Rewriting the American Self: Race, Gender, and Identity in the Autobiographies of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs

Slaves' (or more accurately, ex-slaves') autobiographies record the process in which the ex-slave writes his or her self into an existence recognized by dominant American society. The author portrays the way he or she overcomes the slaveholding society's continuing attempts to eradicate his or her identity; simultaneously, s/he rewrites that identity to fit the dominant culture's norms, despite the fact that these norms tend to conflict with his/her own experiences during and after slavery. These autobiographies thus provide dramatic models of the textual construction and development of "American" identity. In analyzing this construction, I will focus on the autobiographies of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, not because they are representative of African American men's and women's literary traditions, or of masculine and feminine models of identity formation, but because each constructs a slave narrative which is covertly concerned with the formation of identity, a process in which gender plays a significant role. (1) Slavery's constant attack upon the body and mind of the slave can result in a destructively circumscribed identity. I apply Elaine Scarry's theory of the effects of extreme bodily pain upon the victims of torture to Douglass's and Jacobs's texts as a way to understand the extent of the destruction of identity recounted by these ex-slaves in their narratives. As Scarry says, it is "only when the body is comfortable, when it has ceased to be an obsessive object of perception and concern, that consciousness develops other objects" (Scarry 39). One of those "other objects," according to Scarry, is language. Pain, she claims, destroys the victim's voice, his/her ability to express him or herself in words; in doing so, it also destroys "the contents of the consciousness," or the victim's sense of self. The slaves" narratives, then, are attempts to speak, to rebuild the self (Scarry 4, 6, 31). (2) Although she doesn't acknowledge it, Scarry's analysis relies on the model of psychological development developed by Freud and revised by Lacan. This model charts a progression from a moment before identity is developed and language has been mastered to the possession of both a unique identity and language. The mastery of language is central to the models of identity formation constructed by Scarry, Freud, Lacan, (3) and to the feminist revisions of Freud's and Lacan's models. The ability to utilize language, especially written language or literacy, is also portrayed by many ex-slaves as crucial to their quest for freedom, a freedom which in large part is the ability to allow the consciousness to develop without restriction. (4) Thus the written narrative, which in itself is a textual development of the ex-slave's consciousness, can be viewed in Lacanian terms as the author's attempts to enter into the Symbolic order, into Society: by (re-)writing him or herself, and thus placing that self into the tradition of American autobiography, s/he provides proof of "American" identity. I want to examine the norms which Douglass and Jacobs draw upon in their attempts to create textual or fictional identities for themselves. In doing so, I argue that nineteenth-century norms of masculine and feminine identity development mirror the psychoanalytic constructions of identity described by Freud, Lacan, and their revisionists. This view is shared by Hortense Spillers, who describes slavery as "one of the richest displays of the psychoanalytic dimensions of culture before the science of European psychoanalysis takes hold" (Spillers 77). Spillers explains the way that slavery disrupts the slave's ability to develop his/her identity in the fashion described by Lacan: "under the pressure of a patronymic, patrifocal, patrilineal, and patriarchal order," the slave child's "human and familial status" is disfigured. The very concept of family relations, considered by many to be "universal" in its application, "loses meaning" since "it can be invaded at any given and arbitrary moment by the property relations" (Spillers 74). …