Chronotopes in Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl 1

• Published in: African American review Vol. 49; no. 1; p. 19
• Main Author: Troy, Maria Holmgren
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Saint Louis Johns Hopkins University Press 01.04.2016
• Subjects: 19th century; African Americans; American literature; Architecture; Audiences; Chronotope; Females; Genre; Ideology; Jacobs, Harriet A (Harriet Ann) (1813-1897); Middle class; Narratives; Negotiation; Slavery; United States > US
• ISSN: 1062-4783; 1945-6182

In a 1981 article published in American Literature,Jean Fagan Yellin announced that "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herselfhas just been transformed from a questionable slave narrative into a pseudonymous autobiography ...by the discovery of a cache of her letters" ("Written" 479).2 To a certain extent, the questions regarding the narrative's authenticity that had riddled the history of Incidents before Yellin's article and her subsequent 1980s' publications had to do with the novelistic strategies that Jacobs used rhetorically to reach, negotiate with, and convince an audience of antebellum white middle-class women in the North that her narrative was authentic. Flint's house, the provincial town, the grandmother's house, and the garret-yields a deeper understanding of how Jacobs employs sophisticated narrative strategies to reach and negotiate with her white Northern audience, while at the same time severely criticizing the limited access to as well as the limitations of the American ideology of domesticity for African Americans in general, and women slaves in particular.