Slave Narrative: Jacobs

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Introduction
Perhaps because of our emphasis on individualism, Americans have always placed a high stock in autobiographies. From Rowlandson on through Franklin and Thoreau, we've encountered many different lives, and while many of the writings have touched on the major issue of the 19th century, slavery, none of directly addressed it. As the title suggests, this reading will remedy this.

Note that Jacob's words are bracketed (forewords and afterwards) by the words of her white supporters attesting to this ex-slave's writing abilities and the veracity of her story. This speaks to the anxiety of the publishers and their concerns that readers could not accept what was presented as an authentic voice unless presented with an imprimatur of the dominant culture.

Yet inside those brackets a fierce intellect is revealed; an intellect ready to bite at the hand that supposedly feeds it. Instead of kowtowing before her mainly Northern audience, she turns the supposedly religiosity of our nation on its head.

Terms and People to Know
Slave Narrative: A written account by an escaped or freed slave of his or her experiences of slavery. A special American form of autobiography, the slave narrative appeared as an important kind of abolitionist literature in the period preceding the Civil War. The outstanding example is the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845).

"slave narrative." The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Ed. Chris Baldick. Oxford University Press, 2008. Oxford Reference Online . Oxford University Press. Web. 14 November 2009.

Slave Narrative: Slave narratives are autobiographical accounts of the physical and spiritual journey from slavery to freedom. In researching her groundbreaking 1946 dissertation, Marion Wilson Starling located 6,006 slave narratives written between 1703 and 1944. This number includes brief testimonies found in judicial records, broadsides, journals, and newsletters as well as separately published books. It also includes approximately 2,500 oral histories of former slaves gathered by the Federal Writers' Project in the 1930s. The number of separately published slave narratives, however, is much smaller. Although exact numbers are not available, nearly one hundred slave narratives were published as books or pamphlets between 1760 and 1865, and approximately another one hundred following the Civil War. The slave narrative reached the height of its influence and formal development during the antebellum period, from 1836 to 1861. During this time it became a distinct genre of American literature, and achieved immense popularity and influence among a primarily white, northern readership. A few, in particular The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. Written by Himself (1845), displayed a high level of rhetorical sophistication. With the end of slavery, however, interest in the narratives declined sharply. Furthermore, one consequence of the social and political repression of the black population following Reconstruction was the "loss” of the slave narratives for sixty years. During the last few decades of the twentieth century, scholars recovered, republished, and analyzed slave narratives. Both historians and literary critics came to value their importance to the historiography of American slavery and to the development of African-American autobiography and fiction. Read rest of essay -- VERY rich.

Orilla Scott, Lynn. "Autobiography: Slave Narratives." The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature . Jay Parini. Oxford University Press 2004. Oxford Reference Online . Oxford University Press. Web. 14 November 2009.

Sensational Literature: Sensational fiction of the 1820--1870 period consisted largely of inexpensive, mass-produced pamphlet novels, many of them in yellow paper jackets embla-zoned with racy titles in lurid dark lettering and melodramatic lithographs that ranged from the titillating to the horrific. Designed as ephemeral entertainment for a mobile readership, this fiction was an important barometer of popular taste and a revelation of such issues as class relations, gender, ethnicity, and the contexts of major American literature. Read rest of essay

Domestic Fiction: This genre of novels and stories celebrate the Cult of True Womanhood, a belief, common in the nineteenth-century, that middle and upper-class white women (and those who aspired to such class and color) were "Angels of the Hearth," moral and religious exemplars who offered, in their homes/shrines, a respite from the vagaries of the cold, cruel world. This cult entails submission to authority (typically, though not always male), piety, purity, and attention and skill in domestic affairs (creating a comfortable home).

