by Sady Doyle
It was the relic of the sense of chastity that dictated anonymity to women even so late as the nineteenth century. Currer Bell, George Eliot, George Sand, all the victims of inner strife as their writings prove, sought ineffectively to veil themselves by using the name of a man. Thus they did homage to the convention, which if not implanted by the other sex was liberally encouraged by them (the chief glory of a woman is not to be talked of, said Pericles, himself a much-talked-of man) that publicity in women is detestable. Anonymity runs in their blood. The desire to be veiled still possesses them.
All true. Brontë even said as much, counseling a friend who had the misfortune of having a musically gifted daughter: “I was told you had once some thoughts of bringing Fanny out as a professional singer, and it was added Fanny did not like the project … Fanny probably looks on publicity as degrading, and I believe for a woman it is degrading if it is not glorious.” A woman must be perfect, or not be anything at all, to encounter fame without being shamed or scarred.
Mary Beard, writing in the London Review of Books, traces the idea as far back as the Odyssey: Telemachus, as a means of claiming his manhood, tells Penelope to “go back up into your quarters, and take up your own work, the loom and the distaff … speech will be the business of men, all men, and of me most of all.” The word he uses, Beard tells us, is important; gossip and informal conversation are not denoted by it. The speech Telemachus is claiming for men is muthos, speaking with authority in public. This speech is also forbidden to women in Christian scripture: “Let the woman learn in silence, with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.”
These injunctions against female speech were not just cultural. They also passed into law. In Europe and the United States, there were crimes of speech—like being a “common scold,” an “angry woman who, by brawling and wrangling amongst her neighbours, disturbs the public peace”—that only women could commit. Common scolds were punished by being made to wear a gag called a “scold’s bridle” in public; it was made of metal, and sometimes lined with blades or spikes, so that moving one’s tongue at all would cause injury. For those who felt that the bridle was too cruel, there was also “ducking”—repeatedly submerging a woman in a lake or river, or (if all else failed) a horse trough, to simulate the feeling of drowning—which, as you may have already noticed, is basically identical to the punishment we call “waterboarding,” and regard as a form of torture, in the present day. Don’t worry, though: Common scold laws in the United States were ruled unconstitutional. After a New Jersey woman was successfully convicted of the offense in 1972.
It’s no wonder, then, that we make such ugly, public sacrifices of women who’ve dared to become famous. The expansion required to make oneself heard or seen by the public—the act of muthos—is deeply at odds with the basic female work of getting and staying small.
And so it is that the history of women’s written speech is littered with lacunae, dodges and feints around personal fame—women who’ve used male or androgynous pen names (Currer Bell, George Sand, George Eliot, J. K. Rowling) or who have relied on flat anonymity (Jane Austen’s novels, published under the byline “A Lady”; Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, first published by “Anonymous”), or who simply didn’t publish at all (Emily Dickinson, writing hundreds of poems and stuffing them in her desk drawer, where they stayed until her death). So it is that the “singer-songwriter” genre—the one art form that is pretty much explicitly dedicated to putting a person’s voice and perspective out there, embodied and audible, in public—has such an odd habit of losing track of its female practitioners. So it is that women to this day attempt muthos with trepidation and tactical defenses. Here’s Woolf again, and here’s where she gets weird:
[Women] are not even now as concerned about the health of their fame as men are, and, speaking generally, will pass a tombstone or a signpost without feeling an irresistible desire to cut their names on it, as Alf, Bert or Chas. must do in obedience to their instinct, which murmurs if it sees a fine woman go by, or even a dog, Ce chien est a moi. And, of course, it may not be a dog, I thought, remembering Parliament Square, the Sieges Allee and other avenues; it may be a piece of land or a man with curly black hair.
“It is one of the great advantages of being a woman,” Woolf concludes with evident satisfaction, “that one can pass even a very fine negress without wishing to make an Englishwoman of her.”
