132 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865his or her sympathy, than there is to abstract principles or emotions of anger. Men
are a shadowy presence here; even the carpenter father is mentioned only in passing.
It is the women who matter: heroic women like Jacobs’s mother, great-grandmother
and, above all, her grandmother, and evil women who betray promises, borrow
money without returning it, and deny the truth of the Bible. This is a tale, in short,
that concentrates on the female experience of slavery and, in doing so, appropriates
the techniques of the sentimental novel as well as using those of the slave narrative.
And at the center of it is that familiar protagonist of sentimental fiction: the young
woman affronting her destiny – and, in due time, faced with a dangerous seducer –
the female orphan making her way in the world.
One point that has not been made about Incidents is now worth making. The
central character in the narrative is not called Harriet Jacobs but Linda Brent. The
reasons for this become obvious when Jacobs begins to describe the new household
that, as an adolescent slave, she moved into. She became the object of relentless
sexual pursuit by her white master, to escape which she became the lover of another
white man and bore him two children. By creating Linda Brent as an alter ego, Jacobs
could tell her own story as a sexual victim, move the narrative beyond the limits
prescribed by nineteenth-century gentility, and yet remain safely anonymous. Here,
especially, Incidents becomes a captivating generic mix: a slave narrative still, a
sentimental story of female endeavor, a tale of sexual pursuit, attempted seduction
and betrayal, and the first-person confession of a “fallen woman.” “O, what days and
nights of fear and sorrow that man caused me!” Jacobs confides, as she recalls how
her master, here called Dr. Flint (his actual name was Dr. Norcom), tried to make her
submit to him. “Reader, it is not to awaken sympathy for myself that I am telling you
truthfully what I suffered in slavery. I do it to kindle a flame of compassion in your
hearts for my sisters who are still in bondage, suffering as I once suffered!” The power
and the pathos of this episode in Incidents springs from the direct address to the
reader, so common in sentimental fiction, inviting us to participate in the sufferings
of the heroine. Even more, it springs from Jacobs’s insistence, here and throughout
the book, that what she is telling is the truth – and the truth, not just for herself, but
for all her “sisters.” As Jacobs tells in detail how Flint relentlessly pursued her, filling
her “young mind with unclean images,” reminding her that she “belonged” to him,
his “dark shadow” hovering behind her everywhere, she reminds the reader that what
she is telling has a general application. Everywhere in the South, she reiterates, there
are young slave women, like the narrator herself as an adolescent, with “no shadow
of law to protect [them] from insult, from violence, or even from death.” Everywhere
there are white mistresses like Mrs. Flint, “who ought to protect the helpless victim”
but instead “have no other feelings towards her but those of jealousy and rage.” And
everywhere, there are masters like Dr. Flint, “fiends who bear the shape of men.”
As Jacobs recalls how she took a white lover, and had two children by him to protect
herself against Dr. Flint, the tone gravitates toward the confessional. And, true to the
confessional, there is the same intimate mode of address. “And now reader, I come to
a period in my unhappy life, which I would gladly forget if I could,” Jacobs declares.
“The remembrance fills me with sorrow and shame. It pains me to tell you of it, but IGGray_c02.indd 132ray_c 02 .indd 132 8 8/1/2011 7:54:39 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 39 AM