Essay Database

To the Northern White Woman: Hear My Cry! Harriet Jacobs structures her own text - an autobiographical narrative told by "Linda Brent," a generated, first-person narrator - with an awareness of framing and with attention to multiple perspectives. Jacobs knows that context matters and that narratives frequently are contested. The first line of the preface promises truth: "Reader, be assured, this narrative is no fiction." While not naming individual slaveholders, Jacobs is testifying against all …

…While slavery's defenders asserted that the enslaved were happy, they also were determined not to let these happy slaves say a public word, whether in a courtroom, ballot box, or novel. The official line on slavery declared that slaves had no subjectivity to speak of, yet there was tremendous anxiety that there be no public arena where such a subjectivity might somehow speak. This central contradiction helps reveal the fictions underlying legal constructions of slavery.