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Black Girlish Departure and the “Semiotics of Theater” in Harriet Jacobs's Narrative; or, Lulu & Ellen: Four Opening Acts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2018

Allison S. Curseen
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Extract

Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was edited and introduced to its antebellum reading public in 1861 by the white abolitionist Lydia Marie Child. Nearly a century and a half later, another Lydia once again brings Jacobs's story to the public attention as Harriet Jacobs, a stage play by critically acclaimed African American playwright Lydia R. Diamond. Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre commissioned and debuted the play in 2008 as part of its youth program. Regarded as Diamond's best work, the play ends with Jacobs, recently liberated from her hiding space of seven years, declaring to the audience, “But it was above Grandmother's shed, in the cold and dark, in the heat and solitude, that I found my voice.” This aspirational claim to an unshackled black girl voice reverberates a twenty-first-century renewal of black women artists, scholars, and activists committed to recovering, proclaiming, and celebrating black girls. With subsequent back-to-back productions in 2010 by the Underground Railway Theater and Kansas City Repertory Theatre (KCRep), the play heralds the millennial energy of both the 2013 #blackgirlmagic social-media campaign and the 2014 formation of black girlhood studies (BGS), an academic field that prioritizes “a rigorous commitment to locating the voices of black girls,” and elucidating the “local” intersections of race, gender, and other areas in which “black girls’ agency comes into view.” It is precisely this energetic recovery of a black girl voice on the contemporary stage—a Harriet for the new millennial—that makes Harriet Jacobs so attractive. Describing her vision for the KCRep production, director Jessica Thebus stated: “Our task as I see it, today, is to tell the story with the clarity and energy of Harriet Jacobs's voice with her humor, with her intellect, and consciousness.” And promoting Wayne State's 2017 production, Dale Dorlin writes:

For director Billicia Charnelle Hines, Harriet Jacobs is not a slave play, but a prime example of a heroine's journey. “This is an adventure story,” says Hines, “about a heroine who, no matter what, was determined to be free. That's someone I look up to. … I want people to think of her as a hero.”

Hines's focus on the hero and adventure genre echoes the comments of Hallie Gordon, director of the original Steppenwolf production, which located the play within another genre of Western subject formation, the bildungsroman; for Gordon, “Harriet Jacobs is about the strength of this one girl who turns into a woman in front of our very eyes.” Critic Nancy Churnin, lauding the play's accessible rendering of a young female who finds in dismal confinement not only freedom but her voice, titled her 2016 review of the Dallas-based African American Repertory Theater's production, “A Slave Tale with Echoes of Anne Frank.” Resonant with Diamond's own desire for “Harriet Jacobs … to exist, theatrically, alongside Anne Frank and Joan of Arc,” Churnin's title presumably refers to The Diary of Anne Frank, Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett's 1955 stage adaptation of Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl (first performed at the Cort Theatre on Broadway). Still, considering that Jacobs lived well before Frank, the comparison is curious. Reflected in that curiousness is something of the irony of lauding a portrait of historical black girlhood that obscures the minor complexities of a “slave tale” or “slave play.” The comparison effectively fits the black girl into a role of heroic girl power shaped by a history of white girlhood, in which the slave girl, coming too early, can be imagined only anachronistically at best.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 60 , Issue 1 , January 2019 , pp. 91 - 121
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 2018 

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References

Endnotes

1. Diamond, Lydia R., Harriet Jacobs (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011), 70Google Scholar.

2. Field, Corinne T. et al. , “The History of Black Girlhood: Recent Innovations and Future Directions,” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 9.3 (2016): 383–401CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 384, doi:10.1353/hcy.2016.0067. For black feminist theory commitment to thinking with black girls, see Brown, Ruth Nicole, “Introduction” to Hear Our Truths: The Creative Potential of Black Girlhood (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 1–17Google Scholar.

3. “Harriet Jacobs—Director Jessica Thebus Talks about the Show,” YouTube video, 2:18, uploaded by Kansas City Repertory Theatre, 21 October 2010, https://youtu.be/fMB0vCk-iKc.

