Local Theater -- The Gaming Table

Although Susanna Centlivre wrote The Basset Table...I mean...The Gaming Table long before our era begins in EN 230, I'd like to post a quick review of the performance my husband and I saw today at the Folger Theater in DC.

One of the advantages of living near DC is the ability to see performances of plays that are no longer performed as often.  The Folger Theater is a particularly suitable venue.  The two-story stage with its sweeping, wooden staircase represented an eighteenth-century London mansion in a way that a more typical stage might not.

This performance reminded me that Restoration comedy is fun to read--and watch.  The performance was fun and funny without being condescending or condescended to.  Neither did it creak.  The actors were skillful, and parts of the play were discreetly updated here and there.  Since we associate basset with dogs rather than with cards, the play's title became The Gaming Table.  After all, the play is about women who gamble on cards, love, and men.  The prologue and epilogue included references to Congress and women's roles today.

Like many Restoration comedies, The Gaming Table brings together several couples in a merry round of romance.  Centlivre gives us four to be exact.  First is Lady Reveller, a spunky widow, and her beau Worthy, who wants her to give up gambling.  Next is her cousin Lady Lucy, a serious young lady who prefers the playhouse to the gaming table, and Sir James Courtly, a not-so-serious man.  Another cousin, Valeria, would seem to prefer science to love...except that she is in love with the charming Ensign Lovely.  And then there are Mr. and Mrs. Sago, Pud and Kiki...except that she appears to love gaming and Sir James more than she loves her husband.  Other characters throw in complications.  Valeria's father intends for her to marry Captain Hearty who would rather not marry her.  And then there are Buckle and Alpiew, the servants of Worthy and Lady Reveller respectively.

But all's well in the end.

Here are links to a few reviews of The Gaming Table:

http://dctheatrescene.com/2012/02/02/the-gaming-table/

http://www.brightestyoungthings.com/articles/play-dc-the-gaming-table-the-folger-theatre.htm

http://www.washingtonpost.com/gog/performing-arts/the-gaming-table,1213012/critic-review.html

http://ellenandjim.wordpress.com/2012/01/27/susanna-centlivres-the-gaming-basset-table-at-the-folger/

For more information about the play itself, see The Folger Theater's website:

http://www.folger.edu/woSummary.cfm?woid=677

For more information about Susanna Centlivre who wrote The Basset Table in 1705, see these links:

http://www.folger.edu/template.cfm?cid=4035

http://www.juggernaut-theatre.org/first100years/centlivrebio.html

See these links for a review of an earlier revival of The Basset Table:

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=108015&sectioncode=26

UMBC has a podcast of a performance:

http://www.umbc.edu/theatre/z_bassettable.html

Chicago's Alcyone Festival in 2008 included a performance of another of Centlivre's plays:

http://halcyontheatre.org/boldstroke

The Busy Body was staged in NYC in 2010:

http://who-will-kiss-the-pig.blogspot.com/2010/08/saturday-evening-in-washington-heights.html

The blog entry above has many pictures!

The Wonder was also staged in NYC.  This appears to be a more modern version.

Map of Rowlandson's Removes

Link

Above is a link to a map of Mary Rowlandson's journey while she was a captive.  Zeynep found this map.  Below is a map of the Northeast (including New England)  in case you need it.  Hooray for Mapquest and Brewster Academy!

Bettina Judd's Reading 9/17 at MC

 I thought I'd blow off some of this blog's dust today and write about Bettina Judd's reading at MC.  It's been good to read poems from other times and places ("The Ballad of Mulan" and so on), but I've always liked going to readings to hear what other people are writing NOW.

Bettina Judd's poetry fits in nicely with last week's readings...Robert Hayden's "Middle Passage," Muriel Ruykeser's "Absolom," and even Seamus Heaney's "The Tollund Man" and "The Bog Queen."  Research is a significant part of Ms. Judd's writing process since many of her poems are about historical figures or individuals who are in the news.  The first few poems that she read were from a project that she is doing on gynecological experimentation and its impact on Black women's bodies.  Several were from the point of view of Joyce Heth, a slave whom P.T. Barnum had bought and exhibited as George Washington's nurse in 1835 and 1836.  Barnum claimed that she was 160; Ms. Heth was actually in her 70s.  (Below is a picture from a play, "The Exploitation of Joyce Heth," that was performed in New York.)

