In her Preface Mrs. Wilson explains away the text’s lacunae, its silences and reticences, as does the disembodied narrative voice in the novel’s final chapter. In the Preface, as I have suggested, Harriet Wilson argues that she has remained silent about those events in her life which, if depicted, could well result in an adverse reaction against Northern whites, and could thereby do harm to the anti-slavery movement. The novel’s penultimate paragraph repeats that claim, but with a difference. This difference consists of a direct appeal to the reader to grant the author “your sympathy,” rather than withholding it simply because more, critical details are not depicted in the text:
Still an invalid, she asks your sympathy, gentle reader. Refuse not, because some part of her history is unknown, save by the Omnipresent God. Enough has been unrolled to demand your sympathy and aid.
She has revealed quite enough, the narrator tells us, for her readers to be convinced of the author’s merit of their “sympathy and aid.” To ask of her even more would be to ask too much. While the scholar wishes for more details of the life to have been named in the novel, details ideally transpiring between 1850 and 1860 in the author’s life (Chapter XII of the text), even he must remain content to grant the author her plea.
What do we find in this ultimate chapter in the very space where these absent details of the author’s life “should” be? We read, instead, one of the novel’s few direct attacks upon white Northern racism:
She passed into the various towns of the State [New Hampshire] she lived in, then into Massachusetts. Watched by kidnappers, maltreated by professed abolitionists, who did n’t want slaves at the South, nor niggers in their own houses, North. Faugh! to lodge one; to eat with one; to admit one through the front door; to sit next one; awful!
It is clear that Harriet Wilson’s anxieties about offending her Northern readers were not the idle uneasiness most authors feel about their “ideal” constituencies.
It is equally clear that the author of Our Nig was a broadly read constituent of nineteenth-century American and English literature. The text’s epigraphs alone encourage speculation about the author’s experiences with books. True, the structure of the novel would suggest that Mrs. Wilson not only read a number of popular, sentimental American novels but also patterned her fiction largely within the received confines of that once popular form. Our Nig’s plot even repeats a few crucial events found in Mattie Griffiths’s novel, The Autobiography of a Female Slave, suggesting more than a passing acquaintance on H. E. Wilson’s part with Griffiths’s book. But Our Nig’s epigraphs, placed at the head of each of its twelve chapters and on its title page, reflect a certain eclecticism in Mrs. Wilson’s reading habits, perhaps an eclecticism that reflects contact with the arbitrary titles to be found in a small middle-class American library, the “library” that might consist of one shelf of titles, or perhaps two. Josiah Gilbert Holland, Thomas Moore, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Eliza Cook, Lord Byron, Martin Farquhar Tupper, Henry Kirke White, perhaps Charlotte Elliott, and Solomon, are among the authors whom Harriet Wilson felt comfortable enough to quote.
Each epigraph is well-chosen, and each illustrates the predominant sentiment of the following chapter. Most, above all else, appeal directly to the sympathies of the reader, for love betrayed, hope trampled, dreams frustrated, or desire unconsummated. The epigraph to Chapter II, taken from Shelley’s “Misery,” is representative of Mrs. Wilson’s tastes in poetry:
Misery! we have known each other,
Like a sister and a brother,
Living in the same lone home
Many years—we must live some
Hours or ages to come.
The range of citation of American and English authors found in Our Nig is much greater than that generally found in the slave narratives or in other black nineteenth-century novels. Occasionally, however, we encounter belabored erudition and echoing in Our Nig. The five epigraphs that we have not been able to identify could well have been composed by Mrs. Wilson herself, especially since they often read like pastiches of other authors, or like lines from common Protestant hymns. At the least, we know that Harriet Wilson read rather widely and eclectically, and that she preferred the pious, direct appeal to the subtle or the ambiguous.
It is a rewarding exercise to compare the plot structure of Our Nig to the “overplot” of nineteenth-century women’s fiction identified by Nina Baym in her study, Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820–1870. Baym’s overplot consists, in part, of the following characteristics:
1.The device of pairing heroines, or pairing a heroine and a villainess, is a central component of “some exemplary organizing principle in all this woman’s fiction.”
2.The heroine is initially “a poor and friendless child” who is either an orphan, or who “only thinks herself to be one, or has by necessity been separated from her parents for an indefinite time.”
3.The heroine, at the conclusion of her story, “is no longer an underdog.” Her “success in life [is] entirely a function of her own efforts and character.”
4.There are two kinds of heroine in this kind of novel, the flawless and the flawed.
5.The self is depicted to be “a social product, firmly and irrevocably embedded in a social construct that could destroy it but that also shaped it, constrained it, encouraged it, and ultimately fulfilled it.”
