Our society builds us in both body and soul. It has certain expectations of us, depending on whom we are, and it pressures us to live up to them. It compels us to internalise the external reality, to make natural what is socially constructed, to accept and live the status quo. In the case of societies based on power and the abuse of power, such as the plantocracies of the slave-holding south, this construction of the individual’s sense of self is a particularly insidious oppressive strategy. It becomes a means of forcing the slaves to accept their inferior state as natural. It is a method of making them acquiescent to their own humiliation and brutalisation. By using Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slavegirl as a basis for my discussion, I will attempt to demonstrate the various methods power uses to construct her identity, the effectiveness of them and the means of resistance that she finds to them.

Therefore, I would like to begin by considering the ways in which Flints attempts to inculcate a self in Jacobs that would submit readily to his sexual domination, a self that would be complicit in her own degradation at his hands. He tells her that she is his as “his property . . . subject to his will in all things”(361). He attempts to construct an identity that would rob her of her humanity and her free will, that would place her on the level of “dogs . . . foot-balls, cattle, every thing that’s mean”(355). When this fails, he tries to pollute her. As she relates to us, he “(begins) to whisper foul words in (her) ear”(361). He makes suggestive gestures and signs to her. He writes her lewd notes about his intentions towards her. He creates a sexually-charged atmosphere where she cannot hope to remain innocent. He attempts to “corrupt the pure principles (her) grandmother had instilled”(361) and thereby turn her into a fallen woman - a sexually precocious and voracious siren - who would submit to his advances.

Inevitably, this constant pressure has an effect on Jacobs. She speaks about becoming “prematurely knowing in evil things”(361) and being “compelled to realise that she is no longer a child”(361). She might never give into him bodily, but the mental and spiritual effect of Flint’s advances on her are undeniable. Deborah M. Garfield quite rightly likens these “foul words” to a more physical form of abuse when she says that Jacobs “must “stand and listen” before them as passively as the victim suffers her rapist’s will”(109). He rapes her with his words and his gestures. He violates her without laying hands on her. Without her ever falling to him, Flint manages to turn her into a fallen woman.

Jacobs shows an acute awareness of this stratagem and of its success when she confesses her involvement with Sands to the reader:

I will not try and screen myself behind the plea of compulsion from a master, for it was not so. Neither can I plead ignorance or thoughtlessness. For years, my master had done his utmost to pollute my mind with foul images, and to destroy the pure principles inculcated by my grandmother, and the good mistress of my childhood. The influences of slavery had had the same effect on me that they had on other young girls; they had made me prematurely knowing, concerning the evil ways of the world. I knew what I did and I did it with deliberate calculation. (384)

In her plea for understanding, she rejects the two, easier explanations that might exculpate her in the eyes of her readership and ascribes the blame solely to her master’s construction of her sense of self. If she is a fallen woman, she is saying, he created her to be one. His degradation of her moral principles and his transformation of her into an impure woman led her to give herself to a man to whom she was not married.

As a structural point, the deliberate mirroring of the paragraph in which she described her master’s predation is significant. Harriet Jacobs is a consummate writer and she deliberately echoes words and phrases, such as “prematurely knowing”, “unclean images” and “destroy the pure principles”. By doing so, she ties her decision to sleep with Sands directly back to the earlier incidents with Flint. She also hopes to reinvoke the sympathy for her and the outrage on her behalf that her readership would have felt at that point in her biography.

Therefore, despite the recrimination she heaps on herself, her resistance to Flint’s conception of her as a fallen woman emerges within the text. Not only does she mediate a new perception of herself and her choices, but she disputes whether the reader can perceive her in any fair and accurate way:

Pity me, and pardon me, O virtuous reader! You never knew what it is to be a slave; to be entirely unprotected by law or custom; to have the laws reduce you to the condition of chattel, entirely subject to the will of another. You never exhausted your ingenuity in avoiding the snares, and eluding the power of a hated tyrant; you never shuddered at the sound of his footsteps, and trembled within hearing of his voice. (386)

By questioning the reader’s moral ability and right to judge her, she challenges her sense of self as a sinner deserving of their judgement. She rejects as inappropriate for her the circumstances of her life a social (and, by extension, personal) identity either as a fallen woman or a voracious siren. Instead, she argues a view of herself that is not proscribed by conventional, Christian ethics; a view that takes cognisance of her background. She states that “(she feels) that the slave woman ought not to be judged by the same standard as others”(386).

