Dwelling in the House of Oppression: The Spatial, Racial, and Textual Dynamics of Harriet Wilson's Our Nig

Abstract

Harriet Wilson's Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, in a Two-Story White House, North. Showing that Slavery's Shadows Fall Even There (1859) is considered to be the first novel published by an African American woman. Set in a New England farming village, Our Nig tells the story of Frado, the child of an African American father, Jim, and a white mother, Mag. After the death of her husband Jim, Mag decides, along with the black man who becomes her new lover, to abandon her six-year-old daughter. is left at the house of the white Bellmont family, where she is taken in as an indentured servant. Within this space, is subject to the physical and verbal abuse of the tyrannical Mrs. Bellmont and her daughter Mary and to the apparent kindness of other members of the Bellmont family, particularly Mary's brothers Jack and James, their invalid sister Jane, and their Aunt Abby. The narrative follows Frado's trials, tracing her development to adulthood, when she leaves the Bellmont household, only to find she is too physically incapacitated from her treatment there to support herself. The final chapter documents Frado's marriage to a black man, the birth of her child, and her husband's abandonment of her, concluding with an appeal to the reader for support. Together with the preface, this appeal suggests that Frado, the narrator, and the author are one, and that Our Nig was produced in a final effort on the part of Frado to achieve financial security. This essay considers the effect of dwelling in a house marked by divisions of class and race on both and the white Bellmonts, and it probes how Wilson's authorial strategy in depicting the house of oppression contests the very assumptions that serve as the foundation for the racial and spatial practices in that house. Our Nig exposes how the racial dynamics of slavery are replicated in interracial encounters outside of slavery, in part through the spatializing of hierarchies of power within the private home. Analyzing this fictional dwelling reveals that social constructions of race are articulated, enforced, or challenged through the occupation of specific domestic spaces. My reading begins with a delineation of the assumptions about Frado's literal and metaphorical place in the house, contextualized in terms of the history of racialized domestic service and in terms of competing nineteenth-century racial ideologies about how blackness serves whiteness. In addition to examining the physical spaces of t he house, as described in the novel, I consider how these multiple spaces produce multiple narratives about and the Bellmonts. Locating the house in a conjunction of ideologies of race and labor circulating in the mid-nineteenth century, I then consider how Wilson's position differs from Frado's, as the author dwells literarily on this house of oppression in order to liberate herself from the very forces of domination to which the novel's protagonist is subjected. Our Nig reveals not simply that the shadows of the house of slavery fall upon the white house, North, but that the latter replicates the former: The model home for American society is built according to the spatial imperatives of slavery. Despite Frado's attempts to manipulate domestic space to ensure her own protection, the treatment she receives in the Bellmont house, from those who befriend her as well as those who berate and beat her, delimits her physical freedom and her emotional well-being. Slavery's shadows, the narrative implies, will continue to fall not just in the North during slavery but in any post-slavery America that does not directly counter the understanding of space, race, and labor that evolved through slavery. The novel itself initiates such a change, and Wilson's position as novelist suggests a possibility for a black woman both to exert her authority over domestic space by telling her version of what happens there and to escape the limitations of domestic service by becoming a writer. …