『우리의 검둥이』: 흑인여성소설의 시발점과 윌슨의 시그니파잉

Our Nig: the Beginning of Black Women Novel and Wilson’s Signifying

Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, the first novel by an African American woman, was originally published in 1859 and had been completely dismissed more than 12 decades from American literary community. The subject matters of the work, highly charged with political, economic, religious, and cultural controversies in the mid 19th-century America, compelled both the white abolitionist readers and the African-American literary community to ignore her‘politically incorrect’ text. As Wilson insinuates in her preface, the most poignant critique of Our Nig lies in the North which is just as brutally racist as the slaveholding South and in northern abolitionists who are not above racist beliefs and practices. What Wilson signifies in the very beginning of the history of black women writings is quite challenging and groundbreaking in many ways. In her struggle to find a new narrative for her own experience and to speak out her urgent political agendas, Wilson here not just experiments but critically moves beyond the assumptions of the established literary conventions, both white (women's domestic/sentimental novel) and black (the slave narrative). This paper examines through the story of a mulatto heroine Frado how the author urges the white racist America to face the horrid reality of the conditions of free blacks in the post-slavery North. Exposing another kind of slavery system of the North “imbued by southern principle” at the house of the Bellmont family, Wilson clearly criticizes white liberal abolitionists, their perpetration of the legacy of slavery and their political unwillingness and incapability for change. More importantly, tracing in the text how race issue interlocks with the issues of gender, economic oppression, and religion, this paper attempts to demonstrate that Wilson’s innovatively disruptive and politically explosive writing indeed signals a brilliant achievement in American literary history.