Harriet Jacobs’s Autobiography and the Voice of Lydia Maria Child

Harriet Jacobs’s signature, from a letter to Amy Kirby Post [1860].

By permission of the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, University of Rochester Libraries.

Harriet Jacobs studies have reached a new stage. No longer is the main issue corroborating the authenticity of Jacobs’s narrative; instead it has become instating and celebrating Jacobs herself as a major feminist figure in the antislavery movement¹ Jean Fagan Yellin’s compelling biography (2004) and the Norton Critical Edition of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (2001), with its publication of several Jacobs letters, take major steps in calling attention to Jacobs the person as well as the author² In keeping with this trend, Yellin’s prospective publication of Jacobs’s papers—her private correspondence along with her published work—promises to reveal a fuller range of the author’s thought and social commitments.

As an escaped slave who traveled in abolitionist circles for almost twenty years before her book appeared, and as a literate, reflective woman of substantial talent, Jacobs possessed one of the distinctive voices among black female abolitionists—a voice worth recapturing as clearly and fully as possible. To do that effectively, however, we must return to Jacobs’s autobiography and trace the extent to which her editor, Lydia Maria Child, channeled that work in directions she, as contrasted with Jacobs, deemed appropriate. Given the available evidence—including Jacobs’s letters, a number still unpublished and housed in the Rush Rhees Library at the University of Rochester, and several of Child’s private letters that have not been brought to bear in this context before—I think we can now discern more about the

Lydia Maria Child, ca. 1850.

By permission of the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, WRC-P18-1.

author’s intentions than previously, and in so doing reveal a somewhat different Harriet Jacobs from the one presented to the public when Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl first appeared. She is even somewhat different from the person known to modern scholarship by way of an unmediated, undercomplicated acceptance of Jacobs’s autobiography as, in effect, wholly her own. To treat Jacobs’s autobiography from this perspective will prompt us to probe the complex mediating effects brought about by her relationship as a needy escaped slave to her fervent and strong-minded white antislavery editor.

Two principal scholars have examined Jacobs’s relationship to her editor. Each has judged Child’s interventions to be judicious and comparatively nonintrusive³ However, in this essay I propose to treat four issues that challenge this judgment:

1. 1. The selection of the book’s title

2. 2. The use of a pseudonym and the suppression of names, places, and dates

3. 3. The reordering of narrative sequence

4. 4. The excision of the John Brown chapter

The first two issues, as newly examined here, demonstrate that Child’s purposes as an editor were not equivalent to those of Jacobs, the ex-slave autobiographer. As I propose to show, Child sought to emphasize not so much Jacobs’s own discursive arguments against slavery as the personal incidents it could corroborate in support of the antislavery cause. At the same time, Child also sought to include incidents of cruelty to other slaves, to which Jacobs could attest, that would further advance the abolitionist cause. This impulse is apparent in the last two headings, which bear significantly on the way we read Jacobs’s work today, for Child, a pacifist and staunch Garrisonian abolitionist, reordered and excised parts of Jacobs’s manuscript. In so doing, Child directed it away from the combustible militarism of John Brown’s October 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry, against which the country was still recoiling, and foregrounded those melodramatic and sentimental parts illustrating the destruction of families and especially the sexual victimization of girls and women under slavery, along with the devastating effects this abuse brought to their grieving mothers.

In making my argument, I have...