Harriet Jacobs--Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)

First published in 1861 under the pen name “Linda Brent,” Harriet wrote Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl to appeal to a northern audience for the abolitionist cause.  It follows her escape from slavery in 1842 to her legal emancipation in 1852.  Jacobs was born to relatively well-off slaves and had a relatively happy childhood with them and then her grandmother, a slave with a somewhat independent income through her baking who wields a strong sense of moral power throughout the text.  Once her parents die, she is sold to the evil Dr. Flint, who pursues and threatens her sexually.  Jacobs calls upon the values of nineteenth century True Womanhood as she appeals to her audience of northern women, calling their attention to her inability to uphold these shared values, instilled in her by her grandmother, as a slave. 

Dr. Flint is a frightening threat: her “master, whose restless, craving, vicious nature roved about day and night, seeking whom to devour” who informs Jacobs that she “was made for his use, made to obey his command in every thing” (459).  In addition to her surprising frankness about the sexual dangers which Dr. Flint threatened, Jacobs is equally frank about the sexual relationship she has with Mr. Sands, a white man with whom she has two children.  In a candid aside to the reader, Jacobs admits that she chooses a sexual relationship with him, explaining that, “It seems less degrading to give one’s self, that to submit to compulsion” (501).  She asks for forgiveness, explaining that slaves should be judged differently, as slavery is an inherently corrupting system, which made her “prematurely knowing, concerning the evil ways of the world” (500). 

When Dr. Flint becomes too dangerous, Jacobs goes into hiding, staying in a secret compartment in a porch roof which was 9’x3’x7’ (at its highest part).  She stayed seven years in hiding, during which time Mr. Sands is able to take their daughter Ellen to Brooklyn.  Jacobs eventually is able to escape to Philadelphia by boat.  However, even after her escape north, she lives in fear of the Fugitive Slave Act and Dr. Flint’s relentless pursuit of her.  She works for Mrs. Bruce, even spending a year in London, caring for Mrs. Bruce’s daughter, where she experiences a more general freedom from racism than she has ever had.  Eventually, Jacobs’ freedom is bought by her new mistress Mrs. Bruce, despite Jacobs’ complete unwillingness to being purchased.  The text ends with her unfulfilled desires to have her children with her in their own home, and two more truth claims from white authors.

The narrative follows the typical pattern of the nineteenth century slave narrative: (1) loss of innocence (narrator realizes that she’s a slave); (2) realization of alternatives and formulation of resolve to be free; (3) escape (depending on when the narrative was written, will tell more or fewer details about the escape.  Pre-emancipation, fewer details were given); and (4) freedom.  It is prefaced by a truth claim by Lydia Maria Child, a well-respected white author of domestic guides.  Between 1760 and 1947, more than 200 book-length narratives were written; in total, more than 6,000 total exist.  While they were popular tools of propaganda, Jacobs was one of the first to focus on the dangers of slavery which were unique to female slaves, particularly their vulnerability to sexual abuse and rape.  Jacobs uses tropes of the sentimental novel—moralistic asides to her “Dear Reader,” and evocations of her desire to have her children at her own hearth. 

William Faulkner--Absalom, Absalom! (1936)

Published in the same year as Gone with the Wind, Absalom, Absalom! is centered around the story of Thomas Sutpen, the man who came to Yoknapatawpha and set out to realize his great design, establishing himself as the patriarch of his plantation known as Sutpen’s Hundred and the siring of what was to be a great legacy.  However, it is just as much about the relationship between Quentin and Shreve, Harvard roommates who jointly create the narrative after Quentin chooses this story with which to answer Shreve’s famous question, “Tell about the South,” and about how such stories are constructed and reconstructed.  