4. Dale Dorlin, “Harriet Jacobs,” http://daledorlin.com/portfolio/harriet-jacobs/, accessed 16 September 2018.

5. “Harriet Jacobs—Rehearsal—Steppenwolf Theatre,” YouTube video, 3:18, uploaded by Steppenwolf Theater Company, 8 February 2008, https://youtu.be/1ilWF-Fjrgk.

6. Nancy Churnin, “Harriet Jacobs: A Slave Tale with Echoes of Anne Frank,” Dallas News, 17 June 2016, www.dallasnews.com/news/news/2016/06/17/harriet-jacobs-a-slavery-tale-with-echoes-of-anne-frank, accessed 16 September 2018.

7. Diamond, xv.

8. Ibid., iii.

9. Victoria Segal, “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Review—A True Account that Reads as a Novel,” History Books, The Guardian, Saturday, 16 January 2016, www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/16/incidents-life-slave-girl-harriet-jacobs-true-account-reads-as-novel, accessed 3 October 2018.

10. Richards, Sandra, “Writing the Absent Potential: Drama, Performance, and the Canon of African-American Literature,” in Performativity and Performance, ed. Parker, Andrew and Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (New York: Routledge, 1995), 64–88Google Scholar, at 74.

11. Although scholars usually refer to Linda Brent as Brent, I refer to her and her daughter by their first names. I do so to make clear the parallel between Jacobs's autobiographical avatar Linda and Diamond's stage rendering, which refers to Jacobs by her first name in the script. Subsequently I refer to Doctor Flint and his son as the doctor or the master, and to each other character in Jacobs's narrative by his or her first name.

12. Jacobs, Harriet A., Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl [Written by Herself], ed. Child, Lydia Maria (1861), intro. Evers-Williams, Myrlie (New York: Signet Classics / Penguin Books, 2000), 114–15Google Scholar.

13. Ibid., 115.

14. Whispers of Cruel Wrongs: The Correspondence of Louisa Jacobs and Her Circle 1879–1911, ed. Maillard, Mary (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2017)Google Scholar.

15. For one out of numerous examples, consider how Warner, following Joanne Braxton, explicitly states: “The impetus for Brent's flight, as Braxton points out, is ‘the projection of her daughter's life under slavery.’” Warner, Anne Bradford, “Carnival Laughter: Resistance in Incidents,” in Harriet Jacobs and “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl”: New Critical Essays, ed. Garfield, Deborah M. and Zafar, Rafia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 216–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 224.

16. For examples of how scholars have regarded Ellen as a device with which Jacobs replays and revisions earlier incidents, particularly the scene of confessing to her grandmother, within a more empowering and affirmative light, see the critical essays in Garfield and Zafar. In that edited volume, Mary Titus, “‘The Poisonous System’: Social Ills, Bodily Ills, and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” 199–215, notes how Ellen allows Linda a “twinned confession” (211); and Sandra Gunning, “Reading and Redemption in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” 131–55, points out how through Ellen, Jacobs “exactly mirrors” except with an empowering difference the earlier difficulties of her girlhood (149). Similarly Deborah M. Garfield in “Earwitness: Female Abolitionism, Sexuality, and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” 100–30, contends that Jacobs styles Ellen as “[t]he shadow of her mother's former slave-self” (119). For Garfield, Ellen, as mirroring foil, functions as a cypher or “sanctified icon” through which Jacobs instructs her reader how to respond as what John Ernest, in his essay “Motherhood Beyond the Gate: Jacobs's Epistemic Challenge in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” 179–98, calls an “informed spectator” (189).

