American Renaissance UHCL sample research posts

LITR 4328 American Renaissance

Research Posts 2015
(research post assignment)

Research Post 1

Cyndi Perkins

3/10/15

Harriet Jacobs: Slavery as Romance?

In an earlier class, I learned a little about women and men who wrote about their experiences as slaves. I found it interesting that despite laws against being allowed to learn to read and write, they somehow accomplished the impossible and were able to relate their stories to the public in the hopes that it would further the Abolitionist movement. Writers like Fredrick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs were born slaves, but eventually became free and were able to produce brilliant literature. These writers worked to create texts that would hopefully end slavery and allow African-Americans to be accepted as human. Discovering that our class would be taking a look at slave narratives motivated me to find out more about who the female writers were, their life stories and what led them to write the type of stories they did. My favorite so far has been Harriet Jacobs. Her book Incident in the Life of a Slave Girl is a disturbing yet informative look into what female slaves had to suffer. My question is how is Harriet Jacobs a Romantic writer and why would she chose to write her story in this style rather than just sticking to a more auto-biographical linear telling?

I decided to look at Dr. White’s webpage on the slave narrative (http://coursesite.uhcl.edu/HSH/Whitec/terms/S/slavenarr.htm) as well as Romanticism (http://coursesite.uhcl.edu/HSH/Whitec/terms/R/Romanticism.htm) to try and understand how the two interact and crossover. First, it becomes obvious that slave narratives can easily be classified as Romantic, because although they are about human beings suffering horrifically, they are also about individuals trying to transcend society’s designation of them as confined to negative traits unfairly associated with their race. Second, Dr. White explains that slave narratives often follow the captivity narrative formula in which there is an innocent who is captured by malignant, dark forces and suffers while he or she waits for a knight in shining armor to rescue them (http://coursesite.uhcl.edu/HSH/Whitec/terms/C/captnarr.htm). Typically, Dr. White informs us, the dark or evil forces are correlated to savages, such as the Indians, and the light or pure forces are often some version of the Euro-American alpha male. Slave narratives turn this idea on its head. While still using the dramatic element of portraying someone in a weaker position needing to be rescued, dark or black does not equate to bad and light or white does not equate to good. Instead, the stories are of darker-skinned humans who have been captured and enslaved by lighter-skinned adversaries who exhibit immoral, cruel and savage behaviors. I personally find it very interesting that these writers were able to utilize the nineteenth century’s love affair with Romantic fiction to force the white population to take a second look at their participation and association with something as barbaric as slavery.

I next turned to Google to search for a connection between Romanticism and slave narratives as well as find a little more in-depth historical and biographical information. I found the website for the National Humanities Center which has an interesting article helping readers to understand the intricacies of the slave narrative and how and why they were written (http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/freedom/1609-1865/essays/slavenarrative.htm). The article, “How to Read a Slave Narrative,” states that during the abolitionist movement, “as social and political conflict in the United States at mid-century centered more and more on the presence and fate of African-Americans, the slave narrative took on an unprecedented urgency and candor, unmasking as never before the moral and social complexities of the American caste and class system in the North as well as the South” (Andrews). The article mentions that Harriet Jacobs, as a female writer had a more difficult time because she had to no just transcend the limits of being a slave in a pro-slave nation, but also a woman in a male-dominated society. In fact, the author of the article claims “Jacobs’s autobiography shows how sexual exploitation made slavery especially oppressive for black women” (Andrews). She was doubly oppressed and her autobiography directly reaches out to women of the North to draw sympathy for her and her children. This leads me to believe that in her appeal to the women of the North she would have been correct in using the romance narrative as her template to make it easier for them to digest.