Relying on recollections of Quentin and the stories he’s been told all his life, especially those by Miss Rosa Coldfield and his father, Jason Compson, as well as the documentary evidence of letters, tombstones, and Quentin’s own experiences, Quentin and Shreve tell the story of Sutpen’s marriage to Ellen Coldfield and their children, Judith and Henry.  In an incestuous love triangle, Henry brings home his Ole Miss roommate Charles Bon (whom it is revealed is also the son of Sutpen by his first wife, whom he married in Haiti before realizing that she, too, had “black blood”).  The love triangle in part allows for a homosocial bond between Henry and Bon, as Judith is described as the empty vessel which contained their love for each other.  After discovering that Charles is not only Sutpen’s son, but the truth of his birth (as well as Bon’s previous plaçage marriage in New Orleans, which produced an heir.  Henry ultimately shoots and kills Bon.

According to John Bibler, Quentin looks to Henry and Charles Bon as a possible precedent for the homoerotic bond he shares with Shreve.  Unfortunately, the realization that Charles Bon might have “black blood” demonstrates that, after the Civil War, racial status could not be determined for sure.  Unlike before the Civil War, when male/male relationships could be acceptable on the basis of what Bibler, relying on Leo Bersani’s concept of “homo-ness,” sees as a potential for a progressive possibilities for anti-hierarchical, egalitarian relationships.  What’s interesting to me is the not only fluidity of gender in the novel, but the very permeability of identity: at one point in the narration, as Quentin and Shreve narrate the story of Henry and Charles, they are described as being four, then two, then four.  Though John Matthew’s article “This Race Which is Not One” is referencing Light in August in its evocation of Irigaray’s concept of the plurality of female sex, it’s equally applicable to Absalom—not just in terms of race, but in terms of gender and individual identity as well.  Even Thomas Sutpen at one point is defined in terms of multiple identities.  

In class, we were asked to consider what work the novel does in positioning the South with regard to Gary Richards’ claim that the South functions as a way of quarantining queerness for the rest of the country.  If Light in August demonstrates the futility of putting “a white man through the process of establishing his identity and hence exposing the fiction of pure racial difference” (213), as Matthews claims, then perhaps Absalom demonstrates the melancholic repetition of this process: “there is no all, no finish; it is not the blow we suffer from but the tedious repercussive anti-climax of it, the rubbishy aftermath to clear away from off the very threshold of despair” (167).  Considering the question of the South specifically as a quarantined region of queerness, Absalom illustrates the process of trying to clear away the rubbishy detritus of despair, the effluvium which results from this process of trying to establish the unestablishable.

Katherine Anne Porter--The Old Order: Stories of the South (1944)

I adored this collection, and intend to read more by Porter as soon as I can.  The Old Order is a collection of short stories concerning the life of a rural Texas family ruled by Sophia Jane, the matriarch and mother of eleven children. The first half of the collection deals with Sophia Jane and her African American servant and companion, Nannie. Their relationship comprises the closest bond in the family, more so even than that between Sophia Jane and her children. The second part of the collection concerns itself with the family of Harry, one of Sophia Jane’s favorite children, and his daughters Maria and Miranda, who are four years apart in age. 

Consisting of most of the second half of the text, “Old Mortality” is a longer piece in three parts: 1885-1902, 1904, and 1912.  In Part I, the girls Maria and Miranda cannot escape their family history: overshadowed by stories of their late Aunt Amy’s great beauty and romantic escapades, the girls struggle to discover their own individuality under the weight of so much history.  In Part II, they experience a small break from their “immured” existence at convent school when their father takes them to the race track to bet on their Uncle Gabriel’s horse.  Uncle Gabriel, the romantic hero of so many stories involving Aunt Amy, is a great disappointment, as he is a fat, desolate drunkard, whose horse (which the girls are forced to bet on) is given 100 to 1 odds.  Miraculously, the horse wins, though Harry takes the girls money to be put in the bank.  In the final section, Miranda, who has left school and eloped, encounters her old maid Cousin Eva on the train, as they both travel home for Uncle Gabriel’s funeral.  Aunt Eva tries to set Miranda straight about a few of the more romantic and sanitized versions of family stories.

