SOURCE: "Harriet Jacobs' Narrative Strategies: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" in Southern Literary Journal, Vol. XIX, No. 1, Fall, 1986, pp. 79-91.

[In the following essay, Doherty examines Jacob's use of the conventions of the sentimental genre and describes the shortcomings of Incidents as a sentimental novel. Rather, he argues that Jacobs "ingeniously inducts 'women's literature' into the cause of women's politics."]

In 1853, the fugitive slave Harriet Jacobs confided her literary ambitions to the poet and abolitionist Amy Post. "Don't expect too much of me, dear Amy," she cautioned, "You shall have truth but not talent" (Sterling 79). Jacobs' modest opinion of the work that became Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published in 1861 under the pseudonym Linda Brent, has generally accorded with critical opinion. When noted at all, it has been valued primarily as a historical document, one of the precious few antebellum slave narratives written by a woman—and even then, until quite recently, a text considered of dubious authenticity.¹ Likewise, its formal virtues have received scant consideration, Jacobs' stylistic debt to the sentimental novel typically warranting her the bemused appellation "the Pamela of the slave narratives" (Bayliss 108, Foster 58-59).

Though the dearth of historical and literary regard has lately been somewhat remedied, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is still more apt to be taken as a generic anomaly filling the affirmative action slot of English Department book lists than as a complex creative act deserving scrutiny in its own right. Like Jean de Crevecoeur's naive Farmer James in Letters from an American Farmer, the author's guileless persona has too effectively masked her literary sophistication. Prefatory claims of authorial innocence and creative "deficiencies" (xiii) aside, Jacobs ingeniously inducts "women's literature" into the cause of women's politics in her tale of sex-determined destiny under slavery. Seldom has an American writer so ably put popular art to a polemical purpose.

Even by the standards of slave narratives, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl relates an incredible story. Linda, the author's autobiographical persona, is orphaned in childhood and reared by her kindly manumated grandmother, a community matriarch of no little authority in her Carolina county. In early adolescence, the precocious slave girl is made servant to the lecherous Dr. Flint, a hypocrite with all the unholy passions and none of the capacity for moral regeneration of the sentimentalist seducers of the era's best-selling fiction. As Linda grows to womanhood, Flint's sexual harassment becomes increasingly persistent and aggressive, but despite threats and temptations, she steadfastly repulses the advances of her ostensible master. When she cheekily confesses her love for a free-born "young colored carpenter" (36), Flint rages like a jealous suitor, striking Linda and forbidding her marriage.

Shortly after the ill-starred romance, and seemingly more in willful defiance of Flint than from any infatuation of her own, Linda succumbs to the attentions of a prominent white man, by whom she eventually bears two children. Again, Flint is furious and abusive, though (curiously) his violence always stops short of rape. Unable any longer to bear his persecutions, Linda goes into hiding, leading Flint and his slavehunters to believe she has fled North. However, unbeknownst even to her children, Linda is actually concealed in the tiny attic of her grandmother's house. She spends seven years in this crawlspace, a "garret . . . only nine feet long and seven wide. . . . (with) no admission for either light or air" (117). Ultimately, fearing discovery, Linda secures passage North. In New York City, she finds successive employment and sisterly succor with two exemplary mistresses. With their help, and through her own unwavering efforts, she obtains legal freedom for her children and herself. At the narrative's close, she reports, with satisfaction, the news of Flint's death and notes pointedly, "Reader, my story ends with freedom; not in the usual way, with marriage" (207).

Throughout, as per generic convention, Jacobs interweaves her story with long stretches of anti-slavery rhetoric, much valuable ethnography, and some solid history (especially the chapter "Fear of Insurrection" (64-69), which is vivid testimony to the panic among Southern whites wrought by Nat Turner's uprising in 1831). But what lends this narrative unique and immediate appeal is, of course, sex—the sex of the narrator, of the audience, and in the story.

