Dialect and Identity in Harriet Jacobs's Autobiography and Other Slave Narratives

Abstract

Dialect and Id entity in Harriet Jacobs's Autobiography and Other Slave Narratives Albert Tricomi "I have plowed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And a'n't I a woman?" "I have plowed and planted and gathered into barns, and no man could head me—and ar'nt I a woman?" —Sojourner Truth Literary critics and historians alike have viewed the transcription of dialect in the speech of slaves or ex-slaves as a problem of representation. Did Sojourner Truth, for example, repeatedly exclaim in her May 28, 1851, speech at the Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, "and ar'n't I a woman?" or did she say, "And a'n't I a woman?"—or did she say these words at all?1 By framing the problem empirically, scholars have chosen to investigate the reputation of the transcriber or, with similar intent, to determine which of two transcriptions was made nearest to the date of the original speech (Fitch 73–4). Others, such as Marion Wilson Starling, who juxtaposes one speech by Harriet Tubman transcribed in Standard English to another rendered by Lydia Maria Child in heavy black dialect, have been content to observe that "two entirely different types of editing [ . . .] [may emerge] from the same fugitive slave" (246–7). Starling concludes sanguinely, "Both seem to have caught the same spirit [. . .] and must be accepted with thanks (247). This empirical orientation takes as a given the very data I wish to examine as a set of culturally fraught signifying practices, for the dialectal transcription of Negro (and white) speech in slave narratives discloses a social construction of the most fundamental sort. Inescapably, each choice is ideologically valenced. To transcribe Negro speech uniformly in Standard English is to affirm, in effect, an ahistorical equality of condition between the racialized groups we call "black" and "white," while ignoring cultural difference and the distinctive oppressive history of blacks as slaves—the very point nineteenth-century abolitionists were laboring to establish. Yet to render such speech in dialect, especially eye dialect (a practice considered below), intimates an attitude of condescension or at least superiority, even though the transcriber's goal may have been to record ethnographically the distinctiveness of "black" speech.2 Similarly, to transcribe the dialects of slaves or ex-slaves while neglecting to render that of whites in dialect as well—whether by region, class or ethnicity, or all three—is to make another inequitable, problematic "literary" decision. The project of examining dialectal representation in slave narratives, autobiographies, and fictional narratives has yet to be undertaken, and this despite the ascendancy of cultural [End Page 619] studies in the last generation. To take an outstanding example, about one hundred scholarly essays have been written over the last thirty years on Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave, Written by Herself, and none treats its use of dialect in any but a passing way. Yet the Jacobs's autobiography is extraordinary in the extent and complexity of its use of dialect—more various and complex than that of the slave narratives that preceded hers.3 For this reason I propose to make Jacobs's narrative the focal point for this study. In so doing, I intend to place it in a set of cultural contexts that includes other slave narratives as well as novelistic treatments by both white and black authors of the experience of slavery. One of the prime reasons for the complexity of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is that it absorbs many features of the biographical and the fictional slave narrative. Particularly significant is its relationship to fictional slave narratives by white abolitionists such as the Autobiography of a Female Slave by Mattie Griffith and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, for these employ dialect quite liberally, but in several important respects differ substantially from Jacobs's. By examining Jacobs's use of dialect in the context of the other dialectal practices prevalent in her time, I believe we can appraise the ideological significance of this cultural phenomenon while also revealing the ideological and artistic distinctiveness of Jacobs's own work. A...