Harriet E. Wilson

Harriet E. Wilson (born 15 March, 1825 in Milford, New Hampshire, USA; died 28 June, 1900 in Quincy, Massachusetts, USA) was a spiritualist and novelist. Quotes Our Nig (1859 novel) In offering to the public the following pages, the writer confesses her inability to minister to the refined and cultivated, the pleasure supplied by abler pens. It is not for such these crude narrations appear. Deserted by kindred, disabled by failing health, I am forced to some experiment which shall aid me in maintaining myself and child without extinguishing this feeble life. I would not from these motives even palliate slavery at the South, by disclosures of its appurtenances North. My mistress was wholly imbued with southern principles. I do not pretend to divulge every transaction in my own life, which the unprejudiced would declare unfavorable in comparison with treatment of legal bondmen; I have purposely omitted what would most provoke shame in our good anti-slavery friends at home. (from Preface) Lonely Mag Smith! See her as she walks with downcast eyes and heavy heart. It was not always thus. She had a loving, trusting heart. Early deprived of parental guardianship, far removed from relatives, she was left to guide her tiny boat over life's surges alone and inexperienced. As she merged into womanhood, unprotected, uncherished, uncared for, there fell on her ear the music of love, awakening an intensity of emotion long dormant. It whispered of an elevation before unaspired to; of ease and plenty her simple heart had never dreamed of as hers. She knew the voice of her charmer, so ravishing, sounded far above her. It seemed like an angel's, alluring her upward and onward. She thought she could ascend to him and become an equal. She surrendered to him a priceless gem, which he proudly garnered as a trophy, with those of other victims, and left her to her fate. The world seemed full of hateful deceivers and crushing arrogance. (beginning of Chapter I) Pity and love know little severance. One attends the other. (Chapter I) love — that arbitrary and inexorable tyrant. (Chapter XII) Quotes about This discovery is important in terms of the image of the black woman before the Civil War and because it forces us to redefine the shape of the Afro-American literary tradition...We thought the tradition of writing fiction for publication was 90 years old, since we knew a black woman had published a novel in 1892, but now we've moved that back to 1859. To add 33 years to a tradition that young is a hell of a big leap backward, and it probably means there are other books we don't know about as well. Henry Louis Gates Jr., quoted in "An 1859 Black Literary Landmark is Uncovered" (The New York Times, 1982) Publications like The Liberator, a weekly newspaper published in Boston, reviewed virtually everything black people wrote, including books of much less importance than this one, as part of the ongoing attempt to prove the intellectual equality of blacks. But all the abolitionists chose to ignore Our Nig. There were two things you couldn't do if you were a foe of slavery. One was to write about racism in the North -and this book is all about racism in the North. Second, the man Alfrado marries is a black man pretending to be an escaped slave. There was a big lecture circuit of fugitive slaves at the time, and Southern slaveholders were always claiming that these people were fakes. So here Harriet Wilson says that one such black fugitive was indeed fake, that he married her, impregnated her and ran away. That was not designed to win Northern friends in the black community or in the white community. The two aspects of her audience would have been blacks in the North and white abolitionists, and she undercut her own strength with them by writing about these two subjects, which were both taboo. Henry Louis Gates Jr., quoted in "An 1859 Black Literary Landmark is Uncovered" (The New York Times, 1982) The decade of the 1850's was a golden age of women's fiction in America, he observed. White women were writing sentimental novels, and black men were writing autobiography in their slave narratives. Mrs. Wilson, a black woman, combined the two forms. Henry Louis Gates Jr., quoted in "An 1859 Black Literary Landmark is Uncovered" (The New York Times, 1982) [Wilson's] teaching us in a spiritual way about the paucity of substance in people who claim to see your suffering, but then they do absolutely nothing. And that is so American in so many ways. Alice Walker, quoted in "Early Novel Written By Free Black Woman Called Out Racism Among Abolitionists" (NPR, 2020) External links Author:Harriet E. Wilson 301 Category:1825 births Category:1900 deaths