From the outset, Jacobs is gender specific about her audience and cause:

I do earnestly desire to arouse the women of the North to a realizing sense of the conditions of two millions of women at the South, still in bondage . . . (xiv).

The strategy is both demographically and rhetorically astute. Northern women, largely from leisured middleclass households, were among the abolitionist movement's most dedicated participants. As Frederick Douglass declared in a famous tribute to their "agency, devotion, and efficiency in pleading the cause of the slave," women gave the anti-slavery crusade much of its moral force, social legitimacy, and practical effectiveness. "When the true story of the anti-slavery cause shall be written," Douglass predicted, "women shall occupy a large space in its pages; for the cause of the slave has been peculiarly women's own" (472, 469; see also Lutz, Sillen).

To be sure, the active participation of women in the great debate over slavery was an unprecedented break with the sexual status quo; within the abolitionist movement itself, their efforts often met with fierce opposition. Though they were less likely to be the target of outright physical assault, female abolitionists faced a special measure of public resistance, ridicule, and censure. Those who presumed to enter the fray possessed a courage and commitment not wholly typical of their gender and class. Catherine Beecher, the famous apostle of wifely domesticity, probably spoke for the common rung when she placed anti-slavery agitation "entirely without the sphere of female duty" (104-105).

For a great many women, however, the anti-slavery cause was a matter of conscience that overrode convention. Like Lydia Maria Child, Jacobs' editor and literary sponsor, they felt its removal required "every heart and head in the community" (226). Angelina Grimke's An Appeal to the Women of the Nominally Free States, an influential pamphlet issued in 1837 by an anti-slavery convention of American women, expressed the special sense of responsibility and commitment these women brought to "the cause of immediate, unconditional, and universal emancipation," condemning the "vast system of oppression and robbery and heathenism" that was chattel slavery and suggesting how best to combat it. Above all, Northern women were advised to educate themselves to the true nature of slavery by reading and subscribing to antislavery publications:

Be not satisfied with merely setting your names to a constitution—this is a very little thing: read on the subject—none of us has yet learned half the abominations of slavery. . . . Anti-slavery publications abound: and no intelligent woman ought to be ignorant of this great subject—no Christian woman can escape the obligation now resting upon her, to examine it for herself . . . Read, then, beloved sisters. ([58-59, emphasis in the original)

For the Northern woman who took up the challenge, the basic text, after the Bible, was the slave narrative. With the sensational melodrama they inspired, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), slave narratives were the most telling weapons in the abolitionist arsenal. As political argument, the simple fact of a slave autobiography, with the assurance "written by himself on the title page, was a rejoinder to racist ideology. As marketable literature, the built-in potential for adventure and melodrama lent a dramatic edge guaranteed to stir the pulse and pull the hearstrings of the Northern reader. Blending the high moral purpose of religious testimony with the entertainment appeal of escapist fiction, the slave narrative was a truly "good read" for the conscientious, middle class woman who made the slave's cause her own. Whether a true believer or a potential convert, the "virtuous reader" (56) whom Jacobs straightforwardly addresses is a female who will listen to the slave girl's tale in "true womanly sympathy" (185). "Oh, you happy free women," she writes in a characteristic oratorical flourish, "contrast your New Year's Day with that of the poor bondwoman!" (14) Like Sarah Forten, whose poem served as an epigraph for Grimke's Appeal, the authorial presumption is "our skins may differ, but from thee we claim / a sister's privilege and a sister's name."

Having defined what a modern publisher would call her "target group," Jacobs adopts suitable rhetorical strategies. Always, she speaks to the reader as a (sexual) equal; always, she plays on values and emotions having a special force and immediacy for female readers. "Slavery is terrible for men," she declares, "but it is far more terrible for women. Superadded to the burden common to all, they have wrongs, and sufferings, and mortifications peculiarly their own" (79).

Foremost among these mortifications is the sexual subservience sanctified by law. When Linda enters her fifteenth year, Dr. Flint assumes his prerogatives:

My master began to whisper foul words in my ear. .. . He tried his utmost to corrupt the pure principles my grandmother had instilled. He peopled my young mind with unclean images, such as only a vile monster could think of. . . . He told me that I was his property; that I must be subject to his will in all things. My soul revolted against the mean tyranny (26).

