Hostname: page-component-7479d7b7d-t6hkb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-10T11:27:55.082Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Economies of Identity: Harriet E. Wilson's Our Nig

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

John Ernest
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In Our Nig (1859), Harriet E. Wilson offered the story of her life for sale to save her son's life. In her appeal for patronage, however, Wilson looked not for charity but rather for an economic exchange by which the cultural value of her critique of the mid-nineteenth-century northern states could be acknowledged. The narrative defines this exchange as an entrance into a moral economy — a new system of social relations based not on an ideal of cooperation but on the recognition that conflict and distrust among and within culturally defined social groups are inevitable. In this way, Our Nig responds to proslavery forces that found ready arguments in the injustices of capitalism and calls attention to the ethical motivations behind economic relations. (JE)

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 109 , Issue 3 , May 1994 , pp. 424 - 438
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1994

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Andrews, William L To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1986.Google Scholar
Baker, Houston A. Jr Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bell, Bernard W The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1987.Google Scholar
Bender, Thomas, ed The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation. Berkeley: U of California P, 1992.Google Scholar
Bennett, David H “Women and the Nativist Movement.” “Remember the Ladies”: New Perspectives on Women in American History. Essays in Honor of Nelson Manfred Blake. Ed. George, Carol V. R. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1975. 71–89.Google Scholar
Brown, Gillian Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990.Google Scholar
Brown, William Wells Clotel; or, The President's Daughter. New York: Carol, 1989.Google Scholar
Carby, Hazel V Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.Google Scholar
Cartwright, Samuel A Essays, being inductions drawn from the Baconian philosophy proving the truth of the Bible and the justice and benevolence of the decree dooming Canaan to be a servant of servants…. Natchez, 1843.Google Scholar
Cooper, Anna Julia A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South. New York: Oxford UP, 1988.Google Scholar
Dearborn, Mary V Pocahantas's Daughters: Gender and Ethnicity in American Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 1986.Google Scholar
Delany, Martin R The Origin of Races and Color. 1879. Baltimore: Black Classic, 1991.Google Scholar
Doriani, Beth Maclay “Black Womanhood in Nineteenth-Century America: Subversion and Self-Construction in Two Women's Autobiographies.” American Quarterly 43 (1991): 199–222.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Douglass, Frederick My Bondage and My Freedom. New York: Dover, 1969.Google Scholar
Douglass, Frederick Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Written by Himself. Penguin Classics. New York: Penguin, 1986.Google Scholar
Fitzhugh, George Cannibals All! or, Slaves without Masters. Cambridge: Belknap-Harvard UP, 1960.Google Scholar
Fitzhugh, George Sociology for the South; or, The Failure of Free Society. Richmond, 1854.Google Scholar
Foner, Philip S Women and the American Labor Movement: From Colonial Times to the Eve of World War I. New York: Free, 1979.Google Scholar
Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth “My Statue, My Self: Autobiographical Writings of Afro-American Women.” Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology. Ed. Gates, Henry Louis Jr. New York: Meridian, 1990. 176–203.Google Scholar
Frederickson, George M The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914. New York: Harper, 1971.Google Scholar
Gara, Larry The Liberty Line: The Legend of the Underground Railroad. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1961.Google Scholar
Gardner, Eric “‘This Attempt of Their Sister’: Harriet Wilson's Our Nig from Printer to Readers.” New England Quarterly 66 (1993): 226–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gates, Henry Louis Jr Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.Google Scholar
Gates, Henry Louis Jr. Introduction. Wilson xi-lv.Google Scholar
Geertz, Clifford The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic, 1973.Google Scholar
Genovese, Eugene D The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation. New York: Random, 1969.Google Scholar
Holloway, Karla F. C “Economies of Space: Markets and Marketability in Our Nig and Iola Leroy.” The (Other) American Traditions: Nineteenth-Century Women Writers. Ed. Warren, Joyce W. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1993. 126–12.Google Scholar
Hughes, Henry “A Treatise on Sociology.” Slavery Defended: The Views of the Old South. Ed. McKitrick, Eric L. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice, 1963. 51–56.Google Scholar
Jacobs, Harriet Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. New York: Oxford UP, 1988.Google Scholar
Litwack, Leon F North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790–1860. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1961.Google Scholar
Lown, Judy Women and Industrialization: Gender and Work in the Nineteenth Century. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1990.Google Scholar
Nott, J. C., and Gliddon, Geo. R. Types of Mankind: or, Ethnological Researches, Based upon the Ancient Monuments, Paintings, Sculptures, and Crania of Races, and upon Their Natural, Geographical, Philological, and Biblical History…. Philadelphia, 1854.Google Scholar
“On the Moral and Political Effect of the Relation between the Caucasian Master and the African Slave.” Southern Literary Messenger June 1844:329–32.Google Scholar
Roediger, David R The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. London: Verso, 1991.Google Scholar
Ruffin, Edmund “The Political Economy of Slavery.” Slavery Defended: The Views of the Old South. Ed. McKitrick, Eric L. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice, 1963. 69–85.Google Scholar
Shore, Laurence Southern Capitalists: The Ideological Leadership of an Elite, 1832–1885. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1986.Google Scholar
Smith, W. L. G Life at the South; or, “Uncle Tom's Cabin” As It Is. Being Narratives, Scenes, and Incidents in the Real “Life of the Lowly.” Buffalo, 1852.Google Scholar
Stowe, Harriet Beecher Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly. Library of America. New York: Vintage, 1991.Google Scholar
Takaki, Ronald Iron Cages: Race and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford UP, 1990.Google Scholar
Tate, Claudia Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine's Text at the Turn of the Century. New York: Oxford UP, 1992.Google Scholar
Temperly, Howard “Capitalism, Slavery and Ideology.” Past and Present 75 (1977): 94–118.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tise, Larry E Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701–1840. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1987.Google Scholar
Turbin, Carole “Beyond Dichotomies: Interdependence in Mid-Nineteenth Century Working Class Families in the United States.” Gender and History 1 (1989): 293–308.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
White, Barbara A “Our Nig and the She-Devil: New Information about Harriet Wilson and the ‘Bellmont’ Family.” American Literature 65 (1993): 19–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilson, Harriet E Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, in a Two-Story White House, North. Showing That Slavery's Shadows Fall Even There. By “Our Nig. ” New York: Vintage, 1983.Google Scholar