Historical Representation of the Mistress-Enslaved Woman Relationship in Harriet A. Jacobs’ Book
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.48162/rev.48.076Keywords:
Historical representation, slavery, gender perspective, Harriet A. Jacobs, women slave narrativesAbstract
Harriet Jacobs' autobiographical text titled Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Writing by herself (1861) is the first written and published by a slave in the United States; the author early introduces in it references to gender issues (power, sexuality, motherhood, abuse, etc.). This research focuses on the representation of the mistress-enslaved woman relationship based on the historical analysis of that document, to highlight, first of all, the importance of slave writings in the study of the past from a gender perspective; and, secondly, to underline the complex and unequal bond between women within the framework of the slave system of the American South. This research concludes that the narrative of slave women, and in particular Jacobs' text, is a valuable resource for the study of history from a gender perspective, since it makes the analysis of the past more complex by making it possible to distinguish and delineate different models of southern women according to their behavior with their enslaved women and, thus, to question homogeneous approaches and simplistic interpretations of the representation of what happened.
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