Loopholes of Resistance: Harriet Jacobs' Slave Narrative and the Critique of Agency in Foucault

MICHELLE BURNHAM Loopholes of Resistance: Harriet Jacobs' Slave Narrative and the Critique of Agency in Foucault Located in the exact center of Harriet Jacobs' i86r slave narrative , Incidents in the Life ofa Shve Girl, is a chapter entitled "The Loophole of Retreat." The chapter's title refers to the tiny crawlspace above her grandmother's shed, where Jacobs hides for seven years in an effort to escape her master's persecution and the "peculiar institution" of slavery which authorizes that persecution. This chapter's central location , whether the result of accident or design, would seem to suggest its structural significance within Jacobs' narrative. Yet its central location is by no means obvious, for "The Loophole of Retreat" goes just as easily unnoticed in the middle of forty-one unnumbered chapters as it becomes—after careful enumeration—potentially quite prominent, as the hinge which balances twenty chapters on either side. It is almost as though this chapter is hidden in plain sight, much like the body of Harriet Jacobs herself, who finally discovers the safest hiding place to be the most obvious one imaginable: in her own grandmother's house and in the center of her master Dr. Flint's domain. What Jacobs calls her "loophole of retreat" thus provides a strategic site for concealment even as it masks its own location. This spatial loophole becomes for Jacobs a means for escape from slaveiy, and her manipulation of textual loopholes in dominant discourse allows her narrative to escape, as well, from the constraints which her culture necessarily imposes on it. It is this tactical operation of the loophole which I intend to explore not only in Jacobs' narrative but, through her Arizona Quarter!} Volume 49 Number 2, Summer 1993 Copyright © 1993 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-161 54Michelie Burnham text, in the work of Foucault. This loophole operation opens up possibilities for locating and imagining resistance in any discursive structure , including ones which—as Foucault would sometimes have it—effectively exile autonomous agency by producing and then recuperating their own opposition. Critiques of Foucault, including those inspired by Lacanian and pragmatist theory, have all solved this dilemma only by ignoring its very basis: Foucault's important critique of the individual subject as s/he is produced by institutional structures. The figure of the loophole permits a reconfiguration of agency that, unlike the psychoanalytic rescue of agency, accommodates Foucault's critique of the subject and also integrates, rather than elides, the problematic and overlooked category of the structure. I. CONFESSION AND CONCEALMENT Lydia Maria Child introduces Harriet Jacobs' slave narrative with a gesture ofunveiling that promises a subsequent revealing. In her editor's introduction, Child confronts the difficulty of offering to the public Jacobs' account of sexual oppression, by claiming that "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."' Child's theatrical, almost voyeuristic, gesture suggests that what will be revealed is not only the body of the desirable female slave, but the truth about that body, and about the Southern institution of slavery that has inscribed it. A similar language of unveiling proliferates throughout Jacobs' own text, in her recurrent promises "to tell . . . the truth" (53) and to "not try to screen [her]self" from "the painful task ofconfessing" (54). Jacobs' larger project is to lift the veil of deception that hangs between the North and the South, and it is therefore for her Northern listeners— even those whose "ears are too delicate to listen to" (4) the details of her story—that Jacobs constructs the personal history which was denied her in the South. By confessing the history of her concealed body, she constructs that body as a text for "the women of the North" (1) who, in this sense, function as confessors for Jacobs. Thus her narrative appropriately ends with a statement that suggests on the one hand freedom , and on the other self-display: "when I rode home in the cars I was Loophoíes of Resistance55 no longer afraid to unveil my face and look at people as...