April 22 Blog

• Jacobs’ narrative is obviously powerful and moving. It cannot help being so since it is an account of the treatment meted out to black Americans in the nineteenth century.
• It is surprising in its sophistication. Jacobs’ ideas are complex and very well articulated. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl broadly reads like any other mid 19th century work of prose. Because of its subject matter, it especially reminds one of Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe.
• There is nothing in the text itself to indicate that this is the work of a black woman. I do not mean to cast doubt on Jacobs’ authorship but simply to point out the oddness/bizarreness of the fact that black American slave experience with all its specificities and uniqueness has been expressed through the unmodified white bourgeois idiom of the day. An enormous amount of authenticity will naturally have been lost in the process.
• For example: at one point, Jacobs' grandmother (a lifelong slave and very probably illiterate) is recalled to have said “O Linda! Has it come to this? I had rather see you dead than to see you as you now are. You are a disgrace to your dead mother.”
• The grandmother’s words, having been given this shape, would make their way to the hearts of Jacobs’ white middle-class readers. This is in line with more straightforward appeals to shared common humanity. For instance, when Jacobs tells her readers that a black woman's love for her children is the same as a white woman's love for her children.
• In her introduction, Maria Child explains Jacobs’ style of writing and general parhi-likhi-ness by telling us that when she was a young girl, Jacobs had a kind mistress who taught her to read and write and that Jacobs had considerably supplemented this learning during her time in New York by reading and by conversing with educated and intelligent (presumably white) people.
• Child rather loosely tells us that “At her request, I have revised her manuscript; but such changes as I have made have been mainly for purposes of condensation and orderly arrangement.”
• Even if we take Child’s word for it and believe that Jacobs's words are largely her own, a poststructuralist reading of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl should pay attention to the fact that the stock of signifiers that is available for Jacobs to use in her written story, the very language that she uses, has been created by the hegemonic discourse around her. Its limitations therefore have to be kept in mind.
• In light of all this, the introduction to this Penguin edition of the text comes across as unduly confident in its claims. In the first paragraph alone, I was made uncomfortable at several points. Jacobs is referred to as an “African-American” – a term that wouldn't come into existence until long after her death. We are also told that Jacobs was “thoroughly feminist”. The first wave of feminism only came into its own in the early twentieth century. Jacobs is being retrospectively assigned categories that might not have meant a great deal to her. (Which is obviously not to say that she did not share these concerns, but simply that she wouldn't have experienced them in the exact same terms that a late twentieth century academic would.)
• Here is a very short excerpt from a book I read for another course. I think it is relevant to my blog. https://www.dropbox.com/s/3wcwhge6q0r35ic/Truth.pdf?dl=0