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Haunting In American Slave Narratives

Haunting in American Slave Narratives

Both Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl depict enslaved women hidden in attics or garrets in pursuit of freedom. These gothic allusions of people haunting or watching over either the town or the plantation are meant to suggest, among other things, a secret minority witness to the life of the slave society.   Both stories portray their quests for autonomy in similar and also very different ways.   Using their stories of haunting, literal and figurative, Stowe and Jacobs are able to interrogate the ideals of domesticity, virtue, and the slave society as a whole.
Not many people in those days of slavery knew the truth of what was really going on.   And if they did, just pretended like they didn’t, spreading the false ideas that slaves were happy and well treated.   The “peephole” or “loophole”, through which the women of Stowe and Jacobs’ narratives are able to look out onto the town or the plantation, becomes their links to the outside world.   Although they have been completely cut off and isolated from society and almost everyone they love, they still find a way to stay connected.   Stowe imagines this link as a haunting, where they literally are able to control and manipulate the situation.   Jacobs on the other hand uses the peephole as a means of exposing the truth.   She “haunts” the town of Edenton, North Carolina in a very different way.   Linda Brent is able to look down upon the town and reveal all its secrets.   Jacobs and Stowe use their stories of the oppressed women, and their haunting link between confinement and truth, as another link to the public. Using it as means of getting their messages out there for the public to see.   Attempting to expose the truths, the truths about slavery that the public are so quick to shove under the rug and forget about.
The supernatural and gothic allusions throughout Stowe’s text play a big part in the resistance of...