Traps Slyly Laid: Professing Autobiography in Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig

Abstract

Our Nig has been persistently read as an autobiography with good reason.¹ Its title-page indicates that the book’s author and the central protagonist are one and the same person, since its first and final words are, respectively, ‘Our Nig… by “Our Nig”‘. The titles of the first three chapters reinforce the supposition that the book is autobiographical, since they are respectively entitled: ‘Mag Smith, My Mother’, ‘My Father’s Death’ and ‘A New Home For Me’ (xxxi). Furthermore, in the ‘Appendix’, a testimonial writer, Allida, describes the text as an ‘Autobiography’ (75). Unsurprisingly, this led to a search for the identity of the anonymous author, Harriet Wilson, a search complicated by the fact that the text had lain largely unregarded from 1859, when it was first published, until 1983, when Henry Louis Gates republished a facsimile edition. However, whilst preparing his edition, Gates, and, subsequently, Barbara White, carried out painstaking research and managed to demonstrate that Wilson was an African-American living in Milford, New Hampshire, and Boston. Gates (1983) and White (1993) incontrovertibly established all discoverable autobiographical correspondences between Our Nig and Wilson’s life.