What Do We Want From Harriet Wilson?

Abstract

The challenge (and promise) of epistemic identification within nineteenth-century American literature might be summed up in a single question about a single author: what do critics want from Harriet Wilson? If the voluminous scholarship produced over the past quarter-century on Wilson’s 1859 novel Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black is any indication, the answer, in short, is everything. Celebrated variously, and often simultaneously, as a “missing link” in the development of the African American literary tradition, as an early declaration of black feminist thought, as a polemic against racism, and as an ideological critique of American democracy, Wilson’s book faces enormous literary and cultural demands.¹ Yet such expectations are understandable. Because Our Nig is one of the most powerful early texts by a black female author, scholars committed to antiracist and feminist inquiry have justifiably claimed the book as a crucial representation of its era’s ideological and social concerns. Indeed, Wilson’s text appears to possess precisely what critics would most desire from a seminal archetype of minority discourse in the antebellum United States: it is smart, it is subversive, and it is very angry.