| 英文摘要 |
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. |
