Child's introduction performs the function conventional to the slave narrative of establishing the reliability of the accompanying narrative and the narrator's veracity. What is unusual about her introduction, however, is the basis of her authenticating statement; she establishes her faith in Jacob's story upon the correctness and delicacy of her author's manner:
The author of the following autobiography is personally known to me, and her conversation and manners inspire me with confidence. During the last seventeen years, she has lived the greater part of the time with a distinguished family in New York, and has so deported herself as to be highly esteemed by them. This fact is sufficient, without further credentials of her character. I believe those who know her will not be disposed to doubt her veracity, though some incidents in her story are more romantic than fiction (xi).
This paragraph attempts to equate contradictory notions; Child implies not only that Jacobs is both truthful and a model of decorous behavior, but also that her propriety ensures her veracity. Child's assumption is troublesome, since ordinarily, decorousness connotes the opposite of candor--one equates propriety not with openness, but with concealment in the interest of taste.
Indeed, later in her introduction Child seems to recognize that an explicit political imperative may well be completely incompatible with bourgeois notions of propriety. While in the first paragraph she suggests that Jacob's manner guarantees her veracity, bu the last she has begun to ask if questions of delicacy have any place at all in discussions of human injustice. In the last paragraph, for example, she writes, "I am well aware that many will accuse me of indecorum for presenting these pages to the public." Here, rather than equating truthfulness with propriety, she acknowledges somewhat apologetically that candor about her chosen subject may well violate common rules of decorum. From this point, she proceeds tactfully but firmly to dismantle the usefulness of delicacy as a category where subjects of urgency are concerned. She remarks, for instance, that "the experiences of this intelligent and much-injured woman belong to a class which some call delicate subjects, and others indelicate." By pointing to the fact that one might identify Jacobs's story as either delicate or its opposite, she acknowledges the superfluity of this particular label.
In the third and fourth sentences of this paragraph, Child offers her most substantive critique of delicacy, for she suggests that it allows the reader an excuse for insensitivity and self-involvement. The third sentence reads as follows: "This peculiar phase of slavery has generally been kept veiled; but the public ought to be made acquainted with its monstrous features, and I willingly take the responsibility of presenting them with the veil withdrawn." Here, she invokes and reverses the traditional symbol of feminine modesty. A veil (read euphemism) is ordinarily understood to protect the wearer (read reader) from the ravages of a threatening world. Child suggests, however, that a veil (or euphemism) may also work the other way, to conceal the hideous countenance of truth from those who choose ignorance above discomfort.
In the fourth sentence, she pursues further the implication that considerations of decorum may well excuse the reader's self-involvement. She writes, "I do this for the sake of my sisters in bondage, who are suffering wrongs so foul, that our ears are too delicate to listen to them." The structure of this sentence is especially revealing, for it provides a figure for the narcissism of which she implicitly accuses the reader. A sentence that begins, as Child's does, "I do this for the sake of my sisters in bondage, who are suffering wrongs so foul that . . ." would ordinarily conclude with some reference to the "sisters" or wrongs they endure. We would thus expect the sentence to read something like, "I do this for the sake of my sisters in bondage, who are suffering wrongs so foul that they must soon take up arms against their master," or "that they no longer believe in a moral order." Instead, Child's sentence rather awkwardly imposes the reader in the precise grammatical location where the slave woman ought to be. This usurpation of linguistic space parallels the potential for narcissism of which Child suggests her reader is guilty.
Smith, Valerie. "Loopholes of Retreat: Architecture and Ideology in Harriet Jacob's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl," Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology.
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