Thus begins the duel of wills, the bent "romance" that is the narrative's central conflict. Henceforth, Flint and Linda will act out a drama of seduction wellknown to the woman well-read in mid-nineteenth century American fiction.

Throughout the 1850s, concurrent with the composition of Jacobs' autobiography, the slave narrative and the sentimental novel freely—and lucratively—engaged in a promiscuous cross-pollination of influences. Exotic in setting and replete with real-life melodrama, the peculiar institution provided the raw material for squadrons of successful "scribbling women". (Indeed, in the bogus Autobiography of a Female Slave (1857), Mattie Griffiths performed a wholesale theft of the genre.) In turn, the skillful slave narrator drew on the conventions of popular literature to render more movingly the stock situations—family separations, assaults on virtues, and unrequited love—that were to him only too real. The sentimental novel's sine qua non was the seduction motif, a moral conflict that might seem especially well-suited for abolitionist exploitation. A theme as old as the novel itself, it received its first and definitive treatments in Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1747-48), the two great sources for the best-selling fiction of antebellum America. Referring to the "appalling popularity of the seduction motif in the popular sentimental literature of the time, Herbert Ross Brown, the genre's best critic, observed that "no other theme was able to provoke more purple patches or inspire more poetic flights" (44). Similarly, seduction is the one indispensible element in Leslie Fiedler's definition of the early novel: "a prose narrative in which Seducer and Pure Maiden were brought face to face in ritual combat destined to end in marriage or death" (62). But despite its twin potential for plot and polemics, the seduction theme appears only rarely in antebellum slave autobiographies—after all, the narrators were overwhelmingly male.² It was left to Jacobs to exploit the propagandistic possibilities of the form's characteristic moral confrontation. By couching her personal narrative in the familiar terms of formula fiction, she appropriated its popularity while undercutting its presumptions.

In her opening chapters, Jacobs paints the contestants in primary sentimentalist colors: Linda, the steadfast maiden of low estate; Flint, the slimy reprobate from the upper orders. To Flint's first proposition, Linda responds in ripe Richardsonian tones:

When he told me I was made for his use, made to obey his command in every thing; that I was nothing but a slave, whose will must and should surrender to his, never before had my puny arm felt half so strong. . . . The war of my life had begun; and though one of God's most powerless creatures, I resolve never to be conquered. Alas, for me! (16, 17)

Described as a villain "whose restless, craving, vicious nature roved about day and night, seeking whom to devour" (16), Flint also fulfills generic expectations. Jacobs gives him the dialogue required of the role: "'Curse you!'" he mutters through clenched teeth, "'You obstinate girl! I could grind your bones to powder!'" (59) Like the most sinister of the sentimentalist seducers, Flint demands his victim's willing complicity, favoring psychological, not physical, pressure. Thus, though "(he) sought in every way to render (Linda) miserable, . . . he did not resort to corporal punishment, but to all the petty tyrannical ways that human ingenuity could devise" (17).

Having cast her characters in stark (and stock) opposition, Jacobs advances the abolitionist argument in "Sketches of Neighboring Slaveholders" (45-53), a striking chapter aimed directly at the female reader. The author describes the state of women—slave and free—within an institution as patriarchal as it is peculiar. The familiar appeals to interracial sympathy are not slighted:

No pen can give adequate description of the allpervading corruption produced by slavery. The slave girl is reared in an atmosphere of licentiousness and fear. The lash and foul talk of her master and his sons are her teachers (51).

