Introduction | Plantation Romances | Slave Narratives

What of the slave narratives? This is a genre that we almost always understand within the context of abolitionism and quite obviously as an attack on the South as a society from which the fugitive or ex-slave writer has been by law excluded. True enough – but the slave narrative is inescapably also a southern genre, not merely because those who wrote in this format were born in the South but because the South was where they called upon and preserved their own sustaining cultural resources. In Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), Douglass pays homage to his African heritage in his emphasis on the John the Conqueror root that protected him against the Overseer Covey. He does so again in his explanation of the true meaning of the slaves' singing. It was not, he emphasizes, a sign of their contentment but a way of expressing common, communal sorrow that reaffirmed an identity quite different from the one imposed by the slaveholders. Another sign of his southern identification is the way in which Douglass fashioned himself as revolutionary hero within his community, a bold and literate leader consciously framed as a counter-image to the plantation romances’ planter Cavaliers.

Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) is in some ways our best example of the slave narrative as an internally resistant southern text. Here is a slave who framed her life story within the twin regional ideals often cultivated in plantation romances: the southern home place and the southern lady. Jacobs escapes initially not to the North, but to the domestic haven of her grandmother’s Edenton home, a refuge for seven years that keeps her in touch with her children and a large extended family. More importantly, she fashions the controlling ideal of the lady in her portrayal of her grandmother: a matriarch of exquisite manners, deep personal virtue, and religious piety. This envisioning makes all the more pointed Jacobs’s intention when she treats the way in which she was harassed by her master, who hypocritically borrowed the “romance” language – telling “Linda” (Jacobs’s pseudonym) that he wanted to “make a lady” of her, to give her finery and a home of her own.

When Jacobs and Douglass’s narratives are grouped under the heading of “Literatures of Slavery” with plantation romances and Anti-Tom novels, the regional dynamic of the antebellum South is clarified for all of these genres. The plots, characters, motives, and images of the three genres create the absorbing drama of an interlocking dialectic. To segregate these genres from one another is to miss, in all of them, half the story.

Introduction | Plantation Romances | Slave Narratives

Published: 4 March 2004

© 2004 Lucinda MacKethan and Southern Spaces