Voices: Silences and Sexuality in 19th-Century Women's Slave Narratives
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Date
2020-05
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The Ohio State University
Abstract
In my paper, I look at the connections between silences and sexuality in 19th-century women's slave narratives, focusing on Mary Prince's The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself and Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. The silences in these narratives were enforced by notions of chastity at the time, as well as the immediate danger posed against Prince and Jacobs. While sexual labor was very much a part of both British and American slavery, instances of sexual abuse in women's slave narratives were encoded in the language within women's slave narratives. It is these encoded scenes that I analyze in my senior thesis, examining the strategies used by both Prince and Jacobs to convey instances of sexual abuse experienced by themselves and other enslaved people. I aim to build a theory as to how these instances were communicated in each narrative, as well as look at similarities in how both texts approached the issue.
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Keywords
slave narratives, American slavery, Harriet Jacobs, Mary Prince, sexuality, sexual abuse