Of course, Woolf’s reader may very well be a “negress.” Who is also a woman. And for whom the innocence of white women, or their instinct to ownership, may be substantially more in doubt. In the midst of all these Georges and J.K.s and Anons, and in considering the tactical invisibility of “A Lady,” it’s instructive to remember at least one other pen name adopted to conceal an urgent truth. We could consider the account published in the New York Tribune, in April 1853, under the byline “A Fugitive Slave.”
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Anatomy of a Trainwreck
HARRIET JACOBS
“As this is the first time that I ever took my pen in hand to make such an attempt,” she began, “you will not say that it is fiction, for had I the inclination I have neither the brain or talent to write it.”
This was Harriet Jacobs’s first published statement. She was a former slave, a fugitive from North Carolina, living in New York. Her brother John, who had also escaped, had become active in the abolitionist movement; one of his projects was an anti-slavery reading room, a library where documents on the cause could be found. Harriet had been allowed to read, growing up, before teaching slaves to read or write became illegal; she was allowed to use secondhand textbooks that had belonged to her owner. But her adult relationship to language began there, in the reading room, where she spent at least four days a week studying. Her first piece of published writing is a letter to her local paper, in response to the fact that former first lady Julia Tyler had written an editorial praising slavery’s benefits to the American woman.
American women, and specifically enslaved American black women, were being raped. And Harriet Jacobs knew it. She had seen it; she had barely escaped it. And despite being profoundly frightened of writing publicly—“I have not the Courage to meet the criticism and ridicule of Educated people,” she claimed—she found herself remarkably able to inform a first lady that she was full of shit:
“Would you not think that Southern Women had cause to despise that Slavery which forces them to bear so much deception practiced by their husbands?” she wrote.
Yet all this is true, for a slaveholder seldom takes a white mistress, for she is an expensive commodity, not as submissive as he would like to have her, but more apt to be tyrannical; and when his passion seeks another object, he must leave her in quiet possession of all the gewgaws that she has sold herself for. But not so with his poor slave victim, that he has robbed of everything that can make life desirable; she must be torn from the little that is left to bind her to life, and sold by her seducer and master, caring not where, so that it puts him in possession of enough to purchase another victim.
This letter is, among other things, persuasive evidence that Harriet Jacobs was a genius. She had never received formal education; she had never received even informal education after the age of twelve. The Tribune added punctuation to her statement, because, in her earliest writing, she avoided it: “the spelling I believe was every word correct punctuation I did not attempt for I never studied Grammer there fore I know nothing about it,” she explained. But her voice—long, elaborate, lyrical sentences, each one loaded with immense emotional charge—was there from the moment she put pen to paper. When she grabbed hold of language, she made it sing.
It was that very genius that wound up doing her in. Jacobs is a unique case, among all the women in this book. She was not publicly humiliated, not vilified, not forcibly exposed. But she was wrecked all right: faced with her story, and with her exceptional skill in telling it, the world just plain refused to believe tha
t she existed at all. Until the 1970s, Harriet Jacobs—known mainly as “Linda Brent,” the pen name she used for her autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl—was, in fact, believed to be a fictional character, invented by her white editor, Lydia Maria Child.
Historian John Blassingame gave a neat summary of all the reasons Incidents was “not credible”:
The story is too melodramatic: miscegenation and cruelty, outraged virtue, unrequited love and planter licentiousness appear on practically every page. The virtuous Harriet sympathizes with her wretched mistress who has to look on all the mulattoes fathered by her husband, refuses to bow to the lascivious demands of her master, bears two children, and then runs away and hides in a garret in her grandmother’s cabin for seven years until she is able to escape to New York. In the meantime her white lover has acknowledged his paternity of her children, purchased their freedom, and been elected to Congress.