Porter is rather frank about the existence and effects of slavery in the first section.  Slavery has yet to be abolished when they first meet as children, when Sophia Jane’s father purchases Nannie along with her mother and father; Sophia Jane is so taken with Nannie that she insists, “I want the little monkey….I want that one to play with” (14).  Appalling as it is to read this, it gives a proper sense of verisimilitude to their relationship.  Sophia Jane never undergoes any dramatic epiphanies about race relations, though over the years she and Nannie forge a bond by their shared experiences and hardships.  Most striking to me was Sophia Jane’s taking over as wet nurse when Nannie almost dies from puerperal fever—not only is it astonishing that she nurses her own children (allowing her access to a bond with her children she’s never experienced before, and which she insists upon having with her subsequent children), but she also nurses Nannie’s child Charlie.  It was striking enough to read a scene in which a white southern women nurses a black child at this time in Sherley Anne Williams’ 1986 Dessa Rose; to read such a scene in this 1944 collection was quite surprising.  The stories also contain variations on the white liberal consciousness raising scene, quite common in southern literature from this era (Lillian Smith’s Killers of the Dream, for example, was published in 1949, five years after this).  In these stories, much of this is a result of Nannie’s move from the big house to an empty cabin in her old age; the white family members are surprised that she does not wish to live with them any longer, which prompts realizations such as that by Maria, who thinks with a pang that “they had not really been so very nice to Aunt Nannie” (42).

Not only a commentary on race relations in the South, these realizations also illustrate the conflicts at the heart of southern life, especially between Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement.  Sophia Jane’s children are described as unable to function alone:

As their fortunes went down, and they have very few servants, they needed her terribly.  They realized how much the old woman had done for them, simply by seeing how, almost immediately after she went, everything slackened, lost tone, went off edge.  Work did not accomplish itself as it once had.  They had not learned how to work for themselves, they were all lazy and incapable of sustained effort or planning.  They had not been taught and they had not yet educated themselves.  (44)

In fact, Sophia Jane and Nannie share this disdain for her children and grandchildren, and spend quite a bit of their time as they grow old complaining to each other about these children.  Not only do they share contempt for their children, but also, more generally, of men.  In fact, another important theme throughout the piece is the solidarity with which women meet life, and the kind of “deeply grounded contempt for men” which most of them share (here used to describe Sophia Jane) (24).  Both Sophia Jane and Nannie survive despite of, rather than because of, the men in their lives.

They must be strong, because the limitations placed on them as women are great.  A theme which I’m particularly interested in which occurs often is the relationship between these limitations and a women’s physical beauty.  Old maid Cousin Eva’s entire life seems to have been determined by her lack of chin, which is blamed for her failure to marry as well as her strident political activity as a suffragist: “For even then it was pretty plain that Eva was an old maid, born.  Harry said, ‘Oh, Eva—Eva has no chin, that’s her trouble” (111).[1]  Harry makes clear the connection between appearance, value, and character:

“He was a pleasant, everyday sort of father, who held his daughters on his knee if they were prettily dressed and well behaved, and pushed them away if they had not freshly combed hair and nicely scrubbed fingernails.  “Go away, you’re disgusting,” he would say, in a matter-of-fact voice.  He noticed if their stocking seams were crooked.  He caused them to brush their teeth with a revolting mixture of prepared chalk, powdered charcoal, and salt.  When they behaved stupidly, he could not endure the sight of them. (112)

In fact, Harry also passes judgment on Miranda, saying that she “was going to be a little thing all her life, she would never be tall; and this meant, of course, that she would never be a beauty like Aunt Amy, or Cousin Isabel.  Her hope of being a beauty died hard, until the notion of being a jockey came suddenly and filled all her thoughts” (130).  Once again, once the hope of beauty is gone, it seems to clear the way for other possibilities.  The life of the beautiful belle is fixed, determined, and tragic; in these stories, it seems to be the ugly women who have the potential for more interesting lives.  It’s certainly not an easy life—at one point, contemplating Cousin Eva’s life, Miranda wonders, “why was a strong character so deforming?” (158). 

