Harriet Jacobs and Harriet Wilson Contributed to the Women's Cannon

In the 1850's, historians claimed a diversified literary realm saw realism competing with romanticism, popular sentimentalism influencing public policy and private thinking as much as utopian cultural analysis appeared to do, and the writing of women achieved an insight equal to that of the writing of men. In spite of such claims, American literature tradition became synonymous with white male writing. During this time, out of thousands of slave narratives written and orally transmitted, fewer than thirty pieces were written by black women and published during their lifetimes. Two of the most influential women authors are Harriet A. Jacobs and Harriet E. Wilson. Some historians agree that Harriet Jacobs was the only black woman author to publish a book-length slave narrative; whereas Harriet Wilson was the first published black woman novelist. Such a privileged position in the history of American literature would appear as an acceptance into the canon. However, others maintain that skeptical scholars excluded Jacobs and Wilson from the African American canon because of their "self-conscious appropriation of the nineteenth century fictional conventions" which was familiar to women readers (Samuels 260).

Today, scholars are unearthing and reevaluating a number of works of African American women. Harriet Jacob's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself and Harriet Wilson's Our Nig or Sketches From the Life of a Free Black, are two works which have been rediscovered. These two women were nearly obliterated because of the ultimate restriction placed upon authors: question of authenticity. Most critics questioned the authorship because the point of view and the excellent style used by both Harriets were considered to be more like white women work (Samuels 260). Such an unproven restriction nearly destroyed their work.

In order to be regarded as credible authors, critic Patricia Hill Collins claims that black women value the concrete experience as a "criterion for credibility" when making major claims(190). In the context of race, gender, and social oppression, black women cannot afford to be considered as "fools" because they are denied the protection of white skin, maleness, and wealth (190). For the "subordinate", survival is essential in the existence of wisdom, since "knowledge without wisdom is adequate for the powerful"(Samuels 194). Thus, the knowledgeable claims made by African-American authors who are respected for their moral and ethical values, carry more weight. Regardless of the moral righteousness claimed by female authors during Jacob's and Wilson's time, today it is essential to recognize the contribution of these two women to the feminist literary canon, transcending the societal restrictions defined by either color or gender.

One of the most easily recognizable attacks against the domesticity of women is Jacob's manipulation of this idea through "recombinations of tropes on the home as woman's shelter and prison"(Samuels 249). Not only are the women pushed into constricted physical domains, but also in the enslaved existences in which they survive. In Harryette Mullen's essay "Runaway Tongue Resistant Orality in Uncle Tom's Cabin, Our Nig, Incidents in the Life of and Slave Girl, and Beloved," she states that Linda Brent's "loophole"(Jacobs 114) and Frado's "L-chamber"(Wilson 300) can be considered as representations of the cramped, hidden spaces in which "women's self-expression moved toward literary production"(254). Wilson's novel utilizes a compartmentalization of the house in order to present segregation, not only of the physical aspects of the women but also of the language used. Mullen suggests that the "house confines the colored servant to her place under the supervision of white mistress" who is also confined to the domestic sphere (254). The hypocrisy shown by Mrs. Bellmont in Our Nig, is shown in the language differences allocated to contrasting places within the home. Mrs. Bellmont speaks "like an angel in the parlor" but like a she-devil in the kitchen where the rawhide is kept in order to discipline "Nig"(Samuels 254). This separation of the bourgeois home tends to embody the exploitation and domination of gender between social classes.

Along the theme of the domestic sphere, Jacob's arranges Linda Brent in the "Fear of Insurrection" chapter as a parody of housekeeping. After the Nat Turner revolution, even the woman's domestic domain is no longer considered sanctuary. When the soldiers rush in to search the home and possibly incriminate the residents, the reader can see Jacob's rage at the ways she, as a black woman, is denied her rights and authority. In Laura Wexler's essay "Tender Violence: Literary Eavesdropping, Domestic Fiction and Educational Reform", she believes that the pillaged house stands as a metaphor "for the black woman's body under slavery"(35). Although Brent has supposedly escaped rape by Dr. Flint, it is apparent she is continually raped by her country. Ironically, the house no longer symbolizes a source of safety and the only place most of the persecuted slaves can find sanctuary is in jail (Samuels 35).

