Playing Dead: Harriet Jacobs's Survival Strategy in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

• Published in: African American review Vol. 42; no. 3/4; p. 607
• Main Author: Kreiger, Georgia
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Saint Louis Johns Hopkins University Press 01.10.2008
• Subjects: Children & youth; Deaths; Females; Ideology; Jacobs, Harriet A (Harriet Ann) (1813-1897); Narratives; Slavery; Tone; Women
• ISSN: 1062-4783; 1945-6182

Though much has been written about Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl since its twentieth-century re-introduction in print, relatively little critical attention has been given to its author's pervasively morbid tone, which is due in part to her persistent focus on death.1 The subject of death infuses the narrative, appearing repeatedly in descriptions of actual deaths, in numerous death wishes spoken by Jacobs's persona Linda Brent and others, and in the narrator's considerations of whether or not death is preferable to a life without liberty. In this essay, I will argue that Jacobs tenders a common currency among abolitionists and slave narrators by figuring the central event in the narrative as a death and resurrection and that by doing so she creates a text that points out the extent to which resistance both to slavery and to ideologies of ideal womanhood and motherhood may involve, paradoxically, a submission to both.