6.The heroine, as a child, is abused by those who have authority over her. In the realistic tradition of this kind of novel, a series of events represents “the daily wearing down of neglected and overworked orphans.” The heroine’s authority figures “exploit or neglect her,” rather than “love and nurture her.” The heroine’s principal challenge “is to endure until she comes of age and at the same time to grow so that when she comes of age she will be able to leave the unfriendly environment and succeed on her own.” The heroine must “strike a balance between total submission, . . . and an equally suicidal defiance.”
7.The heroine is abused by one of several characters who “are the administrators or owners of the space within which the child is legally constrained. Least guilty are the mothers; often it is the loss of the mother that initiates the heroine’s woes, and the memory of her mother that permits her to endure them. Most guilty are aunts, . . . with whom many orphaned heroines are sent to live.”
8.The heroine encounters people in her community who “support, advise, and befriend her,” precisely as she is abandoned by her own family. They comprise a surrogate family.
9.The heroine’s ultimate “domesticity” is not defined by her relations to her own children but to her surrogate family members; and, “although children may be necessary for a woman’s happiness, they are not necessary for her identity—nor is a husband.”
A concluding, often happy, marriage “represents the institutionalizing of such families, for the heroine’s new home includes not only her husband but all her other intimates as well.”
10.The plot of woman’s fiction has a tripartite structure: an unhappy childhood, “an interlude during which she must earn her own living,” and the conclusion.
Within this “interlude,” the heroine’s life is often influenced by strong, magnanimous, unmarried women, who mother her at a period when the heroine is unmarried and not being courted, and whose presence reinforces the idea that “relations with their own sex constituted the texture” of women’s lives primarily.
11.In encounters “with a man, economic considerations predominated for these women. The women authors created stories in which, ultimately, male control and the money economy are simultaneously terminated.”
12.Husbands and would-be lovers are less important to the heroine than “fathers, guardians, and brothers.” The heroine “is canny in her judgment of men, and generally immune to the appeal of a dissolute suitor. When she feels such an attraction, she resists it.”
13.The path to the Christian religion is unmediated by men, so that “faith is thus pried out of its patriarchal s
ocial setting.”
14.The “woman’s novel” contains “much explicit and implicit social commentary.” Principal targets of this commentary were “the predominance of marketplace values in every area of American life,” oppositions between the city and the country, and “the class divisions in American society.” Slavery and intemperance also are themes, but secondary themes.
15.The novelists “abhorred and feared poverty.”
Nina Baym’s extraordinarily perceptive overplot, as I have summarized it here, enables us to compare the plot of Our Nig with that of the tradition into which Harriet E. Wilson’s novel falls. Many of these fifteen elements of the overplot of woman’s fiction occur almost exactly in Our Nig, Frado, our heroine, most certainly is oppressed by her paired opposite, the evil Mrs. Bellmont. Also, Frado has been orphaned twice, once by the death of her loving, black father, then again as she is abandoned by her desperate, yet unsympathetic, white mother, who has now become the lover of her late husband’s friend and business partner.
Now left in the home of a white, lower middle-class family, the young mulatto child begins an extended period of harsh indenture. Her two torturers are the evil female head of the household, and her daughter, equally evil, but in miniature. Our Nig, too, shares the tripartite structure of other women’s novels, including an unhappy childhood, a seemingly endless period of indenture, and the conclusion. During her interlude of abuse, one white woman character, true to the received form, heavily influences Frado, comforts her, and becomes her only true confidant. Just as her torture is defined largely by two women, so, too, is her principal source of succor afforded by her relationship with this principal surrogate maternal figure, and a second, unnamed maternal figure who expands her consciousness with books.
Our Nig does indeed share the “woman’s novel’s” use of fictional forms to indict social injustice. As we might expect, racism, as visited upon the heroine by another woman whose relationship to the heroine is defined principally by an economic bond, is this novel’s central concern. Curiously enough, it is the complex interaction of race-and-class relationships, depicted in Frado’s relation to Mrs. Bellmont as inextricably intertwined, which Our Nig critiques for the first time in American fiction. By dividing her white characters, of the same family and the same class, into absolute categories of evil and good, Harriet E. Wilson was allowing for more complexity in her analysis of the nature of oppression than generally did, or perhaps could have, those novelists who wrote either to defend or to attack the institution of slavery.
In a sense, this narrative strategy can be read as a complex response to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Caroline E. Rush’s response, for example, was to attempt to enlist the new class of proslavery women writers to turn away from slavery as subject and begin to write about “white, wearied, wornout” women protagonists. Rush, prime propagandist for the peculiar institution, is a dubious source of proto-feminist urgings. Writing in her novel, North and South, or Slavery and Its Contrasts (1852), Rush first commands her readers to cease crying for Uncle Tom—“a hardy, strong and powerful Negro”—and start crying for pitiful, destitute children—“of the same color as yourself.” The freed blacks, of Philadelphia for example, Rush continues, lack any “elegant degree of refinement and cultivation,” thereby demonstrating implicitly that blacks are incapable of ‘elevation,’ enslaved or free. Eschew the profit motive, she concludes, and find a new subject:
Fine, profitable speculation may be made from negro fiction. Wrought up into touching pictures, they may, under the spell of genius, look like truth and have the semblance of reality, but where is the genius to paint the scenes that exist in our own cities?—to awaken a sympathy that shall give strength to the white, wearied, wornout daughters of toil?
