Masters: The Ideal in Slave Management in the Old South. Westport: Greenwood, 1980.
Foster, Frances Smith. Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993.
Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. Within the Plantation Household: Black and While Women of the Old South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.
Gates, Henry Louis. "Introduction." The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford UP, 1988.
Herman, Judith Lewis. Trauma and Recovery. New York: BasicBooks, 1992.
Jacobs, Harriet A. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself. Cambridge:Harvard UP, 1987.
Rawick, George P., Ed. The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography. Vol. 2. Westport: Greenwood Publishing, 1972.
Sanchez-Eppler, Karen. Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
Smith, Valerie. Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987.
YelIin, Jean Fagan. "Introduction." Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself. By Harriet Jacobs. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987.