Harriet Jacobs and the Language of Autobiography

Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue canad1enne d'etudes americames Volume 28, Number 2, 1998, pp. 145-162 Harriet Jacobs and the Language of Autobiography Sarah Emsley 145 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 146 Canadian Review of American Studies Revue canadrenne d' etudes amerrcames 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. Jacobs employs a number of narrative strategies in order to convert her readers to her cause and to maintain her own position of authority. She chooses the genre of sentimental domestic fiction as a way of organizing her autobiography. This genre may be an effective way of communicating a political dream to an audience of nineteenth-century white northern women, but it also makes Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl problematic as autobiography . Jacobs's narrative is often evasive, shifting from personal experience to the more general problems of female slaves, constantly drawing attention to the cause rather than to the life as lived. Jacobs writes to Amy Post, "a woman can whisper her cruel wrongs in the ear of a dear friend much easier than she can record them for the world to read" (Post [1859] 1987, 514), and although she does make a public record of her story, her autobiography is a continual search for ways of keeping the most private life private, even while professing to whisper secrets to an audience of gentle readers, friends, and sisters. The central incident in Jacobs's narrative is her choice to have a relationship with Mr Sands, a white man she loves; this choice paradoxically makes her both a victim and a heroine. The paradox is reflected in the narrative's shifts between confession of sin and assertion of strength. The tension between public politics and personal details leads Jacobs to write her own life out of some incidents in her autobiography in order to preserve her sense of self. Throughout her text, Jacobs uses language both as a veil that covers certain aspects of her life, and as a shield that can defend...