Pro-slavery Psychiatry and Psychological Costs of Black Women's Enslavement in Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861).

Abstract

With careful attention to nineteenth-century race science's psychiatric discourses about slavery and insanity that led to the management and containment of African Americans in or on plantations, asylums, and society writ large, this article examines various themes, narrative sketches and intertextualities in Incidents that illustrate Harriet Jacobs's theoretical conceptions about the devastating mental harm caused by forms of violence that were integral to the practice of slavery vis-à-vis black women-sexualized violence, forced and controlled reproduction, separation from children between and within plantations, runaway attempts, witnessing violence, and hazardous labor conditions. I argue that Jacobs's narrative troubles visions of resiliency and resistance during slavery that elide the impact of the institution's routinized violence. It demonstrates that enslaved women's embodied experiences of psychological suffering were vexed, multilayered, and ongoing.