BACK

Gates notes that it is Harriet Wilson's child's death certificate that enabled scholars to determine her race and her authorship of the text. George Mason Wilson died from fever in February 1860 when he was just seven years old.

BACK

The audience that Wilson addresses in the preface is both the abolitionist audience similar to that addressed in Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. In a unique move, Wilson addresses "my colored brethren" in the following paragraph. This dual audience is intended to provide economic support for the author, and to understand her textual exposure of slavery's cruel existence in the form of indentured servitude in the supposedly free, pre-Civil War North.

BACK

Motherhood is a key concern for Wilson in the text. This first chapter operates outside the main plot line that tells of Frado's time at the Bellmont household. Instead, it focuses on the story of Frado's mother Mag Smith who is a fallen, white woman who marries a black man to free herself from poverty and ill health. Both Frado's birth mother, and her "surrogate" mother, Mrs. Bellmont, are pictured as far from nuturing and maternal. The idea of motherhood is even more intriguing considering it is Wilson's own maternal responsibilities that compel her to write the text so that her young son may eat.

BACK

Jim's comments---his consciousness that "black" is a negative thing-- set up the multifaceted racial dynamics that Wilson threads throughout the text. Issues of blackness and identity are particularly important for Frado who experiences racial prejudice and hatred made manifest through violence and servitude.

BACK

Wilson will employ direct reader address throughout the text. Harriet Jacobs employs a similar narrative mode in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.

BACK

Consumption was the leading cause of death in the United States and Great Britain in the nineteenth-century.

BACK

Wilson's initial description