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Harriet Ann Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is unique as a book-length slave narrative by a woman. It stands out in its emphasis on the sexual exploitation of enslaved African American women, and its demand that they be judged by different standards than those used for free white women. Since the 1981 publication of Jean Fagan Yellin's research authenticating Jacobs' authorship of Incidents, 1 there has been increasing interest in this work as an early feminist document by a woman of color. 2 Numerous articles have addressed the role Lydia Maria Child played as editor; however, none thus far have examined the text's transmission from the standpoint of textual scholarship. Because Incidents is a unique historical document, the textual history of its transmission from Jacobs' manuscript to the 1861 print edition is of interest not only to textual scholars, but to students of history, letters and culture. The introduction and appendices to Yellin's 1987 edition of Incidents provides a foundation for such an inquiry; however, her emphasis was on verification of authorship. Beyond this, and the conjecture of literary critics and historians, little discussion of textual transmission has occurred. An examination based on what we know of the text's history applied through the lens of textual scholarship and nineteenth-century printing practices may assist us in understanding the relationship of Jacobs and Child to the text of Incidents and its publication. This paper is a brief examination of the text's transmission, with emphasis on the concept of authorial intention and the role of the text's transcribers and its editor, Lydia Maria Child. It takes into account the concerns of literary critics and history scholars of Jacobs' work while focusing on transmission history. Before discussing Incidents' text history, I think it necessary to address the need for authentication of Jacobs' authorship. In the case of this narrative, empirical evidence, external to the work itself, is required for formal textual scholarship to take place. The two primary reasons for this are: (1) Jacobs chose to use Linda Brent as a pseudonym and to mask the names of people mentioned in her narrative. While this is understandable for the period in which she wrote, the need to protect people being paramount, the use of pseudonymous names by an author of a single published book for which no manuscript exists requires a textual scholar to authenticate the work, whether the author was an ex-slave or not. That Jacobs's powerful use of language and literary conventions led critics to cast doubt upon whether she, as a former slave, was capable of such a work only adds cultural weight to the need for authentication. (2) Lydia Maria Child was known for works of fiction that treated interracial relationships. A well-known author and abolitionist, Child's very first novel, Hobomok, featured a Puritan white woman who was in love with two men, an Indian and a white man. As a narrative convention she used an "old worn-out manuscript" as a vehicle to mask her narration of the story, and to circumvent cultural imperatives against women writers. It is conceivable that Child might use the voice of an ex-slave to tell a story of sexual oppression. In her feminist analysis of the slave narrative genre, Joanne M. Braxton asserts that due to the male oriented definition of the slave narrative "the kinds of questions asked about the text prohibited scholars from seeing Incidents as part of the slave narrative genre and prevented them from looking for historical evidence to establish Jacobs' authorship" (Braxton, 382). Braxton states that "Marion Starling, a black woman, had argued for the authenticity of the Jacobs narrative as early as 1947, but male critics like Sterling Brown and Arna Bontemps contested that authorship" (382). It was not until the correspondence of Quaker Abolitionist Amy Post, Jacobs' close friend, was acquired by the University of Rochester Library and brought to the attention of Jean Fagan Yellin that Jacobs' authorship was fully authenticated and Child established as her editor. Unfortunately, no manuscript or transcription of Incidents exits. It was "published for the author" by a Boston printer in 1861, and re-issued in London in 1862 by W. Tweedie. The evidence we have concerning the writing and preparation of Incidents is in the correspondence of Jacobs and Child with each other and others. The following examination focuses on the work Jacobs and Child did in preparing the text for publication in 1861; there is no current evidence to show that any editorial or authorial alterations were made in the 1862 re-issue. For many scholars of literature and history, Jacobs' and Child's relationship to Incidents becomes a question of how much did Jacobs write and how much did Child write while editing? Yellin addressed this in the introduction to her 1987 edition; Bruce Mills wrote later specifically addressing the omitted final chapter (on John Brown). Nearly every critical analysis of Jacobs' work addresses some element of Child's influence. Authorial control is of major interest to critics who wish to understand "what really happened," and becomes emphasized in slave narratives because of the unusual relationship between the narrator and white editors/transcribers. In a critical, historical analysis of white editors of slave narratives, John Blassingame asserts that "[s]ince the antebellum narratives were frequently dictated to and written by whites, any study of such sources must begin with an assessment of the editors. An editor's education, religious beliefs, literary skill, attitudes toward slavery, and occupation all affected how he recorded the account of the slave's life" (Blassingame, 79). 3 While we must take into account that the editor of Incidents influenced alterations or made them herself, no scholarly editing practice will permit "recovery" of Jacobs' intentions in Incidents. The attempt to "recover" original or final authorial intention through the editing of eclectic texts has been a common practice among US editors for the past thirty years or more (Shillingsburg, 29). Clear, eclectic texts that propose to retain or restore how the author wished the work to be read are the texts that most of us have used as students, teachers, and critics. This is becoming less true as editors of scholarly editions perceive the socio-historical moment of publication as an important aspect in editorial and critical practices. However, most of us still make assumptions about the works we read based on concepts of authorial intention. Authorial intention is frequently defined as the author's "original" or "final" intention for the text, or, in other words, how the author wanted the text to be read.
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