Whose Incidents Are They?

            In examining Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, one of the topics brought up for discussion was the idea of self in the piece—and subsequently the voice of the piece. Without doubt, by the end of her self-examination, Linda is no longer a slave girl, but a slave woman. This growth is achieved by not only the passage of time itself, but also incidents such as those she recounts in her autobiography. In looking at Linda, the question of self is raised, and the obvious discrepancy between the words she uses in her piece and the knowledge we would expect from a slave prompt us to ask, What is the difference between who Linda presents herself as in the story, and who she really is?

            Linda presents herself as a slave girl suffering alongside her fellow slaves under the emotional assault of her master, Dr. Flint. Her essay is an obvious appeal to the white women of the Northern states to garner support for the abolitionist movement in the antebellum era in which this piece was published. While the emotions presented here are those of the slave, the actual words are those of the women in Jacobs’ audience. It is hard to imagine a slave like Linda writing in such a sophisticated manner—even writing at all, considering it was illegal to teach slaves to read and write. Yet she does present a grammatically sophisticated work, and the claim that she could not have written it does have certain credence based on this principle alone.

The editor, however, implores us to believe Linda Brent, or Harriet Jacobs, was indeed the true author of this piece, and I, at least, as a reader do believe that Jacobs herself was the author of this piece. However, it is said in the introduction that Jacobs wrote this piece years after her experience and her transition from the South to the North, having been educated by a mistress and thus gaining all the knowledge comparable to a white Northern woman, then writing this piece. Linda clearly grows from when we first meet her as readers at age seven to when we leave her as a mother in her teens—but she grows again from when we leave her to when she speaks to us of her experiences. In this time, she has become a different person. She is educated, middle-aged, and a Northerner. The incidents are no longer the present, but the past, and the past is viewed infinitely differently than the present, simply because by looking back on an incident we have the advantages of retrospect, comparison, and contemplation.

If Linda is writing this as an educated person in retrospect, she’s not writing it as the same person she was when the incidents actually occurred. The feelings that she presents to us as immediate are only those she remembers, and those she thinks she felt—and the way she has interpreted the emotions she felt going through her suffering. Thus, she does not truly embody the self of the girl experiencing the incidents. Just as Harriet has assumed the pseudonym of Linda, so too have Harriet’s experiences been veiled by the interpretation of Linda.

This brings me back to the central question—what is the self of the piece? Are Linda’s emotions in this piece really the emotions of the slave girl? It seems there has entered a duel between the narrator of the piece and the main character of it—both trapped inside of the same person. To grant Jacobs justice, it is true that all people change, and she can certainly not be blamed for recounting her experiences falsely on account of the passage of time—she could not control this. And would we not want her to change? Of course not. Finally, she never claims to be in the moment of her incidents—she tells them strictly in reminiscence, never in reproduction—and her honesty with the reader in respect to her regret over her decision to commit the “amoral” act with Mr. Sands is clearly a result of great rumination after the occurrence of the event itself. But even though the discrepancy between her two selves is explainable, does this mean she can write the story honestly?

The answer to this is rather paradoxical: she can indeed write the story truthfully, baring her soul to the reader, sharing all that runs through her mind, funneling it out onto paper with a pen. Jacobs doesn’t lie to her readers; she carries no false pretense. Yet Jacobs can never be fully truthful, simply because she is no longer the same person she was as a child. The incidents she writes about in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl changed her, and she recognizes this. But in changing her, they have distorted her interpretation of them.

Jacobs fails to realize this difference between her two selves, and in doing so, she does strengthen the argument that the piece was not written by a slave: it wasn’t. It was written by a woman who once was a slave, who now is a slave only in memory. Memory distorts everything; for we do, without a doubt, bring the experiences we have after the event back into consideration, subconscious though it may be, and the memory is that: a picture, shaped by our imagination, converted into what we wish it to be by drawing on certain aspects of the memory that we have held onto in our minds, essentially creating its importance.

So who really wrote Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl? Linda Brent, a person created by Harriet Jacobs, a shield for who she thought she was, by both the sophistication of her language and the interpretation of her memory. And who has the stronger voice—the narrator or the woman who experienced the incidents depicted in the autobiography? For our heads, the narrator does. But in our hearts? The troubled slave girl we know as Linda.