17. See O'Neil, Caitlin, “‘The Shape of Mystery’: The Visionary Resonance of Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” Journal of American Culture 41.1 (2018): 56–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar, doi:10.1111/jacc.12840; Vermillion, Mary, “Reembodying the Self: Representations of Rape in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” Biography 15.3 (1992), 243–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar, doi:10.1353/bio.2010.0387; Washington, Mary Helen, Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women 1860–1960 (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1987)Google Scholar; Sherman, Sarah Way, “Moral Experience in Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” NWSA Journal 2.2 (1990): 167–85Google Scholar, accessed 12 August 2018, www.jstor.org/stable/4316015; and Gunning. In a move that also reiterates Ellen as a device for narrative action, O'Neill writes, “It is precisely because of them that Jacobs does not immediately leave Edenton for the North. Jacobs is a mother, and her children's freedom is of paramount importance to her. But as she is also a woman, her children are significant in that they represent the author's first attempt at self-possession” (60); Vermillion argues that Jacobs garners “control by insisting upon a connection between her sexuality and autonomy: ‘I knew what I did, and I did it with deliberate calculation’” (247, quoting Jacobs [58]); Washington posits that “the clearest statement of women's anxiety about sexuality and the need for control over one's female body is made by Linda Brent when she tries to explain to her white female audience why she deliberately chose to bear two children outside of marriage” (xxiii–xxiv). Sherman contends, that through portraying Ellen's response to her confession, Jacobs claims a right to “womanly silence” (174). Similarly Gunning contends that through Ellen's response to the confession, Jacobs asserts that “she alone can claim the power of bodily interpretation” (149).

18. See Larson, Jennifer, “Renovating Domesticity in Ruth Hall, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Our Nig,” Women's Studies 38 (2009): 538–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar, doi:10.1080/00497870902952957. For Larson, Jacobs's children provide the valid backdrop against which female economic struggle and victory (however conscribed) can be rendered.

19. Wright, Nazera Sadiq, Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see esp. 85–92. See also essay, Wright's “Maria W. Stewart's ‘The First Stages of Life’: Black Girlhood in the Repository of Religion and Literature, and of Science and Art,” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S. 40.3 (2015): 150–75Google Scholar, doi:10.1093/melus/mlv034, esp. the section “Defining Black Girlhood: Youthful and Prematurely Knowing,” 156–61.

20. Field et al., 386; italics in original. “Trials of Childhood” is the title of chap. 5 in Jacobs's narrative.

21. For examples, see Foreman, P. Gabriele, “Who's Your Mama?: ‘White’ Mulatta Genealogies, Early Photography, and Anti-Passing Narratives of Slavery and Freedom,” American Literary History 14.3 (2002): 509–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar, doi:10.1093/alh/14.3.505; and Priest, Myisha, “Gospels According to Faith: Rewriting Black Girlhood through the Quilt,” Children's Literature Association Quarterly 39.4 (2014): 461–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar, doi:10.1353/chq.2014.0055. While positing Jacobs's narrative as a “primary site of revision and resistance” to the “tragic mulatto” trope and its emphasis on a patrilineal whiteness (512), Foreman does not address Jacobs's description of Ellen, who explicitly disowns her white father even as she herself can/does pass for white. Consider also Priest's discussion of Jacobs's use of her disembodied childhood innocence as a way of highlighting pain in regards to Jacobs's repeated portrayal of the physical suffering of both her children's, but particularly Ellen's (i.e., measles, eye infection, crying herself sick, having the master fall over her, undernourishment).

22. Field et al., 384.

23. For the dynamic nature of black girlhood, see Simmons, LaKisha Michelle, Crescent City Girls: The Lives of Young Black Women in Segregated New Orleans, Gender and American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 5CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For black girlhood as space and praxis, see Brown, “Introduction.”

24. For black feminist theory commitment to thinking with black girls, see Brown, “Introduction.”

25. See Simmons, esp. “disciplined imagination” as critical methodology (9–11) and chap. 6, “Make-Believe Land: Pleasure in Black Girls’ Lives.” See also Brown, esp. on “creative potential” (Loc 108/5243).

26. Jacobs, 132.

27. Ibid., 200.

28. Ibid., 88, 89.

29. See Hartman, Saidiya, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Spillers, Hortense, “Mama's Baby; Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” in Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 203–29Google Scholar; Moten, Fred, “Taste, Dissonance Flavor: Preface for a Solo by Miles Davis,” Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 17.2 (2007): 217–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar, doi: 10.1080/07407700701387317; and Randle, Gloria T., “Between the Rock and the Hard Place: Mediating Spaces in Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” African American Review 33.1 (1999): 43–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar, doi:10.2307/2901300. Referencing Nathaniel Mackey, Moten uses the phrase “fugitive turn” (219).

