Analysis of the Works of Harriet Jacobs and Audre Lorde - Book Report/Review Example

"Black feminism is not white feminism in blackfaceDespite our recent economic gains, black women are still the lowest paid in the nation by sex and raceIf this society ascribes roles to Black men which they are not allowed to fulfill, is it the Black women who must bend and alter our lives to compensate, or is it the society that needs changing" (Audre Lorde1, 60-61) Harriet Jacobs (1813 - 1897) and Audre Lorde (1934 - 1932) were warriors in their own time - they struggled for meaning, freedom, and shape their own destiny. This has a whole different meaning in Harriet Jacobs world as she was born and bred in slavery, while Audre Lorde was born of immigrant Carribean parents in Harlem and struggled to establish an identity for her own. With Harriet it was a more fundamental struggle of freedom from slavery; whereas, Lorde's struggle was to set herself free as a woman. Harriet Jacobs, in her "Incidents in the Life of a Slave"2 (1861) delves with the sexual oppression and exploitation of black women and this was her main weapon in trying to win the battle of emancipation by appealing to middle-class morally stoic white women who would understand her plea. Her own struggle with her own sense of morality, her guilt and her confession becomes a part of the narrative as this becomes a true picture of her physical and psychological suffering. She depicts herself and all women under bondage as being exploited violently and being deprived of the cherished role that womanhood in America meant at that time - a pure girl, a god fearing devoted housewife and a nurturing mother. Slaves were denied every bit of that comfort and identity. However, Harriet Jacobs is writing about the perils and attractions of slave womanhood and how they are exposed to false conceptions and misadventures that pose a the greatest threat to a slave girl, like her, who are mistreated and exploited by her master, given false promises and beaten up. However her contention is not about these punishments and she states the problems she faced choosing the morally correct pathway as a woman who had limited choices coming her way - she chose whatever path she could to find her freedom - be it by being the mistress of a man or by self isolation in her grandmother's attic. She was fighting against a lot of prejudices of her time, being a slave women writer - not that the prejudices were less in the time of Lorde - her predicaments were reflective of the American society that were not really freed from racist and feminist tribulations. It was the same search for identity - in Lorde's case it was a search for aesthetic identity that was above the binaries of male and female gender equations. Jacobs book sought to digress and also destroy the White European discourse that identified blacks as biologically and socially as a very different species who had less inteligent quotient than a white man and it was all "scientifically" proven. The story of a black slave woman was there even more displaced - it was twice displaced. If Fredrick Douglass sought to write the politically displaced condition of the black man, then Jacobs rightfully exposed the vulnerabilities and deep seated myths that were working against a slave woman, which in turn made her acutely self-conscious when she narrated her own autobiography. As a woman writer she faced moral, political and social resistance, which was met by all women writers of that period. Therefore, the question rises was she threatening the traditional white male dominated literary tradition, being almost poorly read and illiterate herself She did not sought to write like other antislavery writers like Harriet Beecher Stowe with her sentimental and melodramatic tone, neither did she seek to make it a horror tale of moral justification where the heroine of her story is being violated and raped that would rouse moral fury - she is exposing the fine line where the slave girl or she is going through degradation sometimes even consenting to it without choice. Therefore, her novel is not about escape and finding a life of her own - she is politically motivated about the condition of all the slaves. Audre Lorde's work "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power" (1984), she talks about the woman's ambivalence with the use and mistrust of power as it is generally seen as a tool in man's hand. Thus her answer was in eros, or in the erotic, where the lesbian sexuality can not only overturn patriarchal power structures, but it can also overthrow such dominance by embracing nurturing each others' lives and warring against homophobia, the anti-erotic society, sexist and racist prejudices. Through all her work she questions whether heterosexuality as the means by which continual disempowerment of women takes place and how black women can better satisfy their own sexual and economic needs and not succumb to male privileges which perpetuates the power structures. Thus self-empowerment is the key to all of Lorde's writings, where the woman, she asserts, can only freed herself completely from all sorts of "phallogocentricism", only when she abandons old and standard definitions about herself that has been bestowed by society upon her. Thus, in The Black Unicorn (1978), she denies the existence of the signifying male-centered theories and conjures up on the Dahomean mythology and draws more on the female energy that brings Esu to life - the eternal son and not the father. Her black lesbian consciousness in poems like "Between Our Selves (1976), she exposes the history of betrayal by the blacks - she curses the black African who sold the woman pregnant with her grandmother and ultimately she uncovers the silence that is part of the history of colonialism and imperialism and this silence are the acts of betrayals perpetuated through generations. In Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982) Lorde she mainly deals with the complicated balance of racism, lesbianism and motherhood. Her own troubled relationship with her mother pervades through her work and gives it a peculiar strength and caustic tone. The segregation law highlighted through the ice-cream refusal scene in Washington D.C and the increased suspicion due to McCarthyism led to underpin the theme of racism prominently in her book. Her work of fiction called 'The Cancer Journals' (1980) she talks about her own experience with breast cancer. She deals with the problem of prosthesis and the loss of a breast. Her refusal to have a silicon breast implant was to deny her sole existence on the basis of looks in a society where the sole value of a woman resides on the very basis of how she looks. Lorde was part of several movements that reflected in her writing, like the Left, the civil rights movement, the Black Arts Movement, the gay rights movement and women movement. Lorde's works do not intermingle art and life even through the latter is used as a vehicle in writing her essays, fictions and poems - but ultimately Lorde resists the male-centric universal appeal of her art by making it into a resisting, deconstructive and feminist piece that arises from her sensibilities and from her experiences and speaks of the black women's experiences as a whole. The poet within her and what showed in her poetry was inextricably bound with the political activist within her and the erotic female lesbian sensibilities she upheld in her lifetime. She used her poetry to move society with the power or controversy it generated. Jacobs and Lorde are therefore similar in the way they make their own life a testimony or a confessional journey, which can at once rouse opposition, power struggle and questions about black woman's power in their own time. Both their work questions the terrible balance between life and art and how one can intermingle into the other so much so that it can drive the very forces of destroying social resistance against black women. If Jacobs is fighting white male forces, Lorde is talking about betrayal by her own race along with the simultaneous struggle against the white master and the black master. Both of them form the very important literary tradition of the black woman's discourse who were denied a voice and who have risen through generations and proclaiming their political rights, but also questioning the female identity under male-centered power structures and in contrast to the white feminist. They have carved their own literary history parallel to other mainstream forces that are still at work and that seek to drown their voice in the attic where Harriet sought to hide herself or the "closet" that Audre Lorde opened and stepped into the world of her own identity. Work Cited 1. Lorde, Audre and Clarke, Cheryl. Sister Outsider. Crossing Press, 2007. See section on sexism for more information. 2. Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself. (1861) ed. Jean Fagan Yellin (Cambridge, M.A: Harvard University Press, 1987). Read More