Gender and the subjugated body: Readings of race, subjectivity, and difference in the construction of slave narratives

This study examines tropes of embodiment and their role in the production of discursive subjectivity in the slave narrative genre, and in selected later texts of African-American literature that rework and elaborate upon these tropologies. My analysis focuses on conventional representations of male and female bodies, and particularly the constructions of masculinity and femininity, in Frederick Douglass's narrative (1845) and in Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861).;I argue that the representational strategies employed in these texts not only permitted their authors to appropriate bourgeois ideology to affirm the humanity of African-Americans, but also limited their representations of black humanity to terms comprehensible to a literate, predominantly white audience. Although Douglass's text has been singled out as the paradigmatic narrative, Jacobs, by incorporating a model of resistant orality, avoids Douglass's tendency to privilege the literate individual and to silence the slave community.;By contrasting significant, gender-specific tropes of physical movement and stasis, and noting the narrative transformations that ensue--from the body as text to the body in the text--I identify marked differences between Douglass's and Jacobs's conceptualizations of gender, literacy and freedom.;I next trace the development of writing (and other) technologies in the discursive production of African-American subjectivity and the commodification of 'soul,' distinguishing between the conventions of the generic (male) narrative, which tend to construct the (monologic) (male) narrator as a solitary hero, and the specific ascriptions of gender in Jacobs's narrative, which tend to construct the (dialogic) (female) narrator as an individual who exists within a community of speakers.;I conclude with a discussion of the contrasting poles of narrative spatio-temporality evoked by the obsessional mastery of linear, historical time in Douglass's masculine symbolic and the suppressed hysteria of cyclic and monumental time in Jacobs's maternal semiotic. The implications of these opposing discursive strategies are of particular relevance to the continuing theorization of African-American literature, retroactively constructing the slave narrative as a proto-literature.