The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 12 (2001)

Looking at the United States from Two
Dimensions of “Otherness”

Hiroko SATO

This paper will be divided into two seemingly disconnected parts. The
ﬁrst part concerns what I have been thinking about as an ofﬁcer of theJapanese Association for American Studies, as I have faced the increasing internationalization or globalization of American Studies, while thelatter half is connected with what I have been doing as a student ofAmerican literature and culture. Consequently, there will be an appallingly great gap in scale between the two parts, though I feel that they areconnected at some deep level.
It seems that an explanation of why I decided to give this title to mypaper is needed. I feel that many of you are thinking, “What an anachronistic title!” I do agree. When many Americanists in the United States
speak of “American Studies” today, they often use “American” to include not only the United States but also all of the New World, both
North and South America. Even when “American” is limited to theUnited States, the conditions of the country are described as “multiracial” and “multi-cultural.” Indeed, “Americas” are often spoken of, in
the plural. To conceive of the United States as a uniﬁed and homogeneous country seems to be outdated—and hence something to be rejected. However, looking at the country from the outside, as most of us are
doing, we cannot help regarding the country as a single unit, especially
Copyright © 2001 Hiroko Sato. All rights reserved. This work may be used, withthis notice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work may
be distributed, electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without permission from the author.
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because the country is so overwhelmingly powerful in the world politically and ﬁnancially as well as culturally. I myself cannot escape fromthe idea of one “America,” though I am well aware of the plurality ofsociety in the United States.
The latter half of the title is “two dimensions of ‘otherness’.” This indicates the position from which I have been observing the United States
for the past forty years or so. I am not an American, and that explains
half of what I mean by the title. I am also a woman, a member of the“other group” in that patriarchal society which is based on the male/
female dichotomy. This necessarily determines where I stand when looking at the United States and its culture, especially at women’s writingsof nineteenth-century America. However, I must admit that my insistence on being a woman may seem to be dated. The fall issue of American
Literature in 1998 carried a feature titled “No More Separate Spheres!”and critiques speciﬁcally the feminist criticism of nineteenth-century
women’s literature based on the concept of separate spheres for males
and females. The editor of the periodical, Cathy Davidson, insists in her
introductory article for the issue that “the binary version of nineteenthcentury American history is ultimately unsatisfactory.”1 With the emergence of cultural studies and post-colonial criticism, and the consequent
diversity of critical points of view, the paradigm of a binary division or
dichotomy is no longer universally regarded as appropriate in discussing
the literature of nineteenth-century America. If this phenomenon is indeed taking place in American Studies in the United States, we JapaneseAmericanists have to pay keen attention to it. At the same time, we haveto consider seriously how, as Japanese scholars with a different linguistic and cultural background, we should face and respond to this new
development—criticism of the male/female dichotomy—in American
Studies in the United States.
In May, 2000, an international conference was held in Bellagio, Italy.
The main purpose of the meeting was the establishment of the International American Studies Association, and its main topic was “American
Forms, Global Forums.” After having come to dominate in the ﬁelds of
economy and international politics, the idea of globalization has started
to overwhelm the academic world as well and American Studies is no
exception. It is, therefore, necessary for us to make clear where we stand.
Even if globalization is generally synonymous with Americanization or
the acceptance of American hegemony, the globalization of American