The collection does ultimately return to a larger question of the future of the South.  At the end of the novel, as Cousin Eva and her father good-naturedly banter, Miranda feels out of place, wondering, “Where are my own people and my own time?” (163).  Along with her sister, “they had lived not only their young years, but their memories, it seemed to them, began years before they were born, in the lives of the grown-ups around them, old people above forty, most of them who had a way of insisting that they too had been young once” (98).  Ten years after Absalom, Absalom! (1936), and the youth of the South are still trying to live not only their own lives but those of a past which refuses to die—or even be past.

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[1] The more complete description of Eva given:

Eva, shy and chinless, straining her upper lip over two enormous teeth, would sit in corners watching her mother.  She looked hungry, her eyes were strained and tired.  She wore her mother’s old clothes, made over, and taught Latin in a Female Seminary.  She believed in votes for women, and had traveled about, making speeches.  When her mother was not present, Eva bloomed out a little, danced prettily, smiled, showing all her teeth, and was a like a dry little plant set out in a gentle rain.  Molly was merry about her ugly duckling.  “It’s lucky for me my daughter is an old maid.  She’s not so apt,” said Molly naughtily, “to make a grandmother of me.”  Eva would blush as if she had been slapped.  Eva was a blot, no doubt about it, but the little girls felt she belonged to their everyday world of dull lessons to be learned, stiff shoes to be limbered up, scratchy flannels to be endured in cold weather, measles and disappointed expectations. (104)

However, it is Eva who survives, compared to the beautiful Amy, who dies a tragic and mysterious death on her honeymoon in New Orleans.  Ugliness here is connected to industriousness, studiousness, and intellect, perhaps not considered attractive in a woman by society, but that Porter allows Eva to end the collection reveals a certain sympathy for Eva rather than Amy, whom she kills off.

Valerie Martin--Property (2003)

The cover of my copy of Valerie Martin’s 2003 novel Property features an impressive blurb by Toni Morrison: “This fresh, unsentimental look at what slave owning does to (and for) one’s interior life must be a first.”  However, Martin’s novel is much more than a feminist reclamation of an unheard voice, as it goes well beyond simply telling the story of Manon Gaudet, the mistress of a Louisiana sugar plantation.  Rather, Martin gives Manon a complexity which reveals not only Manon’s impatience with her society’s sexism, but also Manon’s own shortcomings and lack of empathy: not only in dealing with her husband but—more importantly—in dealing with Sarah, her slave and her husband’s “mistress.”  The novel’s feminist subtext is strengthened not only by Manon’s candid voice, but also by the remarkable silences which surround Sarah. 

The novel opens with Manon expressing disgust for her husband, as she spies on him forcing his young male slaves to engage in naked horseplay, punishing those who become sexually aroused and then finding a female slave to satisfy his own arousal.  This is followed by a breakfast scene in which Manon implies that Sarah, who has born his children, shares her disdain.  When she tells Sarah that her husband is afraid that she is poisoning him, Manon observes that “Something flickered at the corner of her mouth; was it amusement?” (6).  Any solidarity which might be inferred here, however, is quickly dismissed in the following scene, in which Manon unhappily sews while Sarah fans her.  After Sarah gives a reasonable explanation for what Manon originally thinks is an extravagance, Manon acknowledges Sarah’s persistent silences while begrudgingly admitting that, “It is one of the annoying things about her; on those occasions when she bothers to speak, she makes sense” (6).

Sarah’s silence is one of the most important parts of the novel.  Manon is alternately unnerved, frustrated, and maddened by Sarah’s reticence.  However, she also learns from it: when her husband throws a fit over dinner, Manon “looked at him for few moments blankly, without comment, as if he was speaking a foreign language.  This unnerves him.  It’s a trick I learned from Sarah” (8).  Though Manon has learned to perform Sarah’s trick, she fails to realize the actual meanings of Sarah’s silences.  Rather than portray the two women, who both suffer under Mr. Manon’s rule, as having a growing understanding of each other, Martin instead shows how Manon’s self-centeredness and cruelty inflict further pain upon Sarah.  Manon cannot hear what is beneath Sarah’s silences; she can’t even read between her own lines.

