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

As Gates has clearly documented, for over 100 years this audience was not only less then heartfelt, it was virtually nonexistent: Our Nig and its author have long been conspicuously absent from the pages of literary history. Contemporary criticism has noted the lack of response to Our Nig, its ultimate "failure" to be heard, claiming the text and its history as paradigmatic of a larger societal silence (silencing) of black women's lives and writings.

Such readings are correct in underscoring that, if any flaw exists, it is not in Our Nig itself. The flaw, I believe, exists in a cultural inability or unwillingness to listen, in the way we decide certain texts and certain topics are more deserving of a hearing than others. For ultimately, if Wilson's narrative was not heard, it was most certainly not because she did not speak. (1.) Here the operating, differentiating dichotomy is not homo- versus hetero-, but human versus bestial. (2.) Black women's bodies were valued for production (labor) and reproduction (as suppliers of labor), not just as sexual objects, a valuing Wilson discusses in representing Frado's servitude. Bu since Wilson resembles other writers in addressing Frado's "value" as both worker and mother, yet is unusually silent when it comes to representing her protagonist in explicitly sexual(ized) terms, have chosen to narrow my focus to the sexual construction of black women's bodies in order to tease out the significance of Wilson's silence--or, rather, her decision to speak the body elsewise. (3.) Of course, the sexual life of black women was by no means devoid of pain; in many cases, sex and pain were coextensive, as exemplified in accounts of rape and sex-related beatings. Although I am not trying to set up a binary in which sex and pain act as opposing terms, it intrigues me that t pain Frado suffers in Our Nig is not explicitly related to sexuality; instead, it seems she is tortu solely for the sadistic (but arguably still tinged with sexual) pleasure Mrs. Bellmont derives from act of torture. More importantly, we are only afforded glimpses of Frado's body when it is being tor (4.) In fact, Frado is a mulatto, the daughter of a black father and white mother. It is not her "wh blood," however, upon which Frado bases her appeals for better treatment; instead, she bases them on the premise that no human being, regardless of color, should be made to suffer what she has suffe (5.) See Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "Figures of Significance," in his The Signifying Monkey, for furthe discussion of "Signifyin(g)" as a frequently employed trope in Afro-American discourse. (6.) It is true that Frado does come near to a "conversion" at one point in the narrative, and that letters appended to the text suggest that Wilson herself was a "good Christian." However, religious conversion is not essential to Frado/Wilson's "recovery," nor is it even instrumental in her/their " Indeed, recovery and salvation are "signified" upon and secularized in Our Nig. (7.) Despite Wilson's attempt to 3peak of and through her body, however, even the friends who write letters on Wilson's behalf misread her mission and reinscribe it in sentimental, religious ter For instance, after reframing Our Nig as a sentimental novel and tragic romance, "Allida" pens a poem to offer Wilson solace. In this poem, God addresses Wilson, saying, "What though thy wounded bosom bleed, / Pierced by affliction's dart; / Do I not all thy sorrows heed, / And bear the on my heart?" Our Nig could be read as an emphatic "no" to Allida's poetic question. The narrative argues that the bleeding and wounded bosom cannot be healed by God's presence alone. Wilson demands help in this world, not just in the next. (8.) This is especially true of the kind of pain experienced and described by Wilson/Frado. (9.) While I have found Scarry's work on pain and language extremely helpful in my struggle to under the role of pain in Wilson's narrative, I did not feel I could fairly apply her analysis of torture to Our Nig directly, for The Body in Pain represents the torture of raceless male bodies as generic and generalizable to every body's experience under torture, regardless of race, class, gender, generational (etc.) differences across those bodies. (10.) Of course, it is her protagonist, Frado, that undergoes the torture in Our Nig, not Wilson her In one sense, inventing this surrogate may have helped distance Wilson from her own experience, perhaps making the telling of her own abuse somewhat easier; and yet, Our Nig is authored by "our nig," and the occasional slips from "she" to "I," "her" to "my" within the text sug that the narrative is more an autobiography than a fictional account. I will be using the term our n to refer to this blurred persona in what follows. (11.) Douglass, too, attains power through this act, but in regard to the incident just described, t power he attains feels much more like the power of the voyeur than does Wilson's. (12.) See Gates, "Figures of Signification," for a more detailed analysis of how the body figures in Ellison's and Wright's discourse.