However, in emphasizing just how pervasive the corruption can be, Jacobs crosses the color line:

Nor do the master's daughters always escape. . . . The white daughters early hear their parents quarreling about some female slave. Their curiousity is excited, and they soon learn the cause. They are attended by the young slave girls whom their father has corrupted; and they hear such talk as should never meet youthful ears, or any other ears. They know that the women slaves are subject to their father's authority in all things; and in some cases they exercise the same authority over the men slaves. I have seen the master of such a household whose head was bowed down in shame; for it was known in the neighborhood that his daughter had selected one of the meanest slaves on his plantation to be the father of his first grandchild (52).

In one sense, Jacobs is simply employing basic rhetorical strategy: know your audience and play to it. Having few illusions about the white Northerner's capacity for interracial compassion, slave narrators typically waged a campaign on two fronts, attacking slavery as a system corrupting white and black alike. Always in tune with her readership, Jacobs consistently stresses the insidious influence of slavery on the sacred relations between the white husband and wife, the white parent and child. More to the point, she also suggests relations that are not confined by color: the bond between women, black or white. "Reader," she insists, "it is not to awaken sympathy for myself that I am telling you truthfully what I suffered in slavery. I do it to kindle a flame of compassion in your hearts for my sisters who are still in bondage, suffering as I once suffered" (28). Certainly—but her confessions spark a kindred recognition that the singular possessive is too exclusive, that her sisters are the reader's as well. Further, by cataloging the uniquely female burdens of slavery, the author has provided her virtuous readers with a metaphor for their own sex-determined condition in the nominally free North.

Jacobs makes the comparison explicit in a cautionary tale (50-51) told just prior to the one cited above. A "good mistress" who "taught her slaves to lead pure lives, and wished them to enjoy the fruit of their own industry,. . . . cherished an unrequited passion for a man who had resolved to marry for wealth." The pious young lady marries the fortune hunter, and the "new master" quickly undoes her good work, selling some slaves down the river and debauching others. Legally, the wife has no recourse against the husband's disposition of her—now his—property. "I no longer have the power I had a week ago," she tells a black father who implores her intercession. The mistress can only render her slaves such kindnesses as her "unfortunate circumstances" permit, before passing peacefully away, "glad to close her eyes on a life which had been made so wretched by the man she loved." The moral of the story is so unmistakable that Jacobs' final comment is either diversion or misinterpretation: "Had it not been for slavery, he would have been a better man and his wife a happier woman." Clearly, she faults her wrong patriarchal institution; marriage, not slavery, is the true culprit.

For reasons of cultural necessity, Jacobs' treatment of marriage can only be equivocal. In purely dramatic terms, Linda's duel with Flint is accordingly very much in the Richardsonian tradition. However, for the sentimental heroine so beset, the traditional reward for moral constancy and unwarranted suffering is either marriage (Pamela) or heaven (Clarissa), the classic culmination having the girl either wedded to her (redeemed) seducer or triumphant over him in the next, better world. For the slave heroine, neither ending is possible if the author is to remain true to her abolitionist mandate. Jacobs may appropriate the trappings of sentimental fiction, but not its secure moral universe. Thus, she offers the reader a third alternative: personal autonomy.

Whether from the vantage of the sentimental novel or the slave narrative, Jacob's most striking generic departure is Linda's extraordinary sense of self, her maintainance of an autonomous identity seemingly impervious to assault. As singular as she is singleminded, Linda has a strength of character and consistency of personality more worthy of note than her creator's gender. To say the least, the peculiar institution bequeathed to its victims an understandable reticence about personal revelation and the assertion of self. Concealment and deception defined the slave's relationship to the white world, duplicity being both a strategy for survival and a means of escape. As Stephen Butterfield argues in Black Autobiography in America:

To avoid punishment the slave has to learn to wear a mask, to seem as if he fits the owner's conception of 'the nigger.' At the same time, he has an identity of his own that must be hidden, because it is a threat to the slave system. In effect, he maintains a double identity and shifts between the two according to the occasion (20).

