Chronotopes in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

This article employs Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope to examine the interrelatedness of different places, temporalities, characterization, and values in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Focusing on the complex interactions of four chronotopes—Dr. Flint’s house, the provincial town, the grandmother’s house, and the garret—the article yields a deeper understanding of how Jacobs critiques antebellum American society and, at the same time, constructs the grandmother’s house as chronotope as a site of negotiation with her most obvious historical addressee: the Northern middle-class white woman.