THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE SELF IN THE SLAVE NARRATIVES OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS AND HARRIET JACOBS

Abstract

During the first half of the nineteenth century, slavery was at the core of a hot political debate and was instrumental in the outbreak of the civil war in 1861. Meanwhile, some slaves managed to break free. Many voices had also risen in favour of emancipation and literature eventually managed to convert many readers to the anti-slavery cause. Slave narratives were also essential in this process of conversion; they acted as testimony of the sufferings of those deprived of freedom and urged white people to react. This dissertation compares slave narratives written by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, both of whom were born in slavery, and who described their experiences in passionate, compelling narratives.Douglass and Jacobs are among a small number of slaves who managed to record their own accounts of their years in bondage. In a time when only ten percent of all slaves could read or write, each of them received the gift of learning from their mistresses. Their lives were certainly not identical, but both former slaves lived in the same generation and shared many similar experiences. Yet, gender becomes the one compelling difference between the two. If black men were subjugated to horrible tortures, women carried a "double burden." Like slave men, they were subjected to physical abuse, but many of these women also endured constant sexual advances from lustful white men. Both narrators understand that in their writings they are not only revealing the horrors of slavery, but they are also creating a character evolving in time and space in quest for an identity. Because the slave has suffered a loss of identity, the slave narrative becomes the process through which the slave can write and assert his/her identity. I shall draw upon Freud's and Lacan's theories of the formation of identity to explain how slaves' identities are damaged through slavery and how they attempt to reconstruct themselves through their narratives. It is obvious that the slave narratives were influenced by the environment in which they came into being, and were partly shaped by literary conventions, social expectations and norms. Thus, I shall rely on the works of Philippe Lejeune and Henry Louis Gates on autobiography to define how these narratives accommodate themselves with the general definitions and norms of Western autobiography, and how they create their own.