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7

Studies does not mean the unquestioning acceptance of the ideas,
theories and methodologies of American academe. The globalization orinternationalization of American Studies should involve observing andexamining America through the ﬁlters of different cultures; there should,
therefore, be exchanges of views, theories and methodologies amongscholars of the United States and scholars of other countries with different cultural backgrounds. Through this interaction, the existing paradigms applied to American society and its culture, which have been
mainly devised by American scholars, will inevitably be revised.
This type of interaction has already been going on between Americanists of the United States and those of Europe and South America. As
Rob Kroes, the Dutch scholar of American history, says in a recent issueof the Journal of American History, “there is always the sense that
America is a stray member of a large family, a descendant from Europe.
America belongs to the genus of Western civilization.”2 Among scholars who share linguistic and cultural roots—namely, those who belong
to the genus of Western civilization, smoother communication and easier understanding are possible.
However, the problems we face in Japan are more fundamental, andconsequently not that easy to solve. While the cultural ties between the
United States and European and South American countries can be compared to those within families, the relationships between the UnitedStates and Asian countries are far more complicated and diverse. The
idea of an Asia-Paciﬁc alliance, symbolized by the founding of APEC,
is mainly political. One of the main topics of the recent APEC conference on education was even the globalization of English, which seems
to me another form of colonization, though the importance of mastering
the English language is undeniable under the existing conditions. The
relationships between the United States and most Asian countries arevertical and not horizontal. It might be difﬁcult for scholars of the UnitedStates to be ﬂexible enough to accept the ideas offered by people withcompletely different cultural and linguistic backgrounds, especiallywhen there exist some political and economic tensions between the
United States and the countries concerned. Here I am speaking on thebasis of the difﬁculties we have to consider in developing the disciplineof American Studies in Japan in the face of the worldwide trend of theinternationalization or globalization of American Studies. As I am stepping down from the ofﬁce of the president of the JAAS today, let me say

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that I do hope the examination of America from the viewpoint ofotherness will make a fruitful contribution to the future development ofAmerican Studies.
The latter half of my talk concerns two dimensions of “otherness”—
being a woman and being a non-American, and how those two dimensions have affected me as a student of American literature. I think thatmy position, as a woman and as a non-American, has had a strong
inﬂuence on my choice of research subjects. This is not the occasion todescribe in detail my personal experiences as a woman in the academic
world, but my awareness of the double otherness in American society
has made me especially interested in the literature of women withhyphenated racial designations, such as African-American and AsianAmerican.
Today, I am going to discuss two writings by African-American
women of the nineteenth century. Through an examination of the differences between these works and those by Anglo-American women of
the same period, I hope I can at least modify the current discourse concerning American women’s writings in the nineteenth century. Indeed,
my position could be considered as doubling “two dimensions of ‘otherness’”: reading literary works written by American women of minority groups from the point of view of a non-American woman.
The works I would like to discuss are two autobiographies by AfricanAmerican women. One is Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave
Girl; Written by Herself (1861), and the other is Harriet Wilson’s Our
Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859). I have called these
two works autobiographies, but one characteristic of both these writings
is that it is difﬁcult to ﬁt them into one literary genre. Usually, Jacobs’
work is categorized as autobiography, while Wilson’s book is called ﬁction. However, in Jacobs’ narrative all the characters are called by ﬁctional names, while the ﬁrst three chapters of Wilson’s book are told bya ﬁrst-person narrator and, according to the research of such scholars as
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the incidents in the book coincide with Wilson’s
actual experiences. Also, at the end of the book Wilson adds a section
entitled “Testimony to the truth of her assertions,” and one of the testiﬁers in that section plainly calls the work “an Autobiography.” Gates,
who wrote an introduction to the 1983 edition of the book, calls it “a ﬁctional third-person autobiography.”3 The use of ﬁctional names andthird-person narration in these autobiographies may be taken as reﬂecting the peculiar situation facing African-American women of the time,LOOKING AT THE UNITED STATES FROM TWO DIMENSIONS

