ABSTRACT
Sojourner Truth was an abolitionist and feminist activist who used her many public speeches to construct her body as a site of culture in the public eye. As an African American and freed slave, she did not have untroubled access to the defining rhetorical models of white female identity in nineteenth-century America. The author of this essay argues that Truth enacted a critique of certain nineteenth-century ideals of womanhood by identifying herself with a different discourse, that of the tall tale. The essay examines one particular moment of Truth's corporeal self-construction, her 1851 speech at the Akron Woman Rights Convention, the speech commonly known as Ar'n't I a Woman ?' By defining herself in this speech as a kind of tall-tale figure, Truth is shown to have enacted a deliberate and politically revisionary construction of her body, representing herself as a powerful, physically capable, economically self-sufficient person who was emphatically and defiantly a woman. Examining Truth within the rubric of the tall tale genre, the author argues, reveals her strategic negotiation of public discourses as a means of constructing female selfhood as heroic.