Then, too, the book bore certain damning similarities to women’s popular fiction. Specifically, to Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Jane Eyre. In all three books, a young woman becomes an object of sexual attention from the man she works for—in Brontë’s book, it’s romantic; in Stowe’s, it’s prostitution; in Jacobs’s, it’s threats of rape or murder. In both Jane and Incidents, the heroine awakens to see that man’s wife standing over her threateningly in the night. Bertha Rochester awakes Jane, who passes out from fright; Linda becomes the object of violent hatred and jealousy from “Mrs. Flint,” who stands over her bed at night and whispers sexually suggestive things to see if the sleeping Linda will confess to an affair with her husband. All three books include a woman being trapped in an attic: Bertha, Cassy, and Linda. Even the ending of Incidents is seemingly a Jane Eyre reference: “Reader, my story ends with freedom; not in the usual way, with marriage,” Jacobs wrote, flipping the script on one of the most famous novels of her age.
And yet, it was all true. Even the attic. Even the rape threats. Even the jealous, violent wife. The Jane Eyre and Uncle Tom’s Cabin references are there because, well, Jacobs had probably read them both; she knew Stowe (though she wound up not liking her) and her employer, Cornelia Wallis, owned a copy of Jane Eyre. She specifically intended for her book to be read by privileged white women, whom she hoped to shock into political awareness. Jacobs would have been exercising good sense by studying the literature to figure out what her target audience liked, and fine technique in enlisting the reader’s sympathies by recalling other beloved heroines. But what was literature, when written by white women who’d imagined it, was “melodrama” when written by a black woman who’d actually lived it.
Then there was the congressman. Who was also real, and who was perhaps the greatest obstacle to Jacobs, when it came time to write her story. After enduring years of sexual harassment, Jacobs had made one last, desperate bid to avoid being raped. She had slept, voluntarily, with the white son of one of the richest families in town. It worked: Once the affair became known, “Dr. Flint” (in reality, her master, Dr. James Norcom) backed off, at least physically. There were no consequences for raping or killing a slave, but there would certainly be social fallout from interfering with the affairs of a more powerful white man. Interpersonal awkwardness was more of a barrier to rape, for James Norcom, than a fifteen-year-old girl’s pain.
In other words: Harriet’s only escape from violence and coerced sex was another, slightly less violent form of coerced sex. And yet, she blamed herself. She was very nearly unable to speak of it, even to close friends.
“Though impelled by a natural craving for human sympathy, she passed through a baptism of suffering, even in recounting her trials to me, in private confidential conversations. The burden of these memories lay heavily upon her spirit,” wrote Amy Post, the woman she eventually told. “[Her] sensitive spirit shrank from publicity … Even in talking with me, she wept so much, and seemed to suffer such mental agony, that I felt her story was too sacred to be drawn from her by inquisitive questions, and I left her free to tell as much, or as little, as she chose. Still, I urged upon her the duty of publishing her experience, for the sake of the good it might do; and, at last, she undertook the task.”
To Amy, Harriet explained the burden of silence on her: “Dear Amy if it was the life of a Heroine with no degradation associated with it … your purity of heart and kindly sympathies won me at one time to speak of my children it is the only words that has passed my lips since I left my Mothers door I had determined to let others think as they pleased but my lips should be sealed and no one had a right to question me for this reason when I first came North I avoided the Antislavery people as much as possible because I felt that I could not be honest and tell the whole truth.”
Post’s description of Jacobs’s pain sounds like what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder. And, honestly, how could she not have had it? She had lived with the threat of rape, torture, or death, for both herself and her children, for years. She had seen it. Even when she escaped, she had spent seven years in a crawl-space the size of a spacious coffin; she was unable to sit, stand, or turn over without bumping her head on the ceiling, unable to see the outside world except through peepholes that she had made in the walls, and her movement was constricted to such an extent that, at one point, her legs just stopped working. Her unwillingness or inability to speak, or her inability to relive the events in question without agony, seems like the only possible outcome for a woman emerging from decades of unremitting trauma.