More subtlely, as Hazel Carby discusses, her subversion of one of the major conventions of sentimental fiction serves to further her cause:

According to the doctrine of true womanhood, death itself was preferable to a loss of innocence; Linda Brent not only survived in her “impure” state, but she also used her “illicit” liaison as an attempt to secure a future for herself and her children. Jacob’s narrative was unique in its subversion of a major narrative code of sentimental fiction: death, as preferable to loss of purity, was replaced by “Death is better than slavery”(63). Incidents entered the field of women’s literature and history, transforming and transcending the central paradigm of death versus virtue. (59)

Due to her focus on Incidents’ role in transforming the field of Afro-American women’s literature, Carby does not explore the intratextual implications of Jacobs’ breaking of this narrative code. Again, Jacobs’ seems to be rejecting a specific view of chaste womanhood as practised by the sentimental novel as inadequate for her experience, and, by doing so, rejecting Flint’s construction of her as not living up to it.

However, as she illustrates at other points throughout the narrative, she is cognisant of the number of slaves who do fail in their struggle against their owners’ attempts to form their subjectivity. She comments that “(she knows) that some are too much brutalized by slavery to feel the humiliation of their position”(362). In their cases, plantocratic power has been successful in constructing subordinate identities that do not question the system, but accept the “humiliation of their position” as right and proper.

Moreover, this subordinate self-image often leads slaves to become complicit in their own oppression and degradation. Jacobs tells of Jenny, who “allers got de debble in her”(435) and who attempts to betray her to her pursuers. She has no reason to do so, other than the desire to win the approval of her master and mistress or the belief that it is wrong for slaves to escape.

More harrowingly, Jacobs also relates how “some poor creatures have been so brutalized by the lash that they will sneak out of the way to give their masters free access to their wives and daughters”(375). In other words, they help the slaveholders rape their female relatives by offering no resistance and, in fact, removing themselves from the scene. Again, in this discussion, Jacobs shows an acute awareness of the mechanisms of slavery in creating this type of subservient identity:

I admit the black man is inferior. But what is it that makes him so? It is the ignorance in which white men compel him to live; it is the torturing whip that lashes manhood out of him; it is the fierce bloodhounds of the South, and thescarcely less cruel human bloodhounds of the north, who enforce the Fugitive Slave Law. They do the work (375).

Although Harriet Jacobs foregrounds physical brutality in this argument, her mention of intellectual brutality - of forced ignorance - is significant. One of the slavers’ most insidious strategies is to convince the men and women in the power that their situation was infinitely better than that of slaves who had either escaped or whom had been freed. As Jacobs informs us:

A slaveholder once told me that he had seen a runaway friend of mine in NewYork, and that she besought him to take her back to her master, for she was literally dying of starvation; that many days she had only one cold potato to eat, and at other times she could get nothing at all. . . . This whole story was false. I afterwards staid with that friend in New York and found her in comfortable circumstances (375).

By keeping them ignorant of the facts and by denying them the means of finding out the truth through literacy, plantocratic power is able to persuade slaves that “it is not worth while to exchange slavery for such a hard kind of freedom”(375) and that they should be grateful to their masters and mistresses for preserving them from it.

In many ways, this compulsion on the slaves to feel gratitude to their owners is the greatest intellectual and emotional brutality of all. When Harriet Jacobs tells Flint that she would rather be sold to anybody than live under his constant attempts at seduction, he “(assumes) the air of a very injured individual, and (reproaches her) for (her) ingratitude”(367). He shifts the burden of guilt onto her for refusing his offer to “cherish her . . .(and) make a lady of her” (368). In that way, he tries to distort her sense of morality to make her believe that refusing his ‘kindness’ and his ‘charity’ is a worse sin than extramarital sex. In that way, he oppresses her in ways that physical punishment never could.

Consequently, although the iconic imagery of slavery is that of chains and whips, the slaves were oppressed in far more insidious and far less visible terms as well. Their core identity was brutalised. It was broken by the threat of punishment, smothered by ignorance, then remade into a self that would be quiescent to and complicit in its own oppression and degradation. In order to resist power, therefore, it was necessary for the slave not only to free themselves in physical terms but in mental terms as well by resisting power’s attempts to form their subjectivity.

Bibliography:

Carby, Hazel V, “Hear My Voice, Ye Careless Daughters” in Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. New York: Oxford UP. (1987)

Garfield, Deborah M, “Earwitness” in Harriet Jacobs and Incidents in the Life of a Slavegirl. Edited by Garfield and Zafar. New York: Cambridge UP. (1996)

Jacobs, Harriet (Writing as Linda Brent), “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” in The Classic Slave Narratives. Edited by Gates, Jr. New York: Mentor. (1987)