For the reader, however, the most important meanings emerge from such silences, such as the striking example after the death of Manon’s mother.  Seeing Sarah nursing her baby, Manon—wordless herself—approaches Sarah and suckles from her breast.  The combination of sexual domination and the appropriation of a surrogate mother figure is intoxicating and rejuvenating for the grief-stricken Manon.  However, Sarah is silent and unmoving under this assault: “She had lifted her chin as far away from me as she could, her mouth was set in a thin, hard line, and her eyes were focused intently on the arm of the settee.  She’s afraid to look at me, I thought.  And she’s right to be.  If she looked at me, I would slap her” (77).  Here, Sarah’s silence is absolutely necessary, as Manon teeters on the edge of feeling an emotional connection with her.  Where previously, Sarah’s silences have been a silent rebellion against her owners, here her silence protects Manon from her own momentary vulnerability.

Both Manon and Sarah are eventually allowed some escape after Mr. Gaudet’s death during a slave revolt.  Sarah escapes to the North, and Manon is able to live by herself.  However, Martin refuses any tantalizing romanticism these events might offer, as Sarah is ultimately caught and returned to Manon, who herself remains constrained by her role as a widow in antebellum society.  In the novel’s last scene, Sarah is once again serving a meal to Manon.  Manon attempts to undermine any Sarah’s experiences of freedom which she might have had, ridiculing the idea of a black woman being treated as fully human.  However, freedom has changed Sarah, and she no longer suffers in silence.  In light of her previous persistent silence, that Sarah’s words—“It appeal to me” (192)—are the last in the novel, they gain a defiant force which they might have lacked had Sarah earlier been more loquacious.

Margaret Mitchell--Gone with the Wind (1936)

          This was my favorite novel in seventh grade--partly because I was so darned proud of myself for reading a book that was 1448 pages, but also because it was exciting and romantic and had courageous characters who were impatient with gender expectations.  It was so gratifying to have a heroine to identify with who "was no lady." 

          I was a bit worried about reading it critically now, as I've enjoyed it as a beach kind of read for so long.  However, I was gratified to rediscover how useful it's going to be for my work on ugly women in Southern literature: page one: "Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful."  Well, there you go.  

          It is a problematic book.  Just starting with race, for a novel from 1936, it's pretty reactionary and racist.  The first African American character in the novel is Jeems, the body servant of the Tarleton twins.  Despite the fact that the narrator notes that neither Scarlett nor the Tarletons value book smarts, and “the boys had less grammar than most of their poor Cracker neighbors” (2), their speech is recounted in standard English, while that of Jeems is phonetically-spelled vernacular.  Jeems is presented as one who is wily and spies on the white folks.  He’s also presented as lacking in the “gentlemanly attributes” which it is implied make rich plantation owners (and their sons) inherently worthy of their wealth—such as when Jeems is afraid to make the kinds of jumps on horseback which the twins enjoy (14).

           The second African American character presented is Mammy, who is also such a problematic character: “Mammy felt that she owned the O’Haras, body and soul” (14).  As an aside, it’s interesting to note that she is described as “shining black, pure African, devoted to her last drop of blood to the O’Haras” (15)—the use of the word blood here is interesting to me.  Blood was such a prominent image in the description of the land that I can’t help but connect Mammy to the land.  But blood also evokes breeding—either breeding in terms of the kind of stock that Mrs. Tarleton is obsessed with, or in terms of bloodlines.  Even though Mammy is “shining black,” I can’t help but be interested in her own bloodline.  She was “raised in the bedroom of Solange Robillard, Ellen O’Hara’s mother” (15).  Who was Mammy’s father?

