Rhetoric and Resistance in Black Women's Autobiography

Rhetoric and Resistance in Black Women’s Autobiography Copyright 2003 by Johnnie M. Stover. This work is licensed under a modified Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No De- rivative Works 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/. You are free to electronically copy, distribute, and transmit this work if you attribute authorship. However, all printing rights are reserved by the University Press of Florida (http://www.upf.com). Please con- tact UPF for information about how to obtain copies of the work for print distribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get permission from the University Press of Florida. Nothing in this license impairs or restricts the author’s moral rights. Florida A&M University, Tallahassee Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton Florida Gulf Coast University, Ft. Myers Florida International University, Miami Florida State University, Tallahassee New College of Florida University of Central Florida, Orlando University of Florida, Gainesville University of North Florida, Jacksonville University of South Florida, Tampa University of West Florida, Pensacola Rhetoric and Resistance in Black Women’s Autobiography ° Johnnie M. Stover University Press of Florida Gainesville/Tallahassee/Tampa/Boca Raton Pensacola/Orlando/Miami/Jacksonville/Ft. Myers Copyright 2003 by Johnnie M. Stover Printed in the United States of America on recycled, acid-free paper All rights reserved 08 07 06 05 04 03 6 5 4 3 2 1 ISBN 0-8130-2676-8 Cataloging-in-publication data are available at the Library of Congress. The University Press of Florida is the scholarly publishing agency for the State University System of Florida, comprising Florida A&M University, Florida Atlantic University, Florida Gulf Coast University, Florida International University, Florida State University, University of Central Florida, University of Florida, University of North Florida, University of South Florida, and University of West Florida. University Press of Florida 15 Northwest 15th Street Gainesville, FL 32611-2079 http://www.upf.com Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction: Life-Writing and Subversion 1 1. Autobiography, Authorship, and Authority 20 2. Black Women Autobiographers’ Encounter with Gender, Race, and Class 39 3. A Patchwork of Cultures: Journeys of African American Women Autobiographers 61 4. The Emergence of an African American Mother Tongue 86 5. Subtle Resistance in Our Nig, Incidents, Behind the Scenes, and Reminiscences 108 6. Allusion as Hidden Discourse in Black Women’s Autobiography 128 7. Flagrant Resistance, and Punishment Be Damned 149 8. Linkages: Continuation of a Tradition 168 Afterword: Piecing It All Together 199 Notes 211 Bibliography 227 Index 239 Acknowledgments Let me take a moment to thank those who have given me the spiritual, emotional, and intellectual support I required to complete this project. First and foremost, I thank the members of my family for their constant, unconditional love and encouragement. Any project of this magnitude requires adequate “focus” time away from other professional and eco- nomic considerations, and I thank Dr. William Covino, former chair of the English Department and now dean of the College of Arts and Letters, for instituting a program of research release time for junior faculty at Florida Atlantic University. From the initiation of this project through its various draft stages, I have received immeasurable insightful comments and sug- gestions from a number of colleagues—Bonnie Braendlin, Dennis Moore, Tom Martin, and especially Carol McGuirk. I also offer thanks to Marlene NourbeSe Philip for permission to re- produce excerpts from her text, She Tries Her Tongue: “Her Silence Softly Breaks.” These excerpts were vital in representing my own thoughts and in linking those thoughts together. Last but not least, I must acknowledge the graduate students in my African American autobiography courses for their enthusiasm toward the subject of life-writing, keeping me sharp and on track; I particularly want to name Erika Rosiers, for it was her excitement about and research into the work of Elizabeth Keckley that provided me with so much valuable information. Portions of this text appear in the College English article “Nineteenth- Century African American Women’s Autobiography as Social Discourse: The Example of Harriet Ann Jacobs” and in the a/b: Auto/Biography Studies article, “African American ‘Mother Tongue’ Resistance in Nine- teenth-Century Postbellum Black Women’s Autobiography: Elizabeth Keckley and Susie King Taylor.” Thank you all. Introduction Life-Writing and Subversion Slip mouth over the syllable; moisten with tongue the word. Suck Slide Play Caress Blow—Love it, but if the Word gags, does not nourish, bite it off—at its source— Start again —Marlene NourbeSe Philip, She Tries Her Tongue On June 2, 2000, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported on the