Harriet E. Wilson

For the Regency courtesan, see Harriette Wilson.

Harriet E. Wilson (March 15, 1825 – June 28, 1900) was an African-American novelist. She was the first African American to publish a novel on the North American continent. Her novel Our Nig, or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black was published anonymously in 1859 in Boston, Massachusetts, and was not widely known. The novel was discovered in 1982 by the scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who documented it as the first African-American novel published in the United States.

Born a free person of color (free Negro) in New Hampshire, Wilson was orphaned when young and bound until the age of 18 as an indentured servant. She struggled to make a living after that, marrying twice; her only son George died at the age of seven in the poor house, where she had placed him while trying to survive as a widow. She wrote one novel. Wilson later was associated with the Spiritualist church, was paid on the public lecture circuit for her lectures about her life, and worked as a housekeeper in a boarding house.

Competition for "first novel"

The scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. rediscovered Our Nig in 1982 and documented it as the first novel by an African American to be published in the United States. His discovery and the novel gained national attention,^[1] and it was reissued with an Introduction by Gates (London: Allison & Busby, 1984).^[2] and subsequently republished in several other editions.^[3]

In 2006, William L. Andrews, an English literature professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Mitch Kachun, a history professor at Western Michigan University, brought to light Julia C. Collins' The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride (1865), first published in serial form in The Christian Recorder, newspaper of the AME Church. Publishing it in book form in 2006, they maintained that The Curse of Caste should be considered the first "truly imagined" novel by an African American to be published in the U.S. They argued that Our Nig was more autobiography than fiction.^[4][5]

Gates responded that numerous other novels and other works of fiction of the period were in some part based on real-life events and were in that sense autobiographical, but they were still considered novels.^[4] Examples include Fanny Fern's Ruth Hall (1854), Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868–69), and Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette (1797).^[4]

The first known novel by an African American is William Wells Brown's Clotel; or, The President's Daughter (1853), published in the United Kingdom, where he was living at the time.^[4] The critic Sven Birkerts argued that the unfinished state of The Curse of Caste (Collins died before completing it) and its poor literary quality should disqualify it as the first building block of African-American literature. He contended the works by Wilson and Brown were more fully realized.^[5]

Eric Gardner thought that Our Nig did not receive critical acclaim from abolitionists when first published because it did not conform to the contemporary genre of slave narratives. He thinks the abolitionists may have refrained from promoting Our Nig because the novel recounts "slavery's shadow" in the North, where free blacks suffered as indentured servants and from racism. It fails to offer the promise of freedom, and it features a protagonist who is assertive toward a white woman.^[6]

In her article "Dwelling in the House of Oppression: The Spatial, Racial, and Textual Dynamics of Harriet Wilson's Our Nig," Lois Leveen argues that, although the novel is about a free black in the north, the "free black" is still oppressed. The "white house" of the novel represents, as Leveen puts it: "The model home for American society is built according to the spatial imperatives of slavery." Frado is a "free black", but she is treated as a lower-class person and is often abused as a slave would be. Leveen argues that Wilson was expressing her view that even the "free blacks" were not really free in a racist society.

Legacy and honors

• Since Henry Louis Gates, Jr's work in 1982, Harriet Wilson has been recognized as the first African American to publish a novel in the United States.
• The Harriet Wilson Project commissioned a statue of Wilson in 2006. Sculpted by Fern Cunningham, the statue is located in Milford, New Hampshire's Bicentennial Park.^[7]

See also

• African-American literature

References

Notes

Bibliography

• Shockley, Ann Allen, Afro-American Women Writers 1746-1933: An Anthology and Critical Guide, New Haven, Connecticut: Meridian Books, 1989. ISBN 0-452-00981-2
• Harriet Wilson’s New England: Race, Writing, and Region, ed. by JerriAnne Boggis, Eve Allegra Raimon, University Press of New England, 2007.

Further reading

• Loretta Woodard, "Wilson, Harriett", in Benét's Reader's Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition (1996), New York: HarperCollins.

External links

• Works by Harriet E. Wilson at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Harriet E. Wilson at Internet Archive
• Works by Harriet E. Wilson at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Our Nig, electronic edition, University of Virginia Library
• The Harriet Wilson Project, Official website
• "Harriet E. Wilson", Paul Lauter, The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Fifth Edition, Cengage, Houghton Mifflin Publishers
• "1859 - Harriet Wilson publishes Our Nig", "Timeline: Early Days and Slavery, 1400s–1865," African American World, PBS
• Don Swaim: Interview with Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., 27 May 1983, discussing his discovery of Our Nig (mp3), Wired for Books, Ohio University
• Poinier, Lauren, "Harriet Wilson's Our Nig: The First African-American Novel and Counter Discursive Work to Break the Silence of 'The Other' in America", Senior Thesis, December 21, 2009.