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Here are some historical documents, including the runaway notice that was posted.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. 

Olaudah Equiano

One of the units I intend to include in EN 202 will be on life writing (or autobiography/memoir), and our anthology has several examples of the slave narrative.  One of these is Olaudah Equiano's.  (You may recognize his picture from Vol. D of our anthology.)

Equiano was a chief's son who was kidnapped into slavery around 1755 or so.  He fortunately was able to buy his freedom.  He then became an anti-slavery activist in Britain, and he wrote his autobiography, which not only was popular but also helped to spark the movement to abolish slavery in the British Empire and eventually elsewhere.  I wonder if Equiano ever met the poet Mary Robinson, for they were contemporaries, and she became active in the movement that he inspired.

For a little more information about Equiano, see these sites:

http://www.black-history-month.co.uk/articles/olaudah_equiano.html

http://www.brycchancarey.com/equiano/index.htm

The second site includes excerpts from Equiano's Interesting Narrative. 

Below is a roster of other British abolitionists:

http://www.brycchancarey.com/abolition/index.htm

Equiano was not the first former slave who wrote his life story:

http://www.brycchancarey.com/cugoano/index.htm

Below is a timeline of events connected with slavery:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/africa/features/storyofafrica/9generic3.shtml

For more information on African history, see these sites:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/africa/features/storyofafrica/index_section10.shtml

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/africa/features/storyofafrica/10chapter2.shtml

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/africa/features/storyofafrica/index_section4.shtml

Entry on Sonnets pt. 2 (Aha...I knew that someday I'd teach EN 202)

 

Did you know that poets continued to write sonnets after Shakespeare? The woman pictured above, Mary Robinson, an actress who became a writer and feminist, helped revive this type of poetry in the late 18th century (late 1700s).

Here's a link to some of her sonnets from her book, Sappho and Phaon. Sappho was the Greek poet (or poetess) who is now considered one of the lesbian foremothers. In Robinson's day, Sappho was more noted for her relationship with the young man Phaon. Robinson, in fact, encouraged an identification between herself and Sappho.

http://etext.virginia.edu/britpo/sappho/sappho-poems.html

Here is a link to another more political sonnet, "To Liberty."

http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/robinson/other/rmd-liberty.html

Below is a sonnet dedicated to Robinson's daughter, Maria:

http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/robinson/1791/1791-daughter.html

Another late 18th century poet/novelist Charlotte Smith also worked in this form. Below is a sonnet inspired by Goethe's phenomenally successful novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther.

http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/dictionary/16smithM1.html

She was also known for writing about nature:

http://www.sonnets.org/smith.htm

Nineteenth-century poets wrote sonnets as well. You might recognize this one by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (who also wrote a novel in verse, Aurora Leigh):

http://www.amherst.edu/~rjyanco94/literature/elizabethbarrettbrowning/poems/sonnetsfromtheportuguese/howdoilovetheeletmecounttheways.html

Another poet was Christina Rossetti. Here is a link to her sonnet, "Sappho":

http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/crossetti/sapho.html

She also wrote a "Sonnet of Sonnets." The Great Poetess whom she refers to in her introduction is Barrett Browning. (By the way, you may recognize Christina Rossetti's last name because her brother translated Petrarch's sonnets into English. I think that I linked to some of his translations!)

http://celtic.benderweb.net/cr/cr90.html

Although male poets wrote sonnets at this time as well, like Rossetti, I wonder what Laura -- or Shakespeare's Dark Lady (whether or not she was Aemelia Lanyer) would have made of these later sonnets by women!

Questions on Heart of Darkness

 

Hello again,

I thought I'd post three new quotes of the day from Joseph Campbell, author of Hero with a Thousand Faces and scholar of world mythology:

"A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself. "

"I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive."

"What each must seek in his life never was on land or sea. It is something out of his own unique potentiality for experience, something that never has been and never could have been experienced by anyone else. "

How do these quotes from Campbell apply to Marlow and Kurtz?  How do these quotes apply to Conrad's character of the young Russian -- or to the character played by Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now?  Could Willard (Martin Sheen's character) be a hero?

And are we missing the point when we *don't* focus on Heart of Darkness as a quest with a hero--when we focus on Vietnam or the 19th century or colonialsm?  Alternately, are we missing the point when we don't talk about colonialism?  After all, Conrad's novella is set not only in the heart of darkness but also in the heart of the Belgian empire, and all of his characters (Marlow included) are shaped by their role in this empire.

Keep blogging & keep reading Heart of Darkness.  I think you'll find that part 1 is the hardest since it is so descriptive.

By the way, the picture above is from Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, a film inspired by Heart of Darkness.  The actor pictured above is Dennis Hopper.  Hopper plays a photojournalist based on the questing young Russian in Conrad's novel.  By the way, Hopper was also in the trail-blazing 1960s movie Easy Rider.  Now we know him as the fellow in the financial services ads.

Here's a link to a trailer for Apocalpyse Now Redux:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qnfbekbSa0

Dr. Szlyk

Imagine Orson Welles' Heart of Darkness

While I was looking through a blog for another literature course that I had taught, I found an entry on filmmaker Orson Welles' adaptation of Heart of Darkness, one of his many projects that never reached completion for various reasons (political, economic, psychological). 

Welles was working on his adaptation of Heart of Darkness in 1939.  This would have been about the time that Germany attacked Poland, Great Britain entered the war, and the United States was officially neutral.  Even though many Americans were beginning to realize what Hitler was "up to," many others (like Charles Lindbergh, for example) did not believe that we should be involved in Europe's war.  And, yes, Welles' Heart of Darkness appears to have been "political," portraying Kurtz as a charismatic fascist, and, as Clinton Heylin suggests, this film was never made because of its politics.

I guess I had better look a little further for an apolitical Heart of Darkness! 

Until then, here is a link to a site about another of Welles' projects: The Mercury Theater, a radio program whereby he adapted a number of novels, plays, and short stories for performance on the radio.  Conrad's novella was one of the works that Welles adapted.  Oddly enough, it is paired with a lighter story, "Life with Father."

http://www.mercurytheatre.info

For more information about Welles' Heart of Darkness, see this article from The Guardian:

http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,,1429851,00.html

Or this entry from a blog on Welles and his art:

http://www.wellesnet.com/?p=78

WELCOME TO EN 202 (Spring 202)

Watch this space for my blog for EN 202.