Na- tional Association of Scholars’ (NAS) critique of an alleged reduction of “fundamental” English courses.1 “Losing the Big Picture: The Fragmenta- tion of the English Major Since 1964” surveys the English curriculum at twenty-five colleges and universities, concluding that few “‘still encour- age undergraduates to take the “big picture” or foundational courses em- phasizing broad periods, the greatest writers, and the most important literary genres’” (Leatherman A19). The NAS report further suggests that the quality of the English education curricula has declined since 1964. But rather than consider what writers and genres those earlier curricula include, I prefer to consider which they exclude—any substantial represen- tation of American literary works by women and people of color, and especially those works produced in nineteenth-century America. If we were to use those pre-1964 curricula as defining markers of the “greatest writers” and the “most important literary genres,” we would have to conclude that there were no great African American women writers in the nineteenth century and that slave narratives and African American autobiography do not constitute important literary genres.2 Neither of these conclusions would be accurate. In the 1960s and 1970s, American college students, the NAACP, and women’s rights groups de- manded more representative curricula from the various humanities de- 2 Introduction partments within colleges and universities, including English depart- ments. As they saw it, the “big picture” had to be more than just “big”; it had to include the literary contributions of Americans who had tradition- ally been excluded—placed outside the white-male-heterosexual-middle- class paradigm. Slave narratives and the autobiographical texts of nineteenth-century African American women had been rendered invisible, along with their writers, and would have remained so had we settled for the narrow vision of those who believe that the 1964 English department curricula presents an acceptable model for the study of American literatures. In citing Mrs. N. F. Mossell’s 1894 listing of African American pub- lications, Carla L. Peterson notes that slave narratives joined “sociological texts, fiction, journalism, history, religious studies, poetry, and spiritual autobiographies” on Mossell’s list (Doers 5). Not only does this list repre- sent the tendency of African American writers to blur the lines between genres but it also demonstrates, because of Western society’s need to es- tablish clear genre distinctions, why the literary works of African Ameri- cans were summarily dismissed. Peterson writes that Mossell’s list in- cludes “genres and texts that would be considered either ‘nonliterary’ by modernist criteria, and thus more appropriate to the fields of history or sociology, or ‘minor’ by historical standards, and thus unworthy of seri- ous attention,” resulting in “the erasure from scholarly investigation of ‘minority’ texts considered insufficiently ‘important’ or ‘beautiful’ by dominant cultural standards” (Doers 5). The late-twentieth-century critical and theoretical interest in histori- cally situating American literatures has not only opened the doors for re- visiting and re-reading canonical texts (such as Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Melville’s Moby Dick, and others), but has also breathed life into texts previously ignored, minimized, or mar- ginalized. Russell J. Reising notes that previous generations of literary scholars have been guilty of working within a limited canon and guilty of “deny[ing] or minimiz[ing] American literature’s status as a social discourse” (229). He goes on to suggest that such theorists limit the possible range of social discourse by “positing a homogeneous . tradition of New England literature and by defining literature so as to exclude texts and genres of a frankly social cast” (234). By approaching texts from their historical contexts in this book, I specifically and intentionally apply social perspectives to American literatures because “literary analysis can no longer merely focus on texts as pure objects but must examine how these Life-Writing and Subversion 3 were shaped both by a politics of publication . and by a politics of recep- tion” (Peterson, Doers 5). I wish to give appropriate credit to nineteenth- century African American women autobiographers, whose texts repre- sent a new and distinct American literary form. In this study, I primarily apply my theories to four nineteenth-century African American women autobiographers as examples of black women using their personal narratives to engage the systems of enslavement and disempowerment perpetrated against them: Harriet E. Wilson, Our Nig: or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, in a Two-Story White House, North. Showing that Slavery’s Shadows Fall Even There (1859); Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself (1861); Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes.

Load more