Writing the Self: Incidents in the Life of a slave girl

“Reader be assured this narrative is no fiction” says Harriet Jacobs in the preface of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. In reading these lines, I was reminded of another female autobiography The Weave of my Life by Urmila Parvar, which I read some time ago and it begins “My mother used to weave aaydans, the Marathi generic term for all things made from bamboo. I find that her act of weaving and my act of writing are organically linked. The weave is similar. It is the weave of pain, suffering, and agony that links us.” Though, separated by context and culture, what I found deeply interesting was the way the woman’s autobiography displays a palpable consciousness and at times unease with the form in which her life is to be articulated: ‘What it means to write the gendered self?’ seems to be a critical question that turns the autobiography into a space of self-reflexivity. What should female life writing look like? Should it be just about the self, or does the purpose transcend the self. In the case of Incidents the question is not just confined to notion of gender since here  gender is entwined with racial politics. Incidents then takes the autobiographical mode to write about Jacob’s own experiences but as she says her story is painful and she would rather have kept it private, but she feels that making it public may help the antislavery movement. In this way can we think of this work as a political or historical document? In what way is this autobiographical narrative revealing of the subaltern’s resistance. To that end what can one make of her act to enter into a sexual relationship with Mr. Sands. Is that a moment of deep vulnerability or an act of resistance even if it comes at the cost of having to bear two children from Mr. Sands. How does one extract the voice of the subaltern in such an incident.: She says that she is ashamed of this illicit relationship but finds it preferable to being raped by the loathsome Dr. Flint. With Mr. Sands, she has two children, Benny and Ellen. Linda argues that a powerless slave girl cannot be held to the same standards of morality as a free woman. She also has practical reasons for agreeing to the affair: she hopes that when Flint finds out about it, he will sell her to Sands in disgust. Instead, the vengeful Flint sends Linda to his plantation to be broken in as a field hand. But can we say that Linda is making a choice in this case. Is she exhibiting some kind of agency? This also has implications for thinking about the relationship of agency to the form of writing- autobiography