Sep 21, 2009
Harriet Jacobs’s Congenitally Broken Heart
Harriet Jacobs ends her 1861 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by saying that her story “ends with freedom; not in the usual way, with marriage.” Beneath Jacobs’s literary jibe at the worn conventions of English novels lies her palpable aversion to marriage, which she knows chiefly as an institution of oppression and focal point for heartache. Marriage exists for her in forms molded and marred by the peculiar pressures of slavery. Among white slave owners, slavery is the legal institution ensuring the perpetual bondage of slaves. But marriage among slaves is by definition extralegal; it is unrecognized by the state and subject to dissolution at the master’s whim. The security offered slaves by marriage can be summarily snatched away by the removal of one’s spouse or children — shipped to another of the master’s properties; transferred between families as part of a white marital transaction; sold to traders at auction. In seeking solace through formalizing and intensifying the fragile and impermanent bonds among non-blood relatives who may well soon be severed from them, female slaves especially set themselves up for sorrow so immense that Jacobs questions whether she should permit herself to allow “the tendrils of the heart to twine around objects which may at any moment be wrenched away by the hand of violence.”