          The class and economic statuses pre- and post-war are an important theme in the book, showing both what was lost and what was resilient enough to return.  While the tone of the narration casts doubt on the usefulness of absolute allegiance to the Southern Cause, the inherent worthiness of economic and class status (while shown as mutable to some extent) is always ultimately affirmed.  

In fact, those of slave status are often characterized as affirming these systems of oppression.   Jeems expresses disdain for the poor white trash Slatterys, while the narrator explains how the composition of the Troop reflects the local class hierarchy: while small planters such as Able Wynder, while not rich like the big plantation owners, were respectable enough to lead the Troop, poor whites such as the Slatterys are not (11).  Such distinctions include gentlemanly behavior: “raising good cotton, riding well, shooting straight, dancing lightly, squiring the ladies with elegance  and carrying one’s liquor like a gentleman” (2).  Class and gender are implicated in these distinctions, as the narrator claims that “There was little snobbery in the troop.  Too many of their fathers and grandfathers had come up to wealth from the small farmer class for that….But the planters’ ladies and the planters’ slaves could not overlook the fact that he was not born a gentleman, even if their men folks could” (12).

This idea that men, who interact with the “real world” of war and finance, are more forgiving of slights against caste and class is a common one throughout the novel.  The pre-war women’s sphere is incredibly limited and strongly policed: women cannot afford to be as forgiving as men because the world does not forgive them.  The difference between Scarlett’s status and Rhett’s socioeconomic mobility is partly to demonstrate this.  There is a definite (albeit—that word again—problematic) attempt at a feminist undercurrent to the novel, as not only does Scarlett rebel against the strictures expected of her gender, but there’s definitely a moment that I would characterize as a consciousness-raising moment: “A startling thought this, that a woman could handle business matters as well as or better than a man, a revolutionary thought to Scarlett who had been reared in the tradition that men were omniscient and women none too bright.  Of course, she had discovered that this was not altogether true but the pleasant fiction still stuck in her mind.  Never before had she put this remarkable idea into words….during the lean months at Tara she had done a man’s work and done it well. She had been brought up to believe that a woman alone could accomplish nothing, yet she had managed the plantation without men to help her until Will came.  Why, why, her mind stuttered, I believe women could manage everything in the world without men’s help—except having babies, and God knows, no woman in her right mind would have babies if she could help it.  With the idea that she was as capable as a man came a sudden rush of pride and violent longing to prove it, to make money for herself as men made money” (862-3).

Right after this consciousness-raising realization, however, Rhett comes in to see if she needs his financial rescuing, and shows himself to be much more reactionary than Scarlett.  Though Rhett claims to admire women who value practicality over virtue, he is ultimately much less able to rid himself of the kinds of reactionary values over lost causes and virtues and romanticism than Scarlett is, as he admits to killing the black man who was “uppity to a lady, and what else could a Southern gentleman do?  And while I’m confessing, I must admit that I shot a Yankee cavalryman after some words in a barroom” (867).  Scarlett is about to criticize, but then remembers her own lack of regrets over killing a Yankee.  However, Scarlett kills the Yankee for self-preservation, while Rhett’s murders are over these ridiculous, racist/classist/regionalist?  outmoded Southern notions of honor.

He says that “I always felt that women had a hardness and endurance unknown to men, despite the pretty idea taught me in childhood that women are frail, tender, sensitive creatures” (866).  When complaining about Ashley, he says that “Among men, there’s a very unpleasant name for men who permit women to support them” (875).  All in all, on this reading, I did not find Rhett nearly as dashing and attractive as on my first read.  Of course, I found most people less sympathetic, except (surprisingly) perhaps Melanie.  [spoiler alert!] I was surprised at how saddened I was by her death on this reading.  

I’m also curious about just what the novel is saying about the South.  There is ultimately (to me) a critical tone toward the mythic idea of the South.  I’m not done thinking about either how the novel defines the South or what it’s ultimate tone toward this definition is.