Giving testimony: Social reform and the politics of voice in four nineteenth-century American texts

In this study I provide a close textual analysis of Fanny Fern\u27s Ruth Hall: A Domestic Tale of the Present Time (1855), Harriet Jacobs\u27s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), Elizabeth Stuart Phelps\u27s The Silent Partner (1871) and Louisa May Alcott\u27s Work: A Story of Experience (1873). I place those texts within the social and political contexts of the mid-to-late nineteenth century--especially, the woman question and women\u27s rights movement, slavery and abolition, workers\u27 rights and industrialism, opportunities for employment and discussion of marriage reform. Particularly, I focus upon the way these four writers place their own narratives within the social and political debates of the time, the way they appropriate the rhetoric of social reformers, and especially with the ways they depict social problems and the possibilities of reform within their narratives. These writers, for whom the social issues of the day were intertwined with the debate about women\u27s roles, test the separation of spheres and notions of domesticity by presenting protagonists who gain personal and political power only when they make private experience a matter of public record. Also at issue in these texts is the way in which the author\u27s voice is mediated by audience concerns. Harriet Jacobs, for example, works with and against the expectations of her white, middle-class female readers as she describes her own life under slavery by both appealing to and criticizing the Christian morality of her feminist-abolitionist audience. At times, ambivalences of authorial voice in these texts replicate the ambivalent cultural expectations of the true versus new woman. I argue that access to public voice was a central concern of many social reformers of the mid-to-late nineteenth century, and in this study I examine the ways these authors imagine the possibilities of social reform by depicting that concern against private and public discourse