| Popis: |
At a point near the center of Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Linda Brent reports that she has occupied her self-designated "Loophole of Retreat/' and sits nearly suffocating in the dark hideaway. She survives in her garret by crawling, crouching, or reclining, unable to stand up, relating that, "the air was stifling; the darkness total . . . there was no hole, no crack, through which I could peep/'1 The only palpable comfort upon first occupying the loophole comes in the form of having the good luck to find a gimlet, a sharp tool with which she can pierce the wall facing toward the direction of her children's voices. Hoping that she will be able to watch her children play through the small puncture-hole she makes, she instead is overcome with dread when the first person she sees in the street is Dr. Flint. Jacobs describes the deflated hopes of a slave mother, wishing from the space of her immurement to catch sight of her children but seeing instead her persecutor and would-be seducer. The scene proves perspicacious given that the small view offered her is caused by the tool's function of piercing. My purview here is to show how the gimlet punch marks the material and symbolic initiation of a specific act of writing that is, the act of writing that gears its purpose powerfully toward the reader. During her seven years in hiding, Linda, partly because of the perspective she creates by way of punching a gimlet hole, begins writing and strategizing her writing toward social and political aims. In other words, she begins to write for reasons of abolition and liberation for herself, her family, and her community. It has become a commonplace in the criticism of Jacobs's Incidents to assert that the text offers an account of the condition of slavery that counters or complements Frederick Douglass's Narrative.2 One major difference between the two writers is found in the way each develops the critically heralded scenes of learning to read and write. I concentrate here on scenes of writing: for Douglass, of course, the scene of writing takes on enormous import as he develops into a male adult attempting to gain his |