The critic Nina Baym (who edited our textbook with those erstwhile companions et al.) offers a succinct plot of a typical Domestic novel: "In essence, it is the story of a young girl who is deprived of the supports she had rightly or wrongly depended on to sustain her throughout life and is faced with the necessity of winning her own way in the world. This young girl is fittingly called a heroine because her role is precisely analogous to the unrecognized or undervalued youths of fairy tales who perform dazzling exploits and win a place for themselves i the land of happy endings. She also fits the pattern of comic hero, whose displacement indicates social corruption and whose triumph ensures the reconstruction of a beneficent social order. In Jungian perspective, her story exemplifies the difficult but successful negotiation of the undifferentiated child through the trials of adolescence into the individuation of sound adulthood. The happy marriages with which most -- though not all -- of this fiction concludes are symbols of successful accomplishment of the required task and resolutions of the basic problems raised in the story, which is in most primitive terms the story of the formation and assertion of a feminine ego" (11-12).

"This story itself exists in two parallel versions. In one, the heroine begins as a poor and friendless child. Most frequently an orphan, she sometimes only thinks herself to be one, or has by necessity been separated from her parents for an indefinite time. In the second, the heroine is a pampered heiress who becomes poor and friendless in midadolescence, thought the death or financial failure of her legal protectors. At this point the two plots merge, for both show how the heroine develops the capacity to survive and surmount her troubles. At the end of the novel she is no longer an underdog. The purpose of both plots is to deprive the heroine of all external aids and to make her success in life entirely a function of her own efforts and character. The idea that a woman's identity or place in life is a function of her father's or husbands' place is firmly rejected, not merely on idealistic but also on realistic grounds. It the orphan's rags-to-riches story caught one aspect of American life and faith, the heiress's riches-to-rags caught another. As some moved up, others fell down. When men fell, their dependent women fell with them Several women authors began their careers as a direct result of financial catastrophe in their families; as we will see, the Panic of 1837 created a large new group of women authors. Their novels showed how women were forced to depend on themselves. They asserted that women had to be prepared for both economic and emotion self-support, ..."

There are two kinds of heroine in this novel, the flawless and the flawed. the flawless are those who already possess the emo 36 tional strength and stability to function when adversity strikes. The flawed are those whose characters are defective, so that triumph in adversity becomes a matter of self-conquest as well as conquest of the other. Some novels present more than one heroine. A flawed and a flawless heroine may counterpoint one another. Again, two kind s of flaws will be opposed, such as excessive dependency against excessive self-will. The overly dependent woman has to acquire firmness, the self-willed woman learns to bend so as not to break. The idea of what is, and what is not, a flaw varies according to the perspective of the individual author, yet all agree that some degree of self-control is a moral and practical necessity while total self-abnegation is suicidal. The writers' conviction that character had to adjust to limiting circumstances, their belief that suffering and hardship could not be avoided in any human life, and their strenuous insistence that such trials, because they called out otherwise dormant abilities, could become occasions for 'perfecting' the character imply a deeply Victorian world view" (Baym woman's 35-36)

See Catherine Beecher Stowe and Harriet Beecher Stowe's American Women's Home for a period guidebook.

Baym, Nina. Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820-1870. Ithaca, New York: Cornell UP, 1978. Print.

Middle Passage: " in the days of the African slave trade to the New World, the middle part of the slave's journey -- i.e., the crossing of the Atlantic Ocean. From about 1518 to the mid-19th century, millions of African men, women, and children made the 21-to-90-day voyage aboard grossly overcrowded sailing ships manned by crews mostly from Great Britain, the Netherlands, Portugal, and France. Slaver captains anchored chiefly off the Guinea Coast for a month to a year to gather their cargoes of 150 to 600 persons. Then began a long period of continuous danger, with raids at port by hostile tribes, threats of slave mutiny, epidemics, attack by pirates or enemy ships, and bad weather. During the Middle Passage , male slaves were kept constantly shackled to each other or to the deck to prevent mutiny, of which 55 detailed accounts were recorded between 1699 and 1845. "

"Middle Passage." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2006. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Web. 12 Dec. 2006.

Fugitive Slave Act: "in U.S. history, statutes passed by Congress in 1793 and 1850 (and repealed in 1864) that provided for the seizure and return of runaway slaves who escaped from one state into another or into a federal territory. The 1793 law enforced Article IV, Section 2, of the U.S. Constitution in authorizing any federal district judge or circuit court judge, or any state magistrate, to decide finally and without a jury trial the status of an alleged fugitive slave.