By using the double standard of a patriarchal society, Jacobs and Wilson resist the overwhelming attempt of a male-based civilization to mold all women into a submissive role. Jacob's declared that man "has created a false public sentiment by giving to the world a different code of morals for men and women, by which moral delinquencies which exclude women from society, are not only tolerated, but deemed of little account in men"(Kilcup 86). These divisions of gender attempt to repress any desire for women to express their individuality and be considered equally important as men. Jacobs expresses her direct concern with gender divisions by addressing women explicitly and stating frequently that the focus of her narrative is the female slave's experience. As a result of double standards, women were, and are today, held to greater moral righteousness than men. Linda Grasso asserts in her book The Artistry of Anger: Black and White Women's Literature in America, 1820-1860, that although feelings of "joy, love, sympathy, and reverence" were celebrated and considered essential to the domestic role of woman as a mother and wife, the more passionate feelings of "disproval, discontent, vengeance, and hatred" were exclusively the man's domain (25).

In order to publicly communicate their culturally prohibited discontent, women like Jacobs and Wilson have created an art form which allows them to confront their anger. As women writers, their literature works as a cultural critique over the broken promises of a democratic America (Grasso 40). Grasso claims that by expressing anger, one takes on the "right to judge those who are causing injury and assumes that the self is worth defending"(175). Women of the nineteenth century were not allowed to express their personal opinions or assert their constitutional rights to make judgments about national issues. By obliterating the rights of anger, the patriarchal society attempts to demolish the individual opinions and overall existence of women. However, Wilson affirms the woman's right to vengeful feelings when she uses Frado's excited reaction to Mary's death. "It seemed a thanksgiving to Frado" to be spared more torture by the violent Mary, even if death were the only escape (Wilson 345).

Wilson also validates women's anger through the repeated establishment of a system that rejects the "Jesus-style, turn-the-cheek model of forgiveness" and substitutes it with and angry form of punishment and revenge (Grasso 177). Since Mrs. Bellmont is the primary source of punishment, Wilson asserts that women are also capable of violence and anger. Wilson also uses Mary as the feminine executor of revenge. These two women not only embodied the "southern principles" alive in the supposedly free mythical North, but as the only sources of violence within the text (Wilson 287).

Not only were women expected to deny their more primitive emotions, but the ideal persona of a nineteenth century woman is best described as an impossible feat. Bess Beatty sums up this illusion as: "a beautiful but frail woman, often frivolous, gossipy, scattered brained, and at times devious whose highest mission was caring for home and children, serving as her husband's helpmate, and maintaining the highest standards of morality"(Foster 34-35). Such an ideal remains infeasible for Wilson and Jacobs because of the enslaved woman's situation and inability to live up to the Victorian ideal of chastity as in the "Cult of True Womanhood". This inability is captured by Jacobs' apology and appeal to the reader as a woman in the assertion of the chapter "A Perilous Passage in the Slave Girl's Life".

"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 a chattel, entirely subject to the will of another"(55).

Here Jacobs is presented with the difficult position of writing to Victorian audiences and explaining how and why women were forced to succumb to the often violent sexual approaches of white men, rather than remain chaste like sentimental heroines. Thus, Jacobs appeals to what feminist scholars, such as Patricia Hill Collins, assert as a shared history of "patriarchal oppression through the political economy of the material conditions of sexuality and reproduction"(Collins 188). Jacobs pleads for understanding of her plight as a woman and to not judge her too harshly with the laws of men. In her essay "The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought", she asserts these conditions transcend the divisions of women created by ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, race, and social class to form a corresponding "feminist consciousness and epistemology"(Collins 188).

