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• W101027843 abstract "Though much has been written about Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl since its twentieth-century re-introduction in print, relatively little critical attention has been given to its author's pervasively morbid tone, which is due in part to her persistent focus on death. (1) The subject of death infuses the narrative, appearing repeatedly in descriptions of actual deaths, in numerous death wishes spoken by Jacobs's persona Linda Brent and others, and in the narrator's considerations of whether or not death is preferable to a life without liberty. Death literally surrounds the narrative's central event, Brent's retreat to her grandmother's garret to avoid her lascivious master Dr. Flint, a move that constitutes her extended first step toward escape to the North. Jacobs marks the passage of time in Incidents with Brent's periodic recollections of individual deaths that she witnessed either directly or through the reports of others. The narrative chronicles no fewer than twenty-eight deaths, beginning with those of Brent's mother and mistress in the first chapter and ending with the emotion-charged reports of those of her grandmother and uncle in the last. Within the intervening chapters, a series of slaves and slaveholders depart their fives, often in climactic scenes, which sometimes include the dying person's momentous last words. Jacobs's treatment of death in Incidents enriches what I suggest is the more significant development of death as a metaphor for Brent's experience in hiding. In this essay, I will argue that Jacobs tenders a common currency among abolitionists and slave narrators by figuring the central event in the narrative as a death and and that by doing so she creates a text that points out the extent to which resistance both to slavery and to ideologies of ideal womanhood and motherhood may involve, paradoxically, a submission to both. Jacobs's implication that Brent's seclusion in the garret is a death initiates a collapse in the opposition between resistance and submission by presenting Brent's decision to hide as a self-styled survivalist strategy for confronting oppression. Jacobs plays dead, possibly to forestall condemnation of her sexual past by her Northern, white, largely female readership. In effect, the narrative suggests that she stages her own death in the South to save her life and reputation in the North. Her strategy may be compared to thanatomimeses, acts such as those of wounded soldiers who feign death on a battlefield in order to survive, or those of victims of animal attacks who play dead in order to thwart the animal's further aggression. (2) In cases such as these, victims avoid further physical endangerment by turning themselves, temporarily, into corpses. Thanatomimeses reveal that submission, and resistance may be exerted simultaneously in a single act. By figuring Brent's entry into hiding as an encounter with death, followed by an underworld sojourn, and ending with an extended entombment before her escape and resurrection in the North, Jacobs narrates what can be interpreted as an act of compensation for her past, a death penalty--the ultimate punishment for sin. Brent's self-incarceration in the garret is construed as a self-sacrifice offered in payment for her own and her children's redemption. As such, the ordeal renders her a re-made woman worthy of acceptance by a white abolitionist sisterhood and, equally important, an ideal mother and savior to her son and daughter. Jacobs's rendering of Brent's seven years in hiding serves to affirm the values and standards of her readers, but it also adapts their ideologies to her own defense. By employing death in such a way, Jacobs appears both to submit to and resist these values and standards in one gesture. Jacobs's Seduction of Audience (3) Unlike many American slave narratives by women, Incidents offers its author's confession of what her readers might regard as a sin-ridden past and a justification of her motives to a potentially condemnatory readership. …" @default.
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• W101027843 date "2008-09-22" @default.
• W101027843 modified "2023-09-24" @default.
• W101027843 title "Playing Dead: Harriet Jacobs's Survival Strategy in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" @default.
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