'The ghost in the machine': Text and subtext in the narratives of nineteenth-century African-American women writers

This study examines textual and subtextual signifyin(g) in slave narratives written by nineteenth-century African American women. Since the slave narrative was a popular form for African American self-narration in the nineteenth century, it has often been viewed as a genre whose "generic" format limits the discursive creativity of its authors. I argue, however, that rather than serving to restrict the author, the genre provided a means for the African American female to challenge the culturally constructed limitations of race and gender. By disrupting and coopting the dominant culture's definition of "true womanhood" within their narratives, the authors both condemn the equation of "woman" with "white woman" and simultaneously relocate themselves in positions of authority often situated outside traditionally acceptable cultural norms.;Although the slave narrative of Frederick Douglass, Narrative of a Life (1845), has earned canonical status in many American literature anthologies and literary critics have deemed his text the "classic" of the slave narrative genre, the majority of women's slave narratives have not yet been given the critical attention they deserve. The only female-authored narrative that has received critical acclaim is Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). The celebration of Jacobs' text as a "classic" female counterpart to Douglass' narrative unfortunately has worked to efface the complexity and diversity of the genre.;This project explores that complexity and diversity by first considering the necessary convergence of autobiography, feminist, and African American theories in order to define a critical methodology that creates a literary "space" within which to (re)read these long-ignored texts. Of central importance is the concept of textual and subtextual signifyin(g): we must recognize and learn to read the ways in which these narratives on a textual level conform to, but on a subtextual level subvert the dominant ideology. I then provide close textual analyses of the narratives of Old Elizabeth, Louisa Picquet, Mattie J. Jackson, Lucy A. Delaney, and Harriet Jacobs, focusing on the ways in which these texts attempt to engage with and influence the cultural forces that inform them.