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Article: A Freudian reading of Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.(Critical Essay)
- Article from:
- The Southern Literary Journal
- Article date:
- September 22, 2005
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2005 University of North Carolina Press. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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The negro slaves of the South are the happiest, and, in some sense, the freest people in the world. The children and the aged and infirm work not at all, and yet have all the comforts and necessaries of life provided for them.
--George Fitzhugh, Cannibals All!, or Slaves Without Masters, 113
With her now famous lines informing her readers that she and other former slaves could have told a different tale about slavery, Harriet Jacobs referred explicitly to the master discourse on slavery in the nineteenth century. In their power to represent slavery as they wished it to be seen, slavocrats like George Fitzhugh demonstrated what Foucault pronounced, in ...