Week 13-Maria Said

Throughout the book, Harriet Jacobs is very aware that she is being written and talked about. When she mentions the Clergymen who arrive and are shown a very agreeable view of slavery by the masters, she exclaims, 'What does he know'. This shows a very clear politics of representation where she feels that those who have not lived this life are not able to speak it. I also think that the emphasis on the 'he' might be the emphasis on the gendered nature of the degradation of slavery which Harriet is quite aware of. It appears then for Harriet, those who are not slaves and those who are men might never understand where she is coming from and are thus unable to represent her life in a reasonable way. Though I agree with the ideas we have discussed in class about if everyone can only be represented by themselves, what about the politics of solidarity, Harriet makes a very good case for this claim. As a woman, the gendered nature of the violence she has to bear and the abject humiliation of being a slave are portrayed in such a powerful way only because they are personal and may not have been articulated this well if they had come from someone else. What this book also starkly illustrates is that no category is an undifferentiated mass. Using a gendered lens might be impossible in the case of Harriet without taking her race into consideration since the white Mistresses while being women, are on the side of oppressors and have no way of speaking for the slave women. This shows that in politics of both solidarity and representation, intersectionality is the most important tool.

I think that the question of agency in this context is very interesting, as a slave, she is property and property can not have any agency. When Mr. Flint is pushing her to sleep with him, it appears that she has some agency in the matter because she can say no. And her relationship with Mr. Sands is negotiated under condition of saying no to Dr. Flint, her saying saying yes to him is not a yes she would have given freely but is an act of vengeance against Dr. Flint. In that case, since her consent is not freely given, I am not convinced that this is a case of her exercising her agency but of being raped by one man over another. That is not to say that she never exercises any agency, her push to get freedom for her children is an act of supreme agency. She is willing to let herself stay in a tiny closed off space, have her children stay in jail, all in a bid for their freedom which she eventually succeeds in doing.

What is interesting about her agency when it comes to her sexuality, is the question of virtue and morality. Dr. Flint is trying to take her virtue away from her, her grandmother is ashamed of her when she finds out, she is disgusted with herself, she is ashamed of taking her children for christening. These are all incidents where morality is used as a viewing lens. I find this interesting since this is morality taught to her by the Church and Clergymen who are quite happy to see her in slavery and even rape slaves themselves. This is the morality of the white free man, who has forced it upon the slaves and they view themselves in the same way. With the question of morality, I find the discussion of God also interesting. Her uncle Benjamin can not have faith since he is a slave, but her grandmother does and as the book progresses, Harriet begins to too. She uses the bible to shut her master up when he is propositioning her and there is a belief in the true God and the true word of Bible vs what the white people tell us. This is interesting since this is a god that has been brought to the slaves by the white man and is not their own. But this God has been appropriated by slaves to give them succor. If ideas of morality and religion are looked at as representations of ideas that emerge in one place and travel to others, it appears that origin does not matter. It is actually quite unimportant to those it affects, what matters is how these ideas are adapted and seen by those who practice them.