哈莉特.雅各《黑奴少女生活記事》的藏匿策略：另類身體、空間、方位及主體的互動

The Tactics of Concealment in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: The Dynamics of Mobile Body, Space, Place and Subject

哈莉特.雅各在其《黑奴少女生活記事》作品，採用美國黑人奴隸騙子傳統自述手法，娓娓道來如何成功躲過主人的性侵害，並為自己及子女贏得合法自由。作者於書中匿名為琳達·布倫特，假扮水手，躲過奴隸緝捕，藏匿外祖母狹窄閣樓近乎七載。自囚期間以智取勝，透過北方友人，輾轉寄達親筆書信給主人，巧妙蒙騙，讓主人誤信她已逃至北方。雅各雖未能親手撫育子女，但透過閣樓中微小洞口，看到了孩子們的成長，聽到他們的聲音，也窺視行走街道上主人的言語舉止。故本論文旨在運用米歇爾·塞爾托對於空間/方位與策略/戰略的修辭理論，來探討雅各如何採用游擊藏匿策略，形成另類身體、空間、方位及主體之間互動，進而主動突擊主人，並重建其具女性自主之母愛。

The “repeated theme or topos” of “trickster figure,” as Henry Louis Gates asserts, is the tradition of African-American narratives derived from the African myth of “Esu-Elegbara and the Signifying Monkey” (The Signifying Monkey 8). Harriet Jacobs (1813-1897) follows and plays the conventional trickster role in her slave narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. She uses the pseudonymous name, Linda Brent, disguises herself as a sailor, and successfully moves from the legal institution/place of chattel slavery into the narrow space of her grandmother’s garret where she dwells secretly for nearly seven years and outwits her master, Mr. Flint, by writing letters to her master to cunningly deceive him into believing she has been in the North. Jacobs’s tactical concealment thus liberates herself from Flint’s sexual exploitation and furthers the attainment of her freedom and her children’s afterwards. She transforms the enclosed retreat into the resource of her empowered gendered subject to reconstruct her black womanhood with the alternative motherhood. Even after she flees/travels to the North, she still plays the trickster role by concealing her status of being a fugitive slave and disguising herself as a submissive housekeeper under the roof of proslavery master to secretly write her personal narrative at nights. In terms of Jacobs’s tactics of concealment and her transforming the confined space/body into an empowering subject, this paper aims to borrow Michel de Certeau’s concepts of space/place and tactics/strategies to thoroughly analyze how she rhetorically mobilizes her body to resist “the order established by the strong” with her “tactical ruses” (The Practice of Everyday Life 40). There are three major parts. Part I compares the repeated trope of trickster figures in African-American narrative conventions with Certeau’s rhetorical theory of space/place and tactics/ strategies. Part II investigates Jacobs’s secret movement into the coffin-like attic and her transforming the spatial loophole of retreat into the resource of her gendered autonomy. Part III examines how Jacob continues playing the trickster role to mobilize her body in the North and eventually gets her legal freedom. Overall, it surveys how Jacobs attains her empowered subject through her tactics of concealment and the dynamics of her mobile body, space and place.