The Voice from the Hold: A Narrative Review of the Slave Narrative from Equiano to the Signifying Monkey

Abstract

The slave narrative---the autobiography whose testimony carried slavery's truth to the world---moved from Equiano's 1789 Interesting Narrative and Mary Prince's 1831 History through Douglass's 1845 Narrative, Brown's, Northup's, and Jacobs's Incidents to the scholars' frames of witnessing, masks, and free stories and the Signifying Monkey's theory of the tradition's self-conscious art. This article presents a narrative review of that arc's canonical line: Equiano's 1789 Interesting Narrative, Prince's 1831 History, Douglass's 1845 Narrative, Brown's 1847 Narrative, Northup's 1853 Twelve Years a Slave, Jacobs's 1861 Incidents, Foster's 1979 Witnessing Slavery, Stepto's 1979 From Behind the Veil, Olney's 1985 I was born, Andrews's 1986 To Tell a Free Story, Smith's 1987 Self-Discovery and Authority, and Gates's 1988 The Signifying Monkey. The review is organized around three themes: the foundational voices, in which the narratives' testimony---the ship's hold, the fight with Covey, the garret's confinement---made the institution's witness; the scholars' frame, in which the witnessing's development, the masks' and the ascent's structures, the I-was-born's formula, and the free story's politics defined the genre's form; and signifying and self-discovery, in which the vernacular's theory and the authority's genealogy read the tradition as literature's self-conscious art. It is concluded that the slave narrative is the American autobiography's founding genre---the witness whose craft the tradition's theory restored---and that its arc is the testimony's rise from the document to the canon.