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Writing the Journey: June 1999

"Postcards from the Garret: Travel and Fugitivity in Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,"


Cheryl Williams
Department of English, University of Pennsylvania
cdwillia@english.upenn.edu

Most readings of Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl draw on the narrator's confinement in an enclosed garret to categorize her as a figure of stasis, immobilized as a slave and as a writer. My reading of Incidents, however, explores how Jacobs executes figurations of illicit mobility to demonstrate her resistance to the containment of slavery and narration. In this paper, I examine Jacobs's fugitive travels as instances of strategic liminality and I examine spaces of confinement where she hides as liminal spaces that actually afford her mobility. It is from her confined loophole that Jacobs launches her most powerful resistance to her master Dr. Flint and frustrates his desire to possess her. She transforms a potential place of confinement and stasis into a dynamic route to freedom, a space of personal mobility. Despite the dungeon-like atmosphere, Jacobs regards the garret as a site of freedom, an alternative to the spaces her master wishes to impose on her. "Fugitive travel" encapsulates Jacobs's journey out of bondage, for in claiming movement as a natural right, she contests the institutionalized codes of slave society that classify blacks as res se moventes -- "things that move." Fugitive mobility, therefore, not only exists in opposition to the social, political, and economic dictates of slave society, but also attests to the slave woman's conjunction of self-willed locomotion and personal liberty.


Cheryl Williams
Department of English,
University of Pennsylvania,
Philadelphia, PA 19104.
cdwillia@english.upenn.edu

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Updated May 23, 1999