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the danger facing African-American women if they wrote about theirexperiences in the ﬁrst person and using real names.
Compare these two writings with such Anglo-American women’s
autobiographies as Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s, which Professor Mary
Kelley edited and introduced under the title of The Power of Her Sympathy in 1993. We will immediately notice that Anglo-American women’s concept of autobiography is essentially different from that of
African-American women. In an article titled “Some Deep Old Desk or
Capacious Hold-All,” Suzanne Juhasz deﬁnes a typical autobiography
by a man as a representation of “a life that has claims to the attention of
the public world,”4 namely, the assertion of individuality, while women’s autobiographies are normally similar to diaries, “centered in the private moment and the private feeling.”5 Also, Estelle Jelinek says in her
paper presented at the MLA convention in 1976 that it is characteristicof women’s autobiographies, not to be “chronological and progressive
but disconnected.”6 These points can be easily applied to Sedgwick’s
autobiography; it was written at the request of the husband of her favorite
niece for his daughter. It tells much of her feelings about her parents andfamily members—and not much about herself as a distinguished writerof the time. Her status as a public ﬁgure is almost completely buried
under her personal reminiscences of life in the Sedgwick family. Indeed,
her life is conceived as something inseparable from the family. She herself says in a letter that her life has been “so woven into the fabric of others that [she] seem[s] to have had no separate, individual existence.”7This concept of her own self ﬁts well in the prevailing paradigm of
Anglo-American women’s autobiographies.
Such is not the case, however, with these “autobiographies” ofAfrican-American women. Harriet Jacobs, who was well aware of thesense of values of the white middle-class women who were the potential readers of her book, tried to tell the story of her life following theaccepted rules of the time—in terms of family ties, loving mother-childrelationships, and feelings of piety and ﬁdelity. However, the story of
her life could not be conﬁned within such a framework. From the very
beginning, her autobiography is full of stories of families broken byslavery and of betrayal by white people; she writes of sexual threats by
the white master, of an illegal relationship with a white man in order tothwart the master’s persistent desire, (an illegal relationship which eventually made her the unmarried mother of two children), of hiding in her
grandmother’s attic for seven years in order to escape the master’s vile

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attempt to drag her into an infamous relationship, of her escape to theNorth, of her subsequent miserable and anxious life as a fugitive slave
in northern cities, and of how her freedom was bought by the kind andgenerous mistress of a family where she had been working as a maid.
Even this ﬁnal freedom was disappointing because it was bought bymoney, not given naturally as a human right. At the end of the book,
Jacobs describes her present condition as follows:. . . my story ends with freedom, not in the usual way, with marriage. . . . The
dream of my life is not yet realized. I do not sit with my children in a homeof my own. I still long for a hearthstone of my own, however humble. But
God so orders circumstances as to keep me with my friend Mrs. Bruce. Love,duty, gratitude, also bind me to her side.8

This passage clearly delineates the irony of her being bound to Mrs.
Bruce, who has paid money to buy Jacobs’ freedom. Also, the usual ending of the domestic novels of the time—marriage and a happy family,
closely united by love in a cozy home—remains out of reach for Jacobs’
broken family.
In telling her life story, Jacobs was especially sensitive about her relationship with a white man, Samuel Tredwell Sawyer, who was later elected to the national House of Representatives. It is not clear how she cameto know the man, except that he was a friend of her grandmother, who
was well-known and well-liked in Edenton, North Carolina, for her skills
in domestic services and for her respectable personality. There must havebeen a mutual affection between Jacobs and Sawyer, as is indicated bysuch words as “I felt grateful for his sympathy, and encouraged by hiskind words,” and “a more tender feeling crept into my heart.”9 However,
Jacobs’ words describing her relationship with him also indicate that she
was well aware of how the moral standards of the white, middle-classwomen of the time, did not allow them to approve of extramarital relationships under any circumstances, and that she was afraid of their criticism. Her fear was not groundless. Lydia Maria Child, a staunchabolitionist who helped in the publication of the narrative and who wrote
an introduction for it, was also afraid of being accused of indiscretion in
helping the publication of a book which contains such an incident.10 After
telling that she bore Sawyer two children, Jacobs appeals to the reader:
Pity me, and pardon me, O virtuous reader! You never knew what it is to bea slave, to be entirely unprotected by law or custom; to have the law reduce
you to the condition of a chattel, entirely subject to the will of another.11

