Harriet Ann Jacobs Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Minrose C. Gwin

Critical Essay by Minrose C. Gwin

SOURCE: "Green-Eyed Monsters of the Slavocracy: Jealous Mistresses in Two Slave Narratives," in Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, edited by Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers, Indiana University Press, 1985, pp. 39-52.

In the following essay, Gwin examines the way in which the stereotypes and relationships of white and black women within the "slavocracy" of the South inform Jacobs's work. Gwin also demonstrates how Jacobs's narrative was influenced both by the conventions of the sentimental genre and by her white female audience, pointing out that the ideals of virtue and sensibility advanced by sentimental literature were incompatible with the experience of slave women.

Historians of the southern experience have observed volatile psychological and sociological connections between the white man's sexual exploitation of the slave woman and the evolution of the white woman's pedestal.¹ It is not the smallest irony of the slavocracy that its codes of conduct demanded...
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