Commodities That Speak: Form and Transformation in Mary Rowlandson’s Captivity Narrative and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Abstract

Abstract In texts written more than two centuries apart, Mary Rowlandson and Harriet Jacobs describe the transformation from person to thing that each experiences within different systems of commodification. As objects of property, each author realizes her use-value in ways defined by her owner(s). And each, as Marx observes, realizes her value through exchange or ransom. In the “Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson” and in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself, the commodities speak. Rowlandson and Jacobs construct arguments for personhood using tools denied to the captive and slave; Rowlandson appropriates a narrative form that chronicles the spiritual conversion, and after Jacobs escapes from the South, the fugitive slave writes her own story, exercising skills and knowledge forbidden to her. In their autobiographical narratives, Mary Rowlandson and Harriet Jacobs critique the social relationships that attribute exchange value to them. Both authors create or identify loopholes in those relationships and the systems surrounding them; serving as the means of survival for the authors, these loopholes also shape the arguments that contradict and reverse the transformation from person to thing.