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However, following that appeal, she says, “I feel that the slave woman
ought not to be judged by the same standard as others.”12 The use hereof the generalized expression “the slave woman” can be regarded as
Jacobs’ assertion that a different reality exists for African-American
women.
The story of Jacobs’ life is thus not only the story of one slave woman.
As Jacobs tells in the book, it is also the story of “the slave woman,” justas the book is an indictment of the slavery itself. In that sense, this autobiography is a narrative not only of an individual person but also of theexperiences of a whole ethnic group—African-American women—in the
United States just before the Civil War.
Jacobs’ autobiography is also signiﬁcant in another way. As late as
1974, John Blassingame, the African-American scholar and critic, questioned the authenticity of Jacobs’ sole authorship.13 Pointing out theorderliness of her narrative, he suspected that Lydia Maria Child, who(as we have seen) helped in the publication of the book and wrote an
introduction for it, must have had a great hand in the actual writing of
this narrative. Blassingame’s attitude shows that he strongly believes thatno African-American woman who had risen out of slavery could write
such good prose and such a coherent narrative. Only a few years later,
his suspicion was proved unfounded by the discovery of letters Jacobs
wrote just around the time of the publication of the book. However, thisincident can serve as an example of the double “otherness” with which
African-American women have been treated.
Compared to Jacobs’ life and her narrative, Harriet Wilson’s life andher book suffered much greater discrimination. Harriet Jacobs had, atleast, loving relationships with her grandmother, her uncles, and her children, and the help of abolitionist friends. Also, her white lover took partial responsibility for their children’s upbringing. Though born in New
Hampshire as a free black, presumably the child of a white mother anda free black father, Wilson seemed to have had a far more miserable life
than Jacobs.
After the death of her loving black father, Wilson was, at the age ofsix, deserted by her white mother, who called Wilson and her brother“black devils.” Wilson became a ward of the village and later an indentured servant in the household of a well-known abolitionist family. There
she suffered cruel treatment by the mistress of the house. The subtitle ofher “autobiography” is “Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, in a
Two-Story White House, North, Showing Slavery’s Shadows Fall Even

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There.” This subtitle indicates that, even in the northern states, the house(a metaphor for society) was divided into two parts—white and black—with the latter on the lower ﬂoor. Wilson reveals the hypocrisy of thepeople of the North, and she spares no words in expressing her hatred ofMrs. Bellmont, her abolitionist mistress, who has treated her as if shewere a slave. Wilson states her motives for writing this book in her preface:
Deserted by kindred, disabled by failing health, I am forced to some experiment which shall aid me in maintaining myself and child without extinguishing this feeble life. I would not from these motives even palliate slavery
at the South, by disclosures of its appurtenances North.14

It is clear that, like many white women writers of the time, such as Susan
Warner and Fanny Fern, Wilson wrote this book to earn money for her
own sustenance and that of her child. However, what Wilson wrote in
the book is quite different from what white women writers wrote, andthough she shares her major message with Jacobs—the indictment of thediscrimination against African-Americans—the tones and the developments of the two books are completely different. While Jacobs’ alter ego,
Linda Brent, is always ingenious in devising means of escape from her
harsh treatment by white people, Wilson’s Frado just stays conﬁned in
the ﬁrst ﬂoor of the white house, there suffering loneliness and misery.
Linda, a slave, travels from North Carolina to Philadelphia, then to New
York, Boston and even to England, while Frado, a free black, remains
in the small village of Milford, New Hampshire, until she lives out her
indenture.
Also, contrary to Jacobs, who writes her book with white women inmind as her readers, Wilson regards black males as the potential readersof her book. She says, “I sincerely appeal to my colored brethren universally for patronage, hoping they will not condemn this attempt of theirsister to be erudite, but rally around me as faithful supporters and defenders.”15 From these words, we can draw several inferences. There wasquite a high percentage of literacy among free black people in the North,so that a commercial success could be expected out of their readership.
On the other hand, just like white middle-class men, black men did not
like black women to be authors—or even to be literate. Facts about
Wilson’s life revealed by recent research show that her hope of being
helped and supported by black men was not fulﬁlled; three years after
the publication of the book and one year after the death of her only son,