30. See Smith, Valerie, “Introduction,” Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), xxvii–xxxixGoogle Scholar. Smith explains how Jacobs negotiates the constraints of a white middle-class reading audience “in a manner similar to the way she negotiates her freedom.” She “manipulat[es] linguistic spaces—verbal equivalents analogous to the garret” (xxxiii). Quotes: “stealing away” (Hartman, 66); “between the lines” and “not-quite spaces” (Spillers, 223).

31. See Camp, Stephanie M. H., Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Madera, Judith, Black Atlas: Geography and Flow in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and McKittrick, Katherine, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006)Google Scholar. Camp, Madera, and McKittrick all draw upon Jacobs's narrative in order to articulate their respective ideas on “geography of containment,” black women's geographies; and black geography as process geography.

32. Quotes: “impossible possibilit[ies]” (Randle, 55); “breaks” and “breaking” (Moten, 218). Note that Moten also titles his 2003 book In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition.

33. Moten, 218.

34. Ibid., 219.

35. Jones, Edward P., The Known World (New York: Harper Collins, 2004)Google Scholar.

36. Moten, 218.

37. Ibid., 219; italics in original.

38. For examples of representations of cultural performance, see Foreman, esp. the discussion of racial-sexual passing in her response to Lauren Berlant's reading of the “tragic mulatta” in Incidents (509–12) and the comparison between Incidents and Louisa Piquet: The Octoroon (514, 518–20). For representations of theatrical performance, see Warner on carnival and Johnkannau (217–20).

39. For examples, see Whitsitt, Novian's examination of Jacobs's use of masking in Whitsitt, “Reading between the Lines: The Black Cultural Tradition of Masking in Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” Frontiers 31.1 (2010): 73–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar, doi:0.5250/fronjwomestud.31.1.73.

40. For examples, see Crawley, Ashon T. on Jacobs's attentiveness to “choreosonic” black performance in Incidents in Crawley, Blackpentacostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 153–7Google Scholar; and Tricomi, Albert's discussion of dialect in Jacobs's narrative in Tricomi, “Dialect and Identity in Harriet Jacobs's Autobiography and Other Slave Narratives,” Callaloo 29.2 (2006): 619–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar, doi:10.1353/cal.2006.0125.

41. For examples of innovative participant ethnography using theatre and performance in BGS, see Brown on the “creative potential of Black girlhood” (Loc 108/5243) and the importance of “a performative and creative methodology” (Loc 124/5243). See also Cox, Aimee Meredith, Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. chap. 5 regarding her work with the Move Experiment, as well as her introductory comments about “using performance as a form of community engagement and political commentary …” (37).

42. See Brown, Jayna, Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

43. See Simmons, chap. 6, “Make-Believe Land”; the photograph (fig. 6.2) is on 191.

44. Subsequent citations from this source are given parenthetically in the text.

45. Quoting Bigsby's “A View from East Anglia.”

46. Ibid., quoting Albert Murray's The Omni-Americans; italics in original.

47. Jacobs, 145.

48. Ibid.

49. The joke that readers have been let in on, only to become subject to, becomes more expansive when we understand this “as good as a comed[ic]” relief as a revision of popular antebellum images of black babies as so much clutter about the Southern landscape. For the slapstick comedy of the doctor tripping over Ellen echoes the comedy of George Aiken's (significantly revised) six-act 1858 stage adaptation (Robarts Library, University of Toronto [Internet Archive, 2007], accessed 22 August 2018, PDF: https://ia801408.us.archive.org/8/items/uncletomscabinor00aikeuoft/uncletomscabinor00aikeuoft.pdf) of Harriet Beecher Stowe's popular 1851–2 novel Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly (New York Public Library [Internet Archive, 2007] PDF: https://ia800300.us.archive.org/12/items/uncletomscabin00stow/uncletomscabin00stow.pdf, accessed 22 August 2018). In act 2, scene 1 of Aiken's stage play, St. Clare, the father of the iconic Little Eva and the master of the eponymous Uncle Tom and the theatrically popular character Topsy, refers to the copious black babies around the house as so much clutter about the feet:

St. C.: Come, cousin! [As he goes out.] Look out for the babies! If I step upon any body, let them mention it.

