Professional paper
Negotiation of Sentimental and Abolitionist Traditions in Harriet Jacobs's Incident in the Life of a Slave Girl
Iva Kurtović
; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
Harriet Jacobs’s autobiographical narrative Incidents in the Life of a
Slave Girl offers invaluable insight into the specific position of female slaves in antebellum United States. However, the importance of the text does not rest solely on its historical value. It is first and foremost a narrative, and not only the story itself, but the way the story is told, is what differentiates Jacobs’s text firstly from those focused on male slaves, and secondly from those written by white abolitionists. Thus, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl becomes a means of negotiation between various facets of the narrator’s identity and what the society expects of her, according to the dominant social views on femininity and chastity. Moreover, Jacobs’s text, through (and in spite of) both sentimental and abolitionist writing, tries to maneuver the narrator’s position as regards her white, free, northern, female audience. By focusing on her experiences of womanhood and motherhood, Jacobs seemingly relies on the white female readers’ sympathy, but ultimately rejects the kind of identification which would be based on the shared idea of “true womanhood”. By doing so, Jacobs points to the necessity of a deeper, intersectional understanding of slave women’s sufferings, and not one based solely on the sentimental notions of moral sympathy and sympathetic identification.
Keywords
slave narrative; women's writing; "true womanhood"; identity; sympathetic identification
Hrčak ID:
244511
URI
Publication date:
9.7.2020.
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