SOURCE: "'Loopholes of Retreat': Architecture and Ideology in Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl," in Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Meridian, 1990, pp. 212-26.

In the following essay, Smith examines the implications of the literal and figurative "structures of confinement" in Incidents (such as the attic crawlspace in which Jacobs lived for seven years and which she describes as a "loophole of retreat"). Smith argues that such periods of "apparent enclosure" serve to empower Jacobs to manipulate her destiny.

In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, the account of her life as a slave and escape to freedom, Harriet Jacobs refers to the crawl space in which she concealed herself for seven years as a "loophole of retreat."¹ The phrase calls attention both to the closeness of her hiding place—three feet high, nine feet...