Another picture is one of Barnum's advertisements:

For more about Ms. Heth's story, see this link from George Mason University:

http://chnm.gmu.edu/courses/jackson/5pts/museum/heth.html

Bettina Judd also read poems about more contemporary women.  One was the girl, Latasha Harlins, who was shot in the back of the head by a Korean-American store owner in 1991.  The relatively light sentence that the store owner received was one of the causes of the L.A. riots in 1992.  Having grown up in L.A. and its suburbs, Ms. Judd recalled the impact of Harlins' murder.  She added that at the time she had seen tapes of the shooting on TV.  Another startling poem was about a woman who was tortured and killed by her ex-lover.  A third was about a woman who lay dying and ignored in a NYC emergency ward.

As you can see, Ms. Judd's work is about the violence of history, especially as it affects Black women.  These poems are not for everyone.  Curiously, she read her poems in a soft, quiet voice, swallowing her words.  However, these were not poems for shouting and declaiming.  I would be interested in hearing her read in a different venue...but I was glad to see how packed the room was.

Oh yes...and Ms. Judd talked about *her* approach to writing poetry.  She discussed the projects that she works on.  The poems about gynecological experimentation actually came out of a series of watercolors that she had been working on.  She tries to write a poem a day, not worrying about whether that poem is good or bad.  It is "just" a draft, and she will continue to work on it.  This appears to be an approach that she has taken from the Cave Canem Poets.  Here is a link to their site!  (Caution:  This link has been broken some of the time, so...beware!)

http://cavecanempoets.org/

Here are some links to poems by Bettina Judd.  The first is "A Conversation After Teeth." 

http://penzitspronouncedpants.blogspot.com/2008/08/guest-pnz-conversation-after-teeth.html

Another is her poem, "Sankofa: Gender Bend."

http://www.torchpoetry.org/Fall%2007/bettinajudd.htm

Here is her MySpace page where you may listen to her read some poems, including "Sankofa."

http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=199530233

And here is a link to her blog:

http://www.ablackgirl.com/wordpress/


Next up...the Poetry at Noon for World Peace Day on 9/22!

More on Mirabai

Link

As promised, here is the link to the entry on Mirabai and her work!  Her poems are also song lyrics, and she was a devotee of the Hindu god Krishna.

Ono no Komachi

Link

I thought I'd add a link to an entry on the ninth-century Japanese poet, Ono no Komachi.  She is a wonderful, concise, and passionate poet who continues to intrigue the Japanese.

In the 19th century, the woodblock printer Ando Hiroshige and others depicted her in their work.

More recently playwrights have also depicted her.  Below is a scene from Aoi/Komachi, a performance of two of Yukio Mishima's plays.

Eileen Chang & "Stale Mates"

 

I am going to have track down this book and/or movie, but in the meantime here is an entry on Chinese-American author Eileen Chang's work...which includes both "Stale Mates" and the novella "Lust, Caution."

To begin with, here is Ms. Chang's biography:

 http://www.hellomandarin.com/blog/2009/04/30/chinese-culture-eileen-changs-life-in-brief/

The author's literary executor has also written this essay that provides another perspective:

http://www.zonaeuropa.com/20050215_1.htm

This 2005 review of Ms. Chang's collected essays (in an English translation) provides more of a literary and cultural context for her work:

http://www.raintaxi.com/online/2005fall/chang.shtml

Irish writer John Self reviews the collection of fiction that contains "Lust, Caution."

http://theasylum.wordpress.com/2007/11/11/eileen-chang-lust-caution/

But about the film...

