ABSTRACT
One striking aspect of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is its harsh criticism of the interracial romance as a putative antithesis to racial antagonism. This point is developed systematically, and with an even clearer feminist orientation, in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl , examined in this chapter of American Literature and American Identity. Jacobs unflinchingly represents the exploitation and interpersonal cruelty that were an almost inevitable part of interracial sexual relations under slavery. Only at the end of the memoir does Jacobs come to represent interracial bonding as an important part of racial reconciliation. That bonding, however, is in the form of female friendship, not romance. Jacobs also takes up and extends Stowe’s evaluation of U.S. nationalism, developing what is probably the sharpest criticism of the United States of all the writers discussed in this book.