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13

she was listed among “county paupers” in the township of Milford. And
there the ofﬁcial record of her life ends; nothing is known about her later
life.16
Through reading these African-American women’s “autobiographies,” we may call into question several accepted concepts about
autobiography, especially about woman’s autobiography. As I havementioned earlier, neither of these two works can be simply categorized
in terms of literary genre. Jacobs’ book, though told by a ﬁrst-person narrator, gives ﬁctional names to everyone in the book, including the narrator. Wilson’s narrative takes even a more elaborate form: the ﬁrst threechapters, which tell of Frado’s parents and of her life up to the time she
became a servant in a white family, are told by a ﬁrst-person narrator,
but then the narration switches to third-person in describing her crueltreatment by the abolitionist family and her miserable sufferings there.
This seeming disparity in literary form is obviously intended. In thecases of both autobiographies, the combination of fact and ﬁction is apolitical strategy to attract the interest of the readers, while thwarting any
threats from the white people concerned. Here, the boundary between
autobiography and ﬁction blurs. Usually, autobiography by men is considered as an expression of individuality, with a sense of satisfaction in
their accomplishments, while women’s and minorities’ autobiography
is deﬁned as “relational,” an expression of group identity with the senseof connectedness with others. However, an examination of these two
autobiographies shows that neither of them exactly ﬁts into the existing
paradigms. A new deﬁnition of the genre must be invented to include
such works as these two. We must recognize that only through this newform of autobiography could the deep persecution and suffering of black
women be truly brought to light.17
Autobiography is a comparatively new literary genre, only clearlydeﬁned and legitimized in literary history at the end of the eighteenth
century. Its basic form is the self-satisﬁed reminiscence of a successful
public ﬁgure, a typical example of which is the autobiography of BenjaminFranklin. However, the recent discoveries of such personal narratives byminority women, such as African-Americans, Native Americans andAsian-Americans in the United States not only bring out new realities of
the country, but also demand revisions of literary history and critical theory.
Here, I have come back to where I started, with a very minor example of a possible modiﬁcation in American literary history made through

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an inﬂuence of “other” point of view. We have been, still are, and willbe, looking at the United States and its society through the prisms of ourown experiences and backgrounds. We cannot escape the inﬂuence ofthe various impacts we have experienced in our encounters with America. Inevitably, we look at the United States subjectively. However, thesedeﬂected views might bring out so-far-undiscovered aspects of theUnited States.
I cannot predict what the future of the American Studies in Japan will
be like, but I sincerely do hope that American Studies, as a discipline oras an inter-discipline, will become more challenging through the interaction of various points of view. That would produce the true internationalization of American Studies.
NOTES
1
Cathy N. Davidson, “Preface: No More Separate Spheres!” American Literature 77,
no.3 (1998), 445.
2
Rob Kroes, “America and European Sense of History,” Journal of American
History, A Special Issue (December, 1999), 1135.
3
Harriet E. Wilson, Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, ed. Henry
Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), xxxvii.
4
Suzanne Juhasz, “Some Deep Old Desk of Capacious Hold-All: Form and Women’s
Autobiography,” College English, 39, no.6 (1978), 666.
5
Ibid.
6
This paper is later included in Estelle C. Jelinek, Women’s Autobiography: Essays
in Criticism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 17.
7Catharine Maria Sedgwick, The Power of Her Sympathy: The Autobiography and
Journal of Catharine Maria Sedgwick, ed. Mary Kelley (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1993), 3.
8
Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself, ed. Jean
Fagan Yellin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 202.
9
Ibid., 54–5.
10
Ibid., 3–4.
11
Ibid., 55.
12Ibid., 56.
13John Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South(New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 373.
14
Wilson, Our Nig, n.p.
15
Ibid.
16
Barbara A. White, “‘Our Nig’ and the She Devil: New Information about Harriet
Wilson and the ‘Bellmont’ Family,” American Literature, 65, no.1 (1993), 19–52.
17
For the further discussion of the point, see Hiroko Sato, “Autobiography of AfricanAmerican Women: Telling of One’s Self Behind a Mask,” Women’s Autobiography:
Mainly in the 19th Century Japan, Great Britain and the United States, Research
Monograph 18 (Tokyo: Center for Women’s Studies, Tokyo Woman’s Christian
University, 1998), 21–41.