Regardless of which era of history is reviewed, there is a connection among women of being held to impossible double standards. The autobiographical narrative of Jacobs' is driven by the desire for freedom and the desire to live up to an ideal of womanhood. However, in order for her to reach such an ideal, Jacob's maintains such virtues as Bess Beatty described as illusory. Jacobs expresses that the enslaved woman, in all forms of slavery and abuse, cannot be judged by the same standards as a free, independent woman (Samuels 86). The varying standards required to judge different versions of women shows the unjustness of the double standards used to judge men and women as created by men.

In addition, the ability of resistance to such a complacent grouping of women, slavery-enforced women operated in a tradition of verbal self-defense (Samuels 245). Such speech acts includes labels as sassy or saucy, impudent, impertinent, and insolent. Without resorting to physical violence, Wilson exploits the oral incentive and sauciness through narrative and dialogue. Shirley Samuels, author of The Culture of Sentiment, believes that Wilson's partially autobiographical protagonist Frado counters the language of the "two-story white house" with a "resistant sassiness", while Wilson condemns Mrs. Bellmont's private abusive speech through the "literate, public, and euphemistic language of the sentimental novel"(254). Wilson is faced with the nineteenth century struggle to reconcile an oral tradition of resistance with a literary tradition of submission in relation to acceptable modesty and decorum (Samuels 245). The oral tradition often permitted what literature would not: the directness of expressing concerns about matters such as sex, violence, and sexual violence.

By approaching this silence, Wilson and Jacobs attempt to give a voice to oppressed women. Instead of focusing on a method of resistance, Jacobs deals more explicitly with the sexual subjugation of women. Harryette Mullen centers on the exposure of the slave woman's body (in the field, at public whipping post, and along with her sexual vulnerability in her master's household), as a contrast to the "hidden sexuality and corresponding modesty of the respectable white women" whose bodies are covered and sheltered in the patriarchal domestic sphere (246). Jacobs' own dealings with a master who attempted to defeat and subdue her sexually, stands as a personal acclaim of the moral degradation women suffer, have suffered, and will suffer at the hands of male domination. Critics Joanne M. Braxton and Sharon Zuber, in "Silences in Harriet 'Linda Brent' Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl", illuminate Jacobs's attempt to expose the sexual exploitation of women and her simultaneous silencing by the dictation of the "Cult of True Womanhood"(151). However, Jacobs' moral obligation causes her to speak out and break through the silences imposed upon her with the compassionate righteousness of a woman. Throughout Jacobs' text, key silences surround the sexual abuse of women. Women were not allowed to speak against sexual exploitation of slave women. Brent retells a story of a young woman who married for love, yet died of madness when her husband begins to have sexual relations with the slave women. This woman's inability to act against such demoralizing behavior destroyed her. Even about her own sexual initiation of resistance against Dr. Flint, Jacobs' is quiet. By breaking the surrounding silence of forbidden subjects about sex and telling her story, Jacobs' challenges the male-dominated abolitionist movement and budding feminist movement (Fishkin 152).

Through the power of literary competence, Harriet A. Jacobs and Harriet E. Wilson use their ability to control language as an assertion of their struggle for womanhood. Even if the commonly held ideals of a patriarchal domain are inaccessible, Jacobs and Wilson praise the strengths and capability of all women. By writing in an autobiographical sense, their narratives break out against the silence surrounding sexual exploitation of women, combine the universal suffrage of women regardless of color, support anger as a validated means of expressing a desire for equality, and express how the domestic domain can exist in order to define more clearly the differences of social classes and genders.

Bibliography

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Fishkin, Shelley Fisher, Elaine Hedges, ed. Listening to Silences: New Essays in Feminist Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press. 1994.

Grasso, Linda M. The Artistry of Anger: Black and White Women's Literature in America, 1820-1860. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. 2002.

Jacobs, Harriet A. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2001.

Kilcup, Karen L. Soft Canons: American Women Writers and Masculine Tradition. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. 1999.

Pryse, Marjorie, Hortense J. Pillers, ed. Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1985.

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Wilson, Harriet E. Our Nig. New York: New American Library. 1990.