Speaking of the body's pain: Harriet Wilson's 'Our Nig.' - Women's Culture Issue

African American Review, Fall, 1993 by Cynthia J. Davis

"I know That care has iron crowns for many brows; That Calvaries are everywhere, whereon Virtue is crucified, and nails and spears Draw guiltless blood, that sorrow sits and drinks At sweetest hearts, till all their life is dry; That gentle spirits on the rack of pain Grow faint or fierce, and pray and curse by turns; That hell's temptations, clad in heavenly guise And armed with might, lie evermore in wait Along life's path, giving assault to all."

--Holland (Epigraph to Our Nig)

With these images of blood, sorrow, suffering and crucifixion, Harriet Wilson introduces and frames Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black. Wilson's choice of this particular epigraph foregrounds a central preoccupation of Our Nig: pain. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr., concludes in in his introduction to the novel, ". . . Mrs. Wilson was able to gain control over her materials more readily than her fellow black novelists of that decade precisely by adhering closely to the painful details of suffering that were part of her experience" (xxiii; emphasis added). Over the course of Wilson's narrative, we watch in horror as Frado's once healthy body is tortured, maimed, beaten, and broken; before our eyes, Frado's body is transformed from her strongest asset to her greatest liability.

In Wilson's narrative it is pain, not sexuality, which explicitly determine Frado's physical experiences, which makes her body visible, and which marks this body as worthy of note. I say "not sexuality" because, at the time of Our Nig's writing not only was racial difference inscribed on the body through skin color, hair texture, and facial features; it was also policed and predicated upon an assumption of an essential sexual difference, especially between black and white women.(1) In order to make distinctions between persons who shared the same gender assignment, the dominant ideology, which defined the ideal white woman as pure and chaste, created the mythic "loose black woman" as her necessary correlate. Since the ideal white woman was virtually (and virtuously) bodiless, her black counterpart came to be defined as "body" and little else.(2) As Barbara Christian maintains, "If the southern lady was to be chaste, except for producing heirs, it would be necessary to have another woman who could become the object of men's sexual needs and desires" (190). This "necessary object" was the black woman.

In Essentially Speaking, Diana Fuss discusses the implications inherent in the sexualization of black bodies: "It is not merely that to be a |Negro'. . . is to possess a particular genetic or biological make-up; it is, rather, to be the biological" (75). She reminds us that, in Black Skin, White Masks, Franz Fanon refers to this mythicized black other as "the biological-sexual-sensual-genital-nigger" (qtd. in Fuss 75). While both Fuss and Fanon emphasize that this "nigger" is a fabrication of the powerful, they also recognize that its power derives from a widespread cultural belief in the essential "truth" of this construction.

In light of this preoccupation with black sexuality, Harriet Wilson's Our Nig becomes all the more conspicuous in that, while its protagonist, Frado, is largely defined by and through her body, it is explicitly pain, not sexuality, which delineates her body; pain, not sexuality, which threatens to ruin her; and pain, not sexuality, which eventually compels her to speak out on her own behalf.(3)

Further, in contrast to her silence about sexualization, Wilson vividly represents Frado as raced and vehemently condemns the racism that induces whites to abuse black bodies.(4) It is precisely because the racializing of bodies goes unchallenged--is posited as a given--in Our Nig that I focus on sexualizing discourses in what follows. It is my belief that many nineteenth-century black American writers contested the imposition of a sexualized narrative on their bodies, while never contesting racializing narratives; that is, they accepted that they were innately black but vehemently denied that they were inherently (overly) sexual. As I read these nineteenth-century narratives, the "truth" of a raced bodily narrative was by and large accepted; it is the sexualized narrative that produced a number of reverse discourses, seeking to challenge the simplified, monological representation of black bodies as truly and innately lascivious.

I believe that we can read Wilson's description of the black body in pain as one such challenge, although interestingly, it intervenes in the racist attempt to classify blacks as bestial not by taking on the sexualizing narrative but by testifying to a black subject's ability to feel pain and condemn torture. Of course, Wilson's narrative was not the only one to describe black women being beaten or experiencing pain. Slave narratives and antislavery tracts provide us with ample evidence of the cruel and unusual types of punishment blacks were made to suffer. In "American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses," Sarah M. Grimke recounts the sufferings of