“I, Linda Brent”: Harriet Jacobs and the Textual Production of the Self

This paper examines the challenges of authorship and self-making in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. As an ex-slave author, Harriet Jacobs faced several challenges. First, she had to consolidate her authorship within literary conventions that negated and erased blackness, while at the same time using them to successfully promote the political cause of abolition. The adoption of white literary conventions allowed ex-slave writers a new authorship and entry into public discourse but with many uneasy compromises. Another challenge was posed by the narrator’s gender, for her experience of sexual violence at the hands of Dr. Flint testified to the essential ways in which the oppression of enslaved women and their forced reproduction functioned when the polite reading public might disapprove of addressing such a subject. This paper considers Linda Brent, a pseudonym Jacobs adopted to narrate her story, as a textual performance and a self-construction by Jacobs, aimed at finding a means to re/present her experiences of sexual violence and the complexities of captive black femininity within the constraints of literary conventions and to make these issues both legible and admissible. Specifically, the paper will examine the ways in which Linda uses a discourse of sentiment in order to gain the sympathy and compassion of white female readers in the North, as well as the limitations of such strategies.