ABSTRACT
Harriet Jacobs’s autobiographical roman à clef, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself (1861), was published late in the Anti-Slavery Movement, coming to print in the final weeks before the Civil War. Richly influenced by its abolitionist predecessors, Jacobs’s autobiographical tale of enslaved womanhood is a complex amalgam that draws on sentimental, domestic traditions as well as the more masculine form of the classic slave narrative. Two foundational anti-slavery texts-Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: Written by Himself (1845)—cast particularly long shadows on Jacobs’s work. This influential dyad of abolitionist literature, whose poles reflect nineteenth-century distinctions of gender, race, and genre, presented Harriet Jacobs with compelling but conflicting modes of expression. As an African-American woman trapped between the cultural ideals of her womanhood and the social realities of her race, Jacobs would struggle to find narrative ground between Stowe and Douglass-a platform on which she could garner the necessary cultural authority while remaining true to the difficult experiences of her life. In fact, to articulate the defining gaps between Stowe’s maternal heroics and Douglass’s tale of masculine subjectivity is to discern the narrative and psychological tensions that lie at the heart of Harriet Jacobs’s work.