The measure met with strong opposition in the Northern states, some of which enacted personal-liberty laws to hamper the execution of the federal law; these laws provided that fugitives who appealed from an original decision against them were entitled to a jury trial. As early as 1810 individual dissatisfaction with the law of 1793 had taken the form of systematic assistance rendered to black slaves escaping from the South to New England or Canada—via the Underground Railroad.

The demand from the South for more effective legislation resulted in enactment of a second Fugitive Slave Act in 1850. Under this law fugitives could not testify on their own behalf, nor were they permitted a trial by jury. Heavy penalties were imposed upon federal marshals who refused to enforce the law or from whom a fugitive escaped; penalties were also imposed on individuals who helped slaves to escape. Finally, under the 1850 act, special commissioners were to have concurrent jurisdiction with the U.S. courts in enforcing the law. The severity of the 1850 measure led to abuses and defeated its purpose. The number of abolitionists increased, the operations of the Underground Railroad became more efficient, and new personal-liberty laws were enacted in many Northern states. These state laws were among the grievances officially referred to by South Carolina in December 1860 as justification for its secession from the Union. Attempts to carry into effect the law of 1850 aroused much bitterness and probably had as much to do with inciting sectional hostility as did the controversy over slavery in the territories.

For some time during the American Civil War, the Fugitive Slave Acts were considered to still hold in the case of blacks fleeing from masters in border states that were loyal to the Union government. It was not until June 28, 1864, that the acts were repealed."

" Fugitive Slave Acts ." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2006. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Web. 12 Dec. 2006.

A common character in mythology is the trickster. Typically male, the trickster usually has extreme appetites—for food, but also for women. According to the given society's mores, he is immoral, or at least amoral, and he is frequently a thief. Yet he often uses his inventiveness, even his closeness to the creator, to help human beings as a de facto culture hero. Often his inventiveness interferes with creation, however, and results in such realities as pain and death. The trickster can change shapes at will and is perhaps a mythological relative of the shaman.

Raven, Coyote, and Iktome are popular Native North American tricksters. In Africa some of the best-known tricksters are Ananse, Legba, Eshu, and Dikithi. In ancient Sumer, Enki had trickster qualities, as did Hermes in ancient Greece. The often wicked and destructive Norse trickster was Loki. A particularly phallic-oriented trickster is the Polynesian Maui. Erlik is a ubiquitous trickster-devil in central Asia. Tricksters can be noble figures. The India Vishnu avatar Lord Krishna is a trickster whose pranks usually can be interpreted metaphorically for moral purposes.

To survey the history of sentimental literature in America is to gain insight into some of the most critical moments in American culture. As Thomas Paine 's influential essay of 1776 explained, it is on the grounds of "common sense” that the colonial ...(Click on link for complete entry)

Life
Of course, as an autobiography -- albeit with names and places changed -- the narrative itself offers the best view of her life. For what happens after the book is written, see introduction in Norton Critical Edition for her biography.

Times
The antebellum south -- in all it's "glory" -- is revealed here. Just as important is her portrait, at the end of the narrative, of the ostensibly "free" north.

For more detailed information, check your book and Overview: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Written by Herself . Literature and Its Times: Profiles of 300 Notable Literary Works and the Historical Events that Influenced Them. Joyce Moss and George Wilson. Vol. 2: Civil Wars to Frontier Societies (1800-1880s) . Detroit: Gale, 1997. From Literature Resource Center .

Classified ad by Jacobs' "owner" with a reward for her return. Published in the American Beacon, July 4th 1835.
Love the irony of the date.

Atlanta, 1864. From American Quarterly
Note the advertisements and what looks like a Union soldier reading next to the door.

Yale hosts a site with background documents (many in your Norton edition) and other information: it's worth a look.

Norton Critical Editions are great "one stop shopping" for criticism on a particular work or author. Review the essays in the back of your text (starting on 203) for a view of the rich and varied work that has been written on this text.