http://www.filminfocus.com/focus-movies/lust-caution/movie-splash.php


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/01/02/btchina102.xml

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/03/10/wlee110.xml

Another collection was Love in a Fallen City, which Haiyan Lee, a professor of Chinese literature at the University of Colorado, reviews here:

http://mclc.osu.edu/rc/pubs/reviews/lee.htm

Ms. Chang's first novel in English was The Rice-Sprout Song.  Charlie Dickinson reviews it here:

http://charlied.freeshell.org/RiceSproutSong

She also translated Chinese literature into English.  One novel was The Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai, which tells the story of nineteenth-century courtesans in that Chinese city.

http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-12268-9/the-singsong-girls-of-shanghai

In addition, she wrote screenplays.  Australia's Queensland Art Gallery recently screened both the films that she had written screenplays for and those that others have made from her novels, novellas, and short stories:

http://apt5.asiapacifictriennial.com/cinema/hong_kong,_shanghai_cinema_cities/eileen_chang

At least one of these films may not have aged well (or have been that good to begin with):

http://www.brns.com/pages4/drama263.html

However, Eileen Chang's work in different media is very much worth exploring. 

Midterm Study Guide for Spring 2008 -- part 1: Life Writing

This study guide will be the first of three or four that I will put up before our midterm on March 5 and 7.  To begin with, I will focus on the genre of life writing, a form of history that focuses on individuals' lives and a form of literature that provides evidence about individuals' real lives.  This genre is non-fiction, unlike plays, poems, short stories, or novels.  Documentary films that narrate a person's life story could be considered in this category, but life writing generally consists of autobiographies, memoirs, biographies, letters, and diaries.  Novels may take on the form of life writing, but this is simply a device to intrigue people or perhaps even to further mimesis (the imitation of reality).

Note that memoirs are about one part of one's life.  Autobiographies cover one's entire life (so far).

We have read two examples of life writing in class: Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative and Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.  Both works are slave narratives, autobiographies written by former slaves to show the cruelty of slavery and argue for its abolition.  The slave narrative often encourages its readers to recognize what they have in common with the author.  Accordingly, Harriet Jacobs depicts her loving family who sheltered her as a young child, and Olaudah Equiano reminds his readers that he is a Christian like they are.

On the other hand, the contexts of Equiano's and Jacobs' autobiographies differ from each other.  Equiano's autobiography was published in 1789, during the year the Bastille fell and at the beginning of the anti-slavery movement.  Equiano may have been born in Africa (in present-day Nigeria), and his masters included Africans as well as Englishmen.  His autobiography was exceedingly popular and helped make him a wealthy man.  (I wonder if Benjamin Franklin read it.)  Jacobs' autobiography was published in 1861, the year that the Civil War began and two years before the Emancipation Proclamation.  The book was published anonymously, and in it, Jacobs referred to herself as Linda Brent.  Her authorship was not conclusively proven until the 1980s, and some sites continue to list Lydia Maria Child as her co-author.

Here is more information about the Interesting Narrative and Incidents respectively.

About The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano
-- Our anthology contains only part of this work.  The entire narrative is available online at  http://history.hanover.edu/texts/equiano/equiano_contents.html
-- The excerpt that our anthology includes begins with young Equiano being brought on board an English slave ship.  He is frightened, never having seen whites before, and expects that these strange spirits are going to kill him. 
-- In the next section, Equiano (who is 12) arrives in England and sees snow for the first time.  He believes that it is salt until he tastes it.  At this point, he is owned by Captain Pascal who will cheat him of his money and belongings.  Equiano befriends several Englishmen: a teenager named Dick who teaches him to read and a barber who teaches him religion and his trade.
-- Equiano is sold to another sea captain who brings him to the West Indies.  Eventually, he is bought by Robert King, a wealthy Quaker, but works for Captain Farmer, who helps him buy his freedom in an excerpt included in our anthology. 
-- Once free, Equiano works his way to England where he will become an antislavery activist and write his autobiography.

About Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
-- Harriet Jacobs begins her autobiography with a depiction of her happy, sheltered childhood.  Even though she and her family are slaves, she does not realize it until after her mother dies and she must work for her mistress.  We meet Jacobs' father, a strong-minded carpenter, and her grandmother, an industrious businesswoman.  Jacobs' grandmother will be the "friend of her youth."
-- Jacobs' first mistress appears to take into consideration that she is a child, letting her play.  However, she also borrows money that Jacobs' grandmother has saved in order to buy her family's freedom.  When the first mistress dies, she does not free her slaves as had been expected, but gives them to her family.  At this point, Jacobs is a growing girl, nearly a teenager.
-- After the death of her first mistress, Jacobs is given to the daughter of Doctor Flint, a "hoary-headed miscreant."  Jacobs' grandmother is sold at auction to an elderly relative of the late mistress who then frees her.  When Jacobs' father dies suddenly, she is not allowed to mourn but is forced to string together garlands for a party at the Flints' house.  Jacobs notes that whites criticized her father for his independence and strong-mindedness.
-- Doctor Flint attempts to seduce Jacobs, alternately threatening her and lavishing her with "kindness."  His wife is very much aware of this and is jealous.  Jacobs is repulsed by Doctor Flint and criticizes his wife for her jealousy and cruelty.  Nevertheless, the doctor tries to get Jacobs to sleep in his room when she works as his daughter's nurse.  Instead, Mrs. Flint demands that Jacobs sleep in her room.  She tries to find out how successful her husband's attempts at seduction have been.  (The doctor has raped other slave women before.  He sells them and their children when he loses interest in the women.  A slave who spoke about his partner's relationship with the doctor is savagely beaten.)
-- Doctor Flint builds a house for Jacobs who then informs him that she cannot live in this house because she is pregnant with another man's child.  This man is an unmarried white neighbor of the Flint's.  He appears to treat Jacobs kindly, and she is proud of his interest in her.  Later she is ashamed of this liaison. 
-- However, Jacobs must tell her grandmother that she is pregnant.  At first, the grandmother throws her out of her house.  Eventually she shows that she understands her granddaughter's situation but does not forgive her.
-- Several years later, after the birth of two children (Benny and Ellen), Jacobs decides to escape.  While making Doctor Flint think that she has fled to the North, she hides in a crawl space at her grandmother's house.  Benny and Ellen, in the meantime, are bought by their father who will eventually marry.
-- After seven years, Jacobs heads up North where she still must flee from first Doctor Flint and then his heirs.  When Emily Flint and her ne'er do well husband come to New York City to track Jacobs down, she must flee with her daughter to Massachusetts, and her friend Mrs. Bruce must buy her despite Jacobs' disapproval.  Only then are Jacobs and her children free.  At the end of Incidents, Jacobs and her children return to live with Mrs. Bruce.

Keep in mind that The Interesting Narrative and Incidents are only one type of life writing (autobiography/slave narrative).  Beginning with St. Augustine, other writers wrote spiritual autobiographies.  In the 17th century, Puritan Lucy Hutchinson wrote a biography of her husband who was executed by Charles II on his return to power.  In the 18th century, scandalous autobiographies were popular, but Benjamin Franklin wrote his autobiography in order to provide a model for readers.  Autobiographies and memoirs are also means of self-expression.  Some life writing was never intended to be published; in the 1660s Samuel Pepys kept his diary in code!  One wonders whether Anne Frank would have wanted her diary to be published if she had lived.

The Rise of the Novel?

Above is an 18th-century illustration from Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, one of the novels that literary scholar Ian Watt considered among the origins of the genre. 