Oph.: Babies under foot! How shiftless! (Exeunt L. I E.) (Aiken, 15)

This bit of exchange is a comedic revision of the exchange Stowe penned between Augustin St. Clare and Ophelia when, in chap. 20, St. Clare challenges his cousin to see if her righteous New England principles will have any effect on the newest addition to his stock of human chattel: the infamously black and unruly black slave girl Topsy. Upon seeing Topsy, a very startled and reluctant Ophelia exclaims, “Now, Augustine, what upon earth is this for? … Your house is so full of these little plagues, now, that a body can't set down their foot without treading on ’em” (Stowe, 280). In Stowe's novel, Ophelia's exasperation expresses the gravity of the problem—the “plague”—of domestic disorder, idleness, sensual excess, and impropriety that the system of slavery engenders not only among black peoples, but in Southern households, and in the nation as a whole. Putting the comment in the mouth of the happy-go-lucky St. Clare rather than the serious-minded Ophelia, Aiken's theatrical revision divests the observation from its political critique in order to foreground the ridiculousness of the image. But this divestment also serves to emphasize how, for both Stowe and Aiken and their respective audiences, black babies appear as obstacles to the white master and mistress's gait. While the “as good as a comed[ic relief]” nature of Linda's narration connects it to Aiden's comedic revision, Linda's comedy reclaims the threat of those nameless and indistinct babies underfoot that so troubled Ophelia in Stowe's novel. In having Linda subsume Ellen's encounter with the doctor as essential comedic material in her own epistolary orchestration, Jacobs treats what is an incidental part of the master's landscape (whether one views it with humor or exasperation) as the right here fugitive material of a black and girlish minor resistance. Aiken, George, Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly—A Domestic Drama in Six Acts (1858), Robarts Library, University of Toronto (Internet Archive, 2007), 15Google Scholar, accessed 22 August 2018, PDF: https://ia801408.us.archive.org/8/items/uncletomscabinor00aikeuoft/uncletomscabinor00aikeuoft.pdf. Stowe, Harriet Beecher, Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly (1851), New York Public Library (Internet Archive, 2007), 280Google Scholar, PDF: https://ia800300.us.archive.org/12/items/uncletomscabin00stow/uncletomscabin00stow.pdf.

50. Jacobs, 96–7.

51. Kreiger, Georgia, “Playing Dead: Harriet Jacobs's Survival Strategy in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” African American Review 42.3–4 (2008): 607–21Google Scholar, at 613.

52. Warner, 224.

53. Sofer, Andrew, Dark Matter: Invisibility in Drama, Theater, and Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

54. Ibid., quotes on 3, 4, 5, respectively.

55. Ibid., 3.

56. Although Crawley does not discuss the sonic registers of Ellen's crying or the relation between the childish and the sonic in Jacobs's narrative, his reading of choreosonic performance in her work leads us very close. Crawley uses the incident of Brent hearing music turned into moaning a point of explaining of how Jacobs uses instances of overhearing and choreosonic deformation not just in this incident but throughout the narrative's attention to creaking floors and children's laughter. See esp. Crawley, 152–4.

57. See esp. Camp, chap. 2, “I Could Not Stay There: Women, Men, and Truancy.”

58. Chase, Alicia, “Learning to be Human: An Interview with William Pope.L,” Afterimage 33.4 (2006): 20–3Google Scholar, at 20, via Academic OneFile, accessed 22 August 2018, http://go.galegroup.com.proxy.bc.edu/ps/i.do?p=AONE&u=mlin_m_bostcoll&id=GALE\A143164776&v=2.1&it=r&sid=AONE&asid=b89c8121.

59. Ibid., 22.

60. Ibid.

61. Ibid., 23.