Gender and the Construction of Antebellum Slave Narratives

This chapter explores the intersections of race and gender in the construction of slave narratives written before the Civil War, with special attention to the Narrative of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845) and Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). A comparison of those works reveals the crucial role that the values of a white, northern, middle-class audience played in the development of slave narratives, which shared some common features, including an emphasis on family and a quest for literacy. Such narratives were also shaped by widely shared assumptions about the nature and proper role of women, an ideology known as the “Cult of True Womanhood.”