At some point, I am going to reread and review Watt's book, but for now here is a useful outline of histories of the novel from the University of Freiburg, a German university:

http://www.lit-arts.net/Behn/novel.htm

Here is a link to Ian Watt's obituary.  It will give you an idea of the importance he had in 20th century literary studies.

http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2000/january5/watt-15.html

UC Berkeley Professor of Spanish American and Caribbean Literatures and Cultures Richard Rosa made this argument against Watt's history of the novel:

http://www.sobresites.com/alexcastro/artigos/whatisanovel.htm

FYAmuse, here is a link to the Google Books version of Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders.  It is one of my favorite novels, and if I were editing our anthology of world literature, I would want to include an excerpt from it as well:

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id=RUxV6_7KX30C&dq=moll+flanders&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=JfV4uNzvvG&sig=gi2YvP4SNAT2WtJzPjsRk3XNXhw

I've linked elsewhere to Prof. Taormina's history of the novel, but I think that her page on 18th century novelists will give you an overview of that stage of the continuum.  Note that she is writing about the novel in English.

http://www.nvcc.edu/home/ataormina/novels/history/origins.htm

This page from the University of Missouri at Kansas City outlines the predecessors to the novel:

http://m.faculty.umkc.edu/mallinickd/romanticnovel/whipple/historya.html

Could Oroonoko be like the Italian and Spanish romances mentioned here?

I can't link to Catherine Gallagher's Nobody's Story here, but below is an essay by Ruth Nestvold about women and the history of the novel, beginning with Aphra Behn:

http://www.lit-arts.net/Behn/voice.htm

Life Writing

One genre that we'll be studying in EN 202 and that may seem new to you is life writing. Life writing includes autobiographies, biographies, journals, diaries, memoirs, oral histories, and even letters.  Although, at first glance, this genre seems to belong more to history or sociology, reading life history can shed light on the ways that literature shapes how we think and feel as well as influences on literature itself.  Some of the earliest novels like Aphra Behn's Oroonoko and Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders even represent themselves as memoirs or autobiographies.  (A memoir covers a part of one's life whereas an autobiography treats the whole of one's life.)  And some life writing like Harriet Jacobs'  Incidents and Samuel Pepys' Diary is not only fascinating but well-written and worth studying as literature.  For example, how does Harriet Jacobs tell her life story in such a way that it appeals to her audience?!  How does she depict herself, Dr. Flint, and her grandmother?  (Note that although Pepys did not want people to read his diary, both Incidents and the Interesting Narrative were written to be read *and* to change people's minds about slavery.)

Here are some links on the study of life writing (or life history):

http://www.sussex.ac.uk/clhr/

http://www.latrobe.edu.au/english/usba/usba.html#field

For those of us who know (a little) French, this site is invaluable as it is associated with Philippe Lejeune, one of the literary scholars to focus on autobiography:

http://www.autopacte.org/

This list from California's Center for Autobiographic Studies explains the difference between autobiography and memoir as well as outlining the different forms of autobiography.  The audience is someone wanting to write and perhaps even publish an autobiography or memoir, but I think that you'll find this list to be useful.

http://www.storyhelp.com/autotypes.html

By the way, Beatrice Wood wrote her autobiography, I Shock Myself, when she was in her early nineties.  Almost ten years later she actively participated in a documentary on herself and her work.  Ms. Wood was also one of the models for Rose in Titanic.  Here is a link to a site with examples of her artwork:

http://artscenecal.com/ArtistsFiles/WoodB/WoodBFile/BWood.html

However, life writing is not simply published or unpublished autobiographies and memoirs.  Here is a link to a project from several universities in Hawaii.  It exemplifies the work that scholars are doing in this area.

http://www.hawaii.edu/biograph/cbrbiohiariyoshi.html

There is also the Legacy Project, a collection of correspondence between service members and their loved ones.

http://www.warletters.com/index.html

To read some of these letters, go to this site:

http://www.gilderlehrman.org/collection/battlelines/index_good.html

This database includes women's letters and diaries from the 1600s to 1950:

http://www.alexanderstreet2.com/NWLDlive/

Here writers discuss their motivations for keeping journals--and preserving their life writing:

http://fraglit.com/impassio/k-essay.htm

http://fraglit.com/lwc/archives/38

A literary scholar writes about her experience reading the published diaries of 18th c. novelist Frances Burney D'Arblay:

http://www.jimandellen.org/burney/fanny.divergent.html

Lifewriting is also an important part of national identity:

http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/segan/CANLIN.HTM

Of course, we must not forget biography and collections of biographies.  Lucy Hutchinson's biography of her late husband continues to intrigue literary scholars:

http://faculty.goucher.edu/eng211/Lucy%20Hutchinson.htm

I've cited a number of works by women, but one of the most famous literary biographies is James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson...and earlier Johnson himself wrote a collection of literary biographies:
http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Johnson/Guide/lives.html