It was to address this task, precisely seven years later, that Harriet E. Wilson published her novel, Our Nig, a novel written to demonstrate the suffering of a black, wearied, wornout daughter of toil. We see this clearly in the novel’s characterization of men and women.
All the men in Our Nig befriend the heroine, except for one; all the principal women in this novel victimize the heroine, except for one. The exceptional male is a ne’er-do-well black “fugitive slave,” who meets the heroine, seduces her, marries her, impregnates her, disappears, returns, disappears again, and succumbs to “Yellow Fever, in New Orleans,” all in the novel’s final six-page chapter, as if such matters deserved only an appendix. The great evil in this book is not love-betrayed, however, or the evils of the flesh; rather, it is poverty, both the desperation it inflicts as well as the evils it implicitly sanctions, which is Our Nig’s focus for social commentary. Even the six-page account of love, betrayal, deceit, and abandonment serves more to allow the text’s narrator to appeal directly to the reader to purchase this book and to explain its writing than it does to develop the plot.
This treatment of the protagonist’s marriage is an odd aspect of Our Nig, and is one of the crucial ways in which the plot structure of Our Nig diverges fundamentally from the overplot that Nina Baym so precisely defines as shared, repeated structures of white women’s fiction in the mid-nineteenth century. These significant discrepancies of plot development suggest that the author of Our Nig created a novel that partakes of the received structure of American women’s fiction, but often inverts that same structure, ironically enough, precisely at its most crucial points. Harriet E. Wilson used the plot structure of her contemporary white female novelists, yet abandoned that structure when it failed to satisfy the needs of her well-crafted tale. Mrs. Wilson, in other words, revised significantly the “white woman’s novel,” and thereby made the form her own. By this act of formal revision, she created the black woman’s novel, not merely because she was the first black woman to write a novel in English, but because she invented her own plot structure through which to narrate the saga of her orphaned mulatto heroine. In this important way, therefore, Harriet Wilson’s novel inaugurates the Afro-American literary tradition in a manner more fundamentally formal than did either William Wells Brown or Frank J. Webb, the two black Americans who published complete novels before her.
One major departure that Our Nig makes from the received structure of the fiction written by women is its conclusion. Our Nig’s tale ends ambiguously, if it ends at all; the third-person narrator asks her readers directly for “your sympathy, gentle reader” for, the narrator continues, Frado remains “still an invalid,” as she has remained since being abandoned by her mother. Although by the novel’s conclusion, the villain, Mrs. Bellmont, has suffered “an agony in death unspeakable,” and the good Aunt Abby has “entered heaven,” the protagonist’s status remains indeterminate, precisely because she has placed the conclusion of her “story,” the burden of closure, upon her readers, who must purchase her book if the author-protagonist is to become self-sufficient. This “ending” is an anomalous one, and reinforces the “autobiographical” nature of the novel if only because the protagonist, the author, and the novel’s narrator all merge explicitly into one voice to launch the text’s advertisement for itself, for its status as a “worthy” fiction that should be purchased.
Our Nig does not share the respect for mothers that Baym identifies to be an important aspect in her overplot. While Frado’s tale of sorrow and woe stems directly from her mother’s absence, as is true of much of the contemporaneous woman’s fiction, Mag Smith’s absence is self-willed, and irresponsible. Our Nig questions profoundly the innocence of the mother-daughter relationship not only in Mag Smith and her daughter, but in Mrs. Bellmont’s relation of identity with her evil daughter, both of whom conspire to make life miserable for their mulatto indentured servant. Only Aunt Abby relieves Our Nig’s searching depictions of its principal white women characters.
Our Nig does not end either with a happy marriage or with the institutional consolidation, through this marriage, of the forces of good—Frado’s surrogate family and the protagonist. On the contrary, Our Nig concludes with a marria
ge that ends in desertion and that forces the heroine to abandon her successful work as a milliner, and her first, and apparently liberating, encounters with books. The key members of the heroine’s surrogate family are dead at the novel’s conclusion, so her marriage to “Samuel” is an ironic, false resolution, one that exacerbates the heroine’s condition and leaves her homeless with a newborn child. The desertion of her husband opens, rather than ends, the text, preventing the sort of closure we expect in this genre of the sentimental novel. Indeed, one of the few exercises of free will and desire by the heroine ends ironically and tragically. Frado’s marriage to Samuel both obliterates the only independent, peaceful, relatively prosperous phase of her life, and serves as the incident that negates the novel’s closure and forces the author of Our Nig to write, then attempt to sell, her story.
The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader Page 9