Presumably it also had something to do with the sheer size of her task, the fatal nature of the truth she had to impart. The Cult of True Womanhood was at its height in Jacobs’s lifetime; the belief in the delicate, angelic, asexual nature of women, and of the sanctity of marriage, motherhood, and domesticity, was so widespread that even feminists were using it to advocate their cause. And Jacobs had to say that it was a lie. That it was only tenable because millions of women—black women—were not allowed chastity, or delicacy, or protection. While white women’s sexuality was being written out of existence, black women and girls were completely unprotected from sexual predation. The men preaching the sanctity of marriage and motherhood were building a business out of rape and the selling their own children. What Harriet Jacobs had to say struck at the foundations of the deeply racist American patriarchy. And she had to say it, while also admitting that she had survived the worst of it. That she, too, had never been allowed to be a True Woman.
“Pity me, and pardon me, O virtuous reader!” Jacobs eventually wrote, on the matter of the congressman.
You never knew what it is to be a slave; to be entirely unprotected by law or custom; to have the laws reduce you to the condition of a chattel, entirely subject to the will of another. You never exhausted your ingenuity in avoiding the snares, and eluding the power of a hated tyrant; you never shuddered at the sound of his footsteps, and trembled within hearing of his voice. I know I did wrong. No one can feel it more sensibly than I do. The painful and humiliating memory will haunt me to my dying day. Still, in looking back, calmly, on the events of my life, I feel that the slave woman ought not to be judged by the same standard as others.
This explanation—careful, diplomatic, sometimes flat-out self-abasing, but ultimately unapologetic—was what made it to the book. Because she did tell the truth. Eventually, somehow, she did make herself revisit that trauma, and share it. She changed all the names, including her own; there’s no evidence that she feared capture (a white friend had “bought” her from Norcom eventually, essentially paying him off to leave her alone, a concession to slavery’s legality that Jacobs found immensely painful and humiliating) but she did make that one self-protective dodge. And no one would listen, even then.
She first spoke to Harriet Beecher Stowe, to see if she would consider serving as a ghostwriter; Stowe wrote to Jacobs’s white employer to “verify” her account of sexual harassment and exploitation, seemingly neither knowing nor caring that Jacobs considered this to be sensitive information, and had ne
ver disclosed it to her boss. Jacobs wrote the book herself, without a ghostwriter, and publishers told her it would not be salable without the endorsement of a major author like Harriet Beecher Stowe. She got recognized activist Lydia Maria Child to edit it (Child would say “I don’t think I changed fifty words in the whole volume”) and, when they’d sold it to a publisher, the publisher went out of business before printing it. She used her own money to buy back the printing plates, paid a Boston house to print it, and sold the fucking thing by hand—the woman who’d been physically incapable of talking about her trauma, selling an account of it to people who had to look her in the face before buying—and then the Civil War began, and there was something else to talk about.
Incidents went out of print. Harriet disappeared. She wrote articles, she worked in activist circles, she worked in refugee camps, she ran a school for freed slaves. She identified herself, publicly, as the “Linda” of Incidents. She knew Frederick Douglass. She knew Elizabeth Cady Stanton, whose racism eventually drove her out of the feminist movement. Still, her most prominent mention in the history of nineteenth-century literature or activism was a half-sentence from Stanton, using the wrong name and referring to her in the same breath as a fictional character: “The brave deeds of Margaret Garner, Linda Brent and Mrs. Stowe’s Eliza.”
So she became Linda. And she became unreal. She became Lydia Maria Child’s melodramatic invention. For all the silence she’d fought through, for all the shame and lack of confidence she’d found a way to work around, it ultimately didn’t matter: Silence was imposed on her by the world. And then, in the 1970s, scholar Jean Fagan Yellin got curious about Incidents. She looked into the archive of an activist quoted in the book, Amy Post. Suddenly, into the world came the letters of a woman who did not think she could write. Long, lyrical sentences, a voice you could recognize right away. Suddenly, where there had been only fiction, there was Harriet Jacobs.