I really am only scratching the surface, but I think that adding life writing to EN 202 gives us a much fuller and richer idea of world literature.  If you know French, Spanish, or another language, I would be interested in seeing what you might find in the area of life writing!

Mariama Ba & So Long a Letter

Another woman speaking her mind is Ramatoulaye, the narrator of Mariama Ba's 1979 novel, So Long a Letter.  Ramatoulaye is a middle-aged mother of many children, a recent widow, and a highly educated woman, the first woman in her family to receive a Western education and prepare for a profession.  Several years earlier, her husband had abandoned her so that he could take a second, younger wife--a girl who was the same age as his oldest daughter, Deba.  Since Senegal accepted polygamy, Ramatoulaye was still married to her husband, a Westernized physician.  So Long a Letter is written in the form of a letter to Ramatoulaye's friend from college, written while the narrator mourns her husband and her friend travels from France to visit her.

A Muslim student at Wayne State University has written this book review, using her religious and family background (her husband is Nigerian) to explain the book to readers who do not have this background:

http://www.is.wayne.edu/mnissani/solongbk.htm

Another reviewer argues that reading Ramatoulaye's narrative as a letter is a mistake.  Instead, she is keeping a journal.

http://tukopamoja.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!8234535A7FECFC04!1267.entry

Since Mariama Ba wrote in French, many sites are in that language.  This Wikipedia entry seems to be her most extensive biography in English:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariama_Ba

I've found another biography:

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/mba.htm

Google has translated this interview from 1979 into English.  The translation is fairly rough, especially when it comes to pronouns, but I thought that you would be interested in seeing Ms. Ba's perspective on her life, her novel, and society. 

http://72.14.203.104/translate_c?hl=en&u=http://aflit.arts.uwa.edu.au/AMINABaLettre.html&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dmariama%2Bba%26start%3D10%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26channel%3Ds%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26sa%3DN%26pwst%3D1


Above is a picture of Dakar, the city where Ms. Ba was born.

For more information about Senegal, her country, see these sites:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/country_profiles/1064496.stm

http://www.senegal-tourism.com/

http://amadou.net/ar/history.html

http://amadou.net/ar/poets.html

Here are some links about other women writers from Africa.

http://www.usp.nus.edu.sg/post/africa/ghana/aidoo/aidoobio.html

http://www.usp.nus.edu.sg/post/africa/godona1.html#amadi

http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Emech.html

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/arts/features/womenwriters/emechetta_work.shtml

http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Head.html

http://www.thuto.org/english/bessiehead/eng453-03/index.html

Harriet Jacobs (Revised)

   In 1929, Virginia Woolf maintained, "All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn...for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds" (202).  Although Woolf did not have Harriet Jacobs in mind and Jacobs, in turn, did not have Aphra Behn in mind, one of these women might well have been the former slave who wrote Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl in the 1850s.

Of course, Jacobs used a pseudonym when she first published her life story as slavery was still legal and the Fugitive Slave Act was still in force.  Additionally,  as this teacher's guide suggests, some of her readers might have wondered whether she was the only author of her story, and readers today ask themselves how much her story draws on the "novel of seduction."  After all, Jacobs had set out to convince her audience to fight against slavery, and to do that, she had to consider them and their prejudices about women.

http://college.hmco.com/english/heath/syllabuild/iguide/jacobs.html

This site from PBS also addresses these issues more concisely:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4h2924.html

Historian Margaret Washington helps 21st century readers understand the concerns that Jacobs faced as a slave who could not marry in an era when sex outside of marriage stigmatized women:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4i3089.html


The University of Minnesota's VG/Voices from the Gaps has published a brief biography.  It touches on what Harriet Jacobs did after publishing her one and only book:
http://voices.cla.umn.edu/artistpages/jacobsHarriet.php


Or you may find this timeline to be more useful. 

