The Spoken and The Silenced in Incidents in The Life of a Slave Girl and Our Nig

Abstract

If slave narratives are the most neglected body of early American writing, as John Sekora asserts, then nineteenth-century Afro-American women's narratives are more neglected still. Until recently Harriet Jacobs was the lonely black female representative of that era and genre. Critics with specialities in the nineteenth century might have heard of Jarena Lee or Louisa Picquet, but rarely were these authors read. The attention generated by the rediscovery of Harriet E. Wilson, for example, timed as it was, with the growing recognition of contemporary authors like Alice Walker, Toni Morrison and Gloria Naylor, revitalized the field of Afro-American letters. The impact on the Afro-American women's literary tradition has been significant-recently the Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers published thirty volumes, many of which had never been published in this century. This plethora of new material is bound to restructure the critical field considerably. Although to date no full-length study on even a prominent text like Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) exists, many critics of the nineteenth century examine her work. Unfortunately, until now, she has been considered almost exclusively in the context of Afro-American men's or white American women's writing. Rarely have critics had the opportunity to also explore how her work junctures and diverges with written by her contemporaries -works such as Harriet E. Wilson's Our Nig (1859), the first novel authored by an Afro-American woman. In this essay I will attempt to address how Wilson and Jacobs negotiate the assertion of their voices. I will argue that their voices blur the parameters of the genres they have chosen. Further, I will suggest that these women subvert and invert the authority of audience and mediate the writings of the nineteenth-century unutterable that space of sexuality around which so many women of that time swooned, or were driven to madness or death, alternatives Wilson and Jacobs refuse for their subjects. Instead, they write the unutterable in a manner which challenges their readers to recover not only their texts but their contexts and codes.