Certainly identity is too fragile a concept actually to be donned and discarded like a mask—at some point, the actor becomes the role—but Butterfield's metaphor properly evokes the two-faced nature of slave behavior. The songs, stories, and jokes of slave folklore confirm and celebrate such deceits, as do the slave narratives themselves. For example, the tobacconist Lunsford Lane, whose existence as a slave was relatively easy, wisely concealed his rising fortune, finding "it politic to go shabbily dressed, and to appear poor" (16). Likewise, Solomon Northup, a New York freeman kidnapped into slavery, quickly learned his "true policy" was to keep quiet about his background because "it would but expose (him) to maltreatment, and diminish the chances of liberation" (250).

The role of deception, the donning by the black narrator of a mask that accords with white society's racist expectations, is the first consideration when examining the slave narrator's autobiographical self. Indeed, as public manifestoes directed at a white audience, the narratives might appear to be intrinsically compromised documents. However, after a lifetime of compromised identity, slave narrators generally turned to the autobiographical act not as a way to assume yet another mask, but as an occasion for self-examination and revelation. Though they may, like Lane and Northrup, recall past disguises, their present presentation of self needs no costume; in the slave narrative, the political mandate for anti-slavery testimony accords perfectly with the autobiographical mandate for frank confession.³ By these lights, Jacobs' presentation of self (Linda Brent) is still more unusual for, past as well as present, she is only herself.

This is not to say that Linda is above some strategic trickery ("slaves," she observes by way of explanation, "being surrounded by mysteries, deceptions, and dangers, early learn to be suspicious and watchful, and prematurely cautious and cunning" [159]). To facilitate her escape, she disguises herself as a sailor and, during the long confinement in her grandmother's attic, she engages in an extended "competition in cunning" (130-135), diverting her pursuers with letters postmarked from New York. But face to face with Flint, she plays neither fool nor coquette. She wears no mask.

The singleness of identity reinforces the singleness of purpose. Jacobs expresses an acute awareness and profound abhorrence of the double-dealing pretenses intrinsic to slavery. She tells of the gullible Northern clergyman on his first visit to a Southern plantation, "easily blinded" by the false performances of slaveholder and slave alike:

(The clergyman) walks around the premises, and sees the beautiful groves and flowering vines, and the comfortable huts of favored household slaves. The southerner invites him to talk with these slaves. He asks them if they want to be free, and they say, "Oh, no, massa" (76).

Similarly, the "grand funeral" of a beloved slave matriarch, complete with dramatic effusions of grief from Dr. and Mrs. Flint, is treated as a piece of theater:

Northern travellers . . . might have described this tribute of respect to the humble dead as a beuatiful feature in the "patriarchal institution"; a touching proof of the attachment between slaveholders and their servants; and tender-hearted Mrs. Flint would have confirmed this impression, with handkerchief at her eyes. We could have told them a different story (150).

Bitterly conscious of the harm such play-acting does to the abolitionist cause, Jacobs takes every opportunity to expose the reality behind appearances. Linda herself offers the best occasion: consistently "one-self," she takes no part in the broad shams of slave life.

Linda's refusal to compromise, and insistence on asserting, her "self makes the slave girl's relationship with her obsessed master more nearly one of psychological equality. It often gives Linda the edge. Nowhere is this more evident than in the pair's dramatic confrontation over Linda's pregnancy (54-57). Determined not to fall prey to Flint's seductive machinations, Linda resolves to do "anything, everything, for the sake of defeating him." Her subsequent "plunge into the abyss," an affair with a certain "white unmarried gentleman," is shameful to relate and doubtless shocking to a readership "whose purity has been sheltered from childhood," but Linda makes clear that she was no deceived maiden, that this admittedly illicit relationship had her willing participation. (Her confession is downright boastful: "I knew what I did, and I did it with deliberate calculation.") Significantly, she rationalizes her action in terms of personal autonomy:

It seems less degrading to give one's self, than to submit to compulsion. There is something akin to freedom in having a lover who has no control over you, except that which he gains by kindness and attachment (55).

She is honest enough to own up to another, equally personal motive: spite. "I knew nothing would enrage Dr. Flint so much as to know that I favored another; and it was something to triumph over my tyrant even in that small way," she admits.

