Harriet Jacobs and the Sentimental Politics of Female Suffering

When Harriet Jacobs confesses her sexual relationship with Mr. Sands, a white lawyer, she is alternately apologetic, a pathetic victim appealing to her audience for sympathy, and defiant, a renegade claiming that her choice was made with deliberate calculation and cannot be understood let alone judged by an audience that knows nothing of slave experience.' Throughout Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Jacobs vacillates between the highly stylized and oblique language that characterizes the sentimental and domestic fiction of the antebellum period, and a direct, succinctand descriptive style. Jacobs's self-presentation and her attitude toward her audience fluctuate with these stylistic vacillations. She alternately describes herself as a victim of circumstance, pleading for pity and assistance, and as a discerning actor who exercises significant control over nearly impossible conditions. Employing well-tried sentimental forms to apologize for her sexual demise, Jacobs implicitly endorses the shared value of sexual purity as the grounds for communication with her genteel audience. Asserting illicit sexuality as an instance of her autonomy, Jacobs rejects the conventions of sexual purity altogether, defining her relationship with her audience as adversarial rather than cooperative. Critics, while taking note of these stylistic and substantive inconsistencies, have emphasized the unconventional aspects of Jacobs's address, focusing on her refutation of dominant ideology at the expense of fathoming her significant adherence to both literary and social conventions. Situating Jacobs's account of her sexual demise and her emancipation in relation to the cult of true womanhood, Hazel Carby provides an exacting analysis of Jacobs's challenge to antebellum culture. In Reconstructing Womanhood, Carby argues that Jacobs must contend with conventions which, as they promote female chastity and submissiveness, deny her experience, her femininity, and, by extension, her humanity. From this position of exclusion, however, Jacobs is able to condemn and modify the models of female character and behavior that insistently marginalize her. Depicting the material discrepancies between her circumstances and those of her white, female audience, Jacobs is able to critique conventional standards of female