ABSTRACT
This chapter relies on a conception of the female body as transparent; as Christian girls matured sexually and spiritually, their bodies did not draw attention to themselves as sexual objects but mediated the girls' developing interior piety. In her 1859 novella Our Nig, free-born black author Harriet E. Wilson critiques the Eurocentric substructure of the female Bildungsroman by illustrating how it stunts the course of her black heroine Frado's physical and spiritual development, entrapping her in a state of perpetual girlhood. Unable to disengage from identification with her body, Frado abandons her pursuit of Christian conversion to concentrate on physical survival. Although by the novella's conclusion Frado has given birth to a child, in the terms set out by the nineteenth-century female Bildungsroman, she never grows up: She neither converts nor effects conversion, and Mrs. Bellmont's brutality leaves her in a state of permanent physical and psychic dependency, a perpetual girlhood brought about by forcible identification with an opaque body.