For his part, Flint acknowledges both the terms of the competition (a duel of wills, not arms) and its prize (Linda's identity, not her "honor"). He seeks to break down his opponent with incessant verbal and occasional physical abuse (most memorably, when he crops her hair after being informed of her second pregnancy), but he never carries his assault to its logical conclusion. Rape will not confer the victory he craves. "Dr. Flint loved money, but he loved power more" (81), Linda observes, and that power is emphatically psychological. Linda knows very well what the real stakes are and what her advantage is:

. . . I thought how completely I should be in his power and the prospect was appalling. Even if I should kneel before him, and implore him to spare me, for the sake of my children, I knew he would spurn me with his foot, and my weakness would be his triumph (86).

And again:

I had a women's pride, and a mother's love for my children; and I resolved that out of the darkness of this hour a brighter dawn should rise for them. My master had power and law on his side; I had a determined will. There is might in each (87).

Linda is handicapped in her battle—and Jacobs in her narrative—by the female's usual complication, children. The slave husband or father who left his family to escape North could justify his desertion as a necessary tactical and personal move. In freedom, he could better fight slavery, more easily earn the money to emancipate his family, and, above all, be his own man. A woman who did likewise was not granted the same latitude. Speaking the harsh truth, Linda's grandmother reminds her of the double standard: "'Nobody respects a mother who forsakes her children'" (93). If Linda is to escape slavery unburdened by guilt, and if Jacobs is to retain the reader's unqualified sympathy, she must first faithfully discharge her maternal responsibilities.

Linda earns her maternal credentials most impressively through the seven long years she spends hidden in the tiny crawlspace above her grandmother's shed, her dismal "loophole of retreat" (117-120). This extraordinary confinement, Jacobs knows, will strain credulity ("I hardly expect the reader will credit me ..." [151]), so in keeping with generic convention she attaches confirming testimony in a brief appendix. As an indictment of slavery and an expression of the lengths its victims will go to escape it, the ordeal speaks for itself, but the episode serves at least two additional, narrative functions. First, it is a ready metaphor not only for the prison of slavery but for the restrictions of domestic life. Linda spends perhaps one fourth of the narrative literally imprisoned in the female's traditional sphere of influence, the household, initially in the attic of a white benefactress ("For that deed of Christian womanhood, may God forever bless her!" [103]) and later in the loophole. Watching, waiting, sometimes plotting against Flint, Linda lives an almost wholly vicarious existence. Though the author herself may not be conscious of the associations, she describes this circumscribed life in terms a wifely readership might find evocative:

Sometimes it appeared to me as if ages had rolled away since I entered upon that gloomy, monotonous existence. At times, I was stupified and listless; I became very impatient to know when these dark years would end, and I should again be allowed to feel the sunshine, and breathe the pure air (152).

The episode has a second, more certain narrative purpose: it verifies and accentuates Linda's maternal commitment. Her domestic imprisonment has one compensation: ".. . I was not comfortless. I heard the voices of my children" (117). As a cynical strategic device, the bond between mother and child promises an emotional force, and hence a propagandistic pull, to which an audience of "happy free women" is especially susceptible. For Jacobs, the opportunity to enhance antislavery politics with the power of familial melodrama is irresistible:

Season after season, year after year, I peeped at my children's faces, and heard their sweet voices, with a heart yearning all the while to say, "Your mother is here" (152).

If the narrative strategy is cold-blooded, the execution is not. Jacobs' tearful declarations are obviously heartfelt and the scenes between mother and child inspire her most heartrending prose. Typically, she expresses "such feelings as only a slave mother can experience" in language equal parts affection and abolitionism. "Never should I know peace till my children were emancipated with all due formalities of law" (140). Or: "Always I was in dread that by some accident, or some contrivance, slavery would succeed in snatching my children from me" (153). Necessarily, her ultimate decision to escape comes only after her daughter has been sent North and the imminent threat of discovery jeopardizes the welfare of her son and grandmother. Once in the comparative safety of New York, Linda's first thoughts are dutifully maternal: "I was impatient to go to work and earn money, that I might change the uncertain position of my children" (172). Assisting Linda is her employer, the kindly Mrs. Bruce, a woman of true Christian sympathy and a exemplary model for like-minded readers.