Interestingly, because she was working so hard to convince her readers that her situation was dire and that many other women were still left in terrible oppression, many believed the story too romantic in nature to be true. Jacobs herself recognizes that her “adventures may seem incredible; but they are, nevertheless, strictly true” (Jacobs 5). In fact, Lydia Maria Child’s, a white abolitionist and writer, was called upon to authenticate the text in the introduction. I decided it was time to look through some scholarly articles and chose JSTOR for my search. I was surprised that there weren’t as many articles that concentrated on Jacobs’s writing style and even fewer dedicated to her as a Romantic writer. I eventually came across an article about the development of African-American fiction in which the author reported that at the time of the publication of Incidents, many “agreed that Lydia Maria Child was the real author, and that the book was ‘too melodramatic’ and sentimental to be a critical slave narrative” (Showalter 71). The article mentions that it was not definitively proven that Jacobs even wrote Incidents until the late twentieth century.

If employing the sentimental and romantic when writing an autobiography only causes the public to disregard it because it’s impossible for a typical reader to either believe a slave has the ability to write it or that its simply too conveniently romantic for it to be true, then I find it even more perplexing that these writers chose to use this style. So, I continued my search using JSTOR and found another article that offered more clues. The article “Why Does the Slave Ever Love” explained that “throughout history, romantic desire has been understood as a feeling, an emotion, an act expressed by human beings” (Robinson 41). Apparently, the idea is that “love and affection” are to be “[distinguished] from the innate desire and lust practiced by animals” (Robinson 41). In other words, the accepted thinking of the time was that slaves were not human and could not feel love. Therefore, it was easy for the public to dismiss the idea that a slave could ever form romantic attachments. The article goes on to explain that “Jacobs faced severe consequences for daring to believe that [she] could or should have a right to enjoy such a romance” further driving home the point that the pro-slavery population rigorously suppressed the idea of a slave having human emotions (Robinson 42). Since Incidents definitely includes romance, it seems evident that she may have been trying to prove to her audience that she was a human woman. She wanted them to know she was a mother, a sister, a daughter, granddaughter, and even a lover, and so not an animal. This, it seems would be a very good reason to mimic a romance narrative and other Romantic elements in telling her story.

Due to this research, I have a much clearer idea of how the slave narrative fits within Romanticism and I realize now that there are many reasons why slave narratives are Romantic and why these authors would have chosen to write in this vein, though I do not have enough space to share these ideas now. I assume with the sentimental novel being popular at the time, writing a slave narrative as a romance or captive narrative would have given the abolitionists a much wider audience to appeal to. It seems to me that Jacobs and many others writers, whether former slaves or white abolitionists, were trying to assert that the slave is human and therefore deserving of all the compassion, fairness, protection from tyranny and freedom a white person demands. The slave narratives, like Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, display the inhumane treatment slaves suffered at the hands of their evil captors making it very easy for the readers to root for the victim. This would have had to make the readers think a little more deeply about the plight of the slave. These stories also show readers that slaves exhibit romantic feelings as well as yearn for freedom of choice and the power to control their own lives. This would have made readers rethink their acceptance of the notion of the slave being inhuman. I believe this is what Harriet Jacobs accomplished in writing a Romantic novel.

Works Cited

Andrews, William L. How to Read a Slave Narrative. Freedoms Story, Teachers Serve. National Humanities Center. 10 Mar. 2015.

http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/freedom/1609-1865/essays/slavenarrative.htm

Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Ed. Nellie McKay and Frances Smith Foster. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2001. Print.

Robinson, Angelo Rich. “Why Does the Slave Ever Love? The Subject of Romance Revisited in the Neoslave Narrative Author(s)”. The Southern Literary Journal, 40.1 Fall Ed. (2007): 39-57. JSTOR. Web. 10 Mar. 2015.

Showalter, Elaine. ”The Development of Black Women's Fiction: From Slavery to the Harlem Renaissance Author(s)”. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 64 Summer Ed. (2009): 70-79. JSTOR. Web. 10 Mar. 2015.

White, Craig. Litr 4328 American Renaissance. University of Houston Clear Lake, 2015. Web. 7, Mar. 2015. http://coursesite.uhcl.edu/HSH/Whitec/LITR/4232/