Harriet Jacobs and the limits of the domestic novel

Jacobs wants marriage, a home, and a family too. That shared desire is the starting point for understanding why she writes her story in a form familiar to free women. Her readers may recognize those goals in themselves. The question is whether they will recognize what it means to pursue them under slavery.

The opening sentence gives us two things her autobiography does: it recounts her individual life and offers a view of the larger culture from someone denied access to it. Keep both in mind. We are not just learning what happened to one person; we are considering what her experience reveals about the values of the society around her. Her position as both a woman and an enslaved person matters to that perspective.

The sentimental domestic novel provides a familiar way to reach her intended readers. Its cherished values include marriage, personal identity, home, and family. Jacobs adopts its conventions because free women are its principal readers, and she hopes they will sympathize with her situation. The point is not that she wants entirely different things from them. She wants them to understand that enslaved women prize these things too.

Then the critics object: by fitting her story into this conventional form, has she shortchanged her own experiences? One critic thinks the purposes of the domestic novel overshadow those of the slave narrative. My first reaction is to defend her choice. If she wants these women to read and understand her story, a familiar form could help. Why assume that using their preferred kind of literature necessarily prevents her from communicating something new?

The author's defense goes further. The two genres create a tension that reveals something the conventional domestic story can miss. A reader familiar with that story expects love to encounter obstacles and eventually succeed in marriage. Jacobs's protagonist instead has to send her lover away to protect him from her jealous master. She has not decided that love is unimportant. Slavery forces a choice that breaks the expected romantic ending.

Freedom provides another example. She escapes to the north, which is a real achievement. But she does not reach the domestic novel's ideal of a stable home with her family. The price of freedom is separation from most of her family, including one of her children. We cannot treat this as a simple happily-ever-after ending. What would normally count as success in the familiar genre does not account for the sacrifices she must make.

That is why the ending calls the narrative an “antidomestic novel.” The word might sound as if Jacobs is against marriage or family, but the next part of the sentence rules that out: she willingly embraces the genre’s aims (paragraph 2). What fails is the assumption that its usual priorities and expectations can simply be applied to an enslaved woman. Pursuing freedom and preserving family life can require choices her free readers have never had to make.

So the familiar form has not merely swallowed her distinctive experience. In the author's reading, it helps make the difference visible. Her readers recognize the values, then confront circumstances in which those values cannot be pursued in the usual way. Understanding Jacobs requires them to broaden their perspective beyond the conventional domestic story.