Jacobs' concluding chapter, "Free At Last" (200-208), does double duty as narrative closure. Throughout Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, the author has drawn on the conventions of one prose narrative form (the sentimental novel) for the purposes of another (the slave narrative). Though her authorial allegiance has never been in doubt, she cannot complete the course of one narrative (slavery to freedom) without ending the other (the maiden versus the seducer). Despite everything, it is her former master whose presence animates Linda's story; the reader demands a final accounting and Jacobs can do nought but provide one. In a letter from her grandmother, Linda at last receives the news: "'Dr. Flint is dead.'" She comments:

I cannot say, with truth, that the news of my master's death softened my feelings towards him. There are wrongs which even the grave does not bury. The man was odious to me while he lived, and his memory is odious now (201).

With the book closed on Flint, Jacobs turns to the remaining unfinished business, the long-negotiated purchase of "legal" freedom for her children and herself. Once the necessary document is signed ("future generations will learn from it that women were articles of traffic in New York, late in the nineteenth century of the Christian religion . . ." [206]), the author bluntly sums up her narrative, and political, priorities: "Reader, my story ends with freedom; not in the usual way, with marriage." Perhaps only Jacobs' modern readers can appreciate the many meanings of that declaration.

Notes

¹ Citing a discovery of a cache of Jacobs' letters, Jean Fagin Yellin convincingly asserts that Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl "has just been transformed from a questionable slave narrative into a well-documented pseudonymous autobiography" (479). The contribution of editor Lydia Maria Child, long thought crucial, is deemed to be precisely what she affirmed in her introduction: "mainly for purposes of condensation and orderly arrangement" (p. xii).

² Male slave narrators did comment occasionally on seduction. See Nichols (36-40).

³ For another reading see Minter.

Works Cited

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Bayliss, John F., editor. Black Slave Narratives. New York: The McMillan Company, 1970.

Beecher, Catherine. An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism, with Reference to the Duty of American Females. Philadelphia: Henry Perkins, 1837.

Brent, Linda. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl [1861]. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers, 1973.

Brown, Herbert Ross. The Sentimental Novel in America, 1789-1860. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1940.

Butterfield, Stephen. Black Autobiography in America. Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1974.

Child, Lydia Maria. An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans. Boston: Alklen and Ticknor, 1833.

Douglass, Frederick. The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass [1892]. New York: McMillan Publishing Company, 1962.

Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel New York: Stein and Day Publishers, 1960.

Foster, Francis Smith. Witnessing Slavery: The Development of the Ante-bellum Slave Narrative. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1979.

Lane, Lunsford. Narrative of Lunsford Lane [1842]. Rpt. in Katz, William Loren, editor. Five Great Slave Narratives. New York: The Arno Press, 1969.

Lutz, Alma. Crusade for Freedom: Women of the AntiSlavery Movement. Boston: Beacon Press, 1968.

Minter, David. "Conceptions of Self in Black Slave Narratives." American Transcendental Quarterly 24 (1974): 62-68.

Nichols, Charles H. Many Thousands Gone: The ExSlaves' Account of Their Bondage and Freedom. Leiden, Netherlands: E.J. Brill, 1963.

Northrup, Solomon. Twelve Years a Slave: The Narrative of Solomon Northup [1853]. Rpt. in Osofsky, Gilbert. Puttin' on Ole Massa. New York: Harper and Row, 1969.

Sillen, Samuel. Women Against Slavery. New York: Massesfd and Mainstream, 1955.

Sterling, Dorothy, editor. We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1984.

Yellin, Jean Fagin. "Written By Herself: Harriet Jacobs' Narrative." American Literature 25 (1981): 479-486.