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/JACOBS/hj-timeline.htm

Literary scholar Jean Fagin Yellin recently published a book-length biography of Jacobs.  (Prof. Yellin was the scholar who rediscovered Jacobs' autobiography and proved her authorship of it.)  Here is the NY Times review of the book-length biography:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9906E7DD1038F932A25754C0A9629C8B63

Here are some historical documents, including the runaway notice that was posted.  The second site links to a collection of Jacobs' correspondence.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4h1541.html

http://www.yale.edu/glc/harriet/docs.htm

Here is a summary of Incidents. Our anthology has not reprinted the entire work, as engaging and enthralling as it is!

http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/jacobs/summary.html

For a contemporary review of Incidents, go to this link:

http://www.yale.edu/glc/harriet/11.htm

Jacobs' brother John may have written his own life story as well.  In 2000, it was published with Incidents.

http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/jjacobs/summary.html

http://www.lib.unc.edu/instruct/docsouth_workshop/digital_narratives/excerpts/plantation.html

Historians consider slave narratives and evidence from slavery as sources in this issue of History Now:

http://www.historynow.org/12_2004/index.html

See this site for links to slave narratives transcribed in the 1930s:

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/slavery/resources/wpa.html

The New York Public Library's Schomburg Digital Collection contains a number of books by nineteenth-century African-American women.  Among them are Sojourner Truth's autobiography, Frances E.W. Harper's novel Iola Leroy, and several books of poetry. 

http://digilib.nypl.org/dynaweb/digs-t/@Generic__CollectionView;hf=0

While a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Texas, Melanie Ulrich put together this web site on feminism and the anti-slavery movement:

http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~ulrich/RHE309/abolition/

Aphra Behn's Oroonoko

We may read selections from Aphra Behn's Oroonoko alongside the excerpts from Olaudah Equiano's and possibly Harriet Jacobs' slave narratives.  Oroonoko, however, was a novel (that may or may not have been autobiographical) written about 100 years before Equiano's time and over 150 years before Jacobs'.  Some scholars argue that Oroonoko even predates the novel.  Others argue that the protagonist's royal blood was much more important to the author than his race was and that she was using this story to comment on the then-current political situation in England.  (In November of the year that Oroonoko was published, James II fled from England and was deposed.  The new king was his Protestant son-in-law, William of Orange.)

In this novel, Aphra Behn, a novelist/playwright/political pamphleteer *and* one of the first professional women writers in England, tells the story of her friendship with Oroonoko, an African of royal blood who is kidnapped into slavery and ultimately rebels against the Europeans.  Oroonoko is unsuccessful and is then executed.

The picture above is from Thomas Southerne's successful play that was based on Behn's novel.  In this play, Oroonoko's wife is depicted as a European.  Behn, however, depicted this woman as a dark-skinned African. 

For more background about Oroonoko, see these sites:

http://faculty.goucher.edu/eng211/aphra_behn_oroonoko.htm

http://www.wmich.edu/dialogues/texts/oroonoko.html

http://www.english.bham.ac.uk/staff/tom/website/work99/bp3/Behn/essay/essay1.html

http://www.litkicks.com/Oroonoko/

As you can see, it is controversial whether or not Oroonoko is a novel--and how autobiographical it was. 

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/11/aphra_behn_still_a_radical_exa.html

For more information about Behn and her career, see these sites:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/behn_aphra.shtml

http://www.lit-arts.net/Behn/chron-ab.htm

http://www.luminarium.org/eightlit/behn/behnbio.htm

For links to her works (poems, plays, & novels), see this site at Luminarium:

http://www.luminarium.org/eightlit/behn/behnbib.htm

I've enjoyed reading her play The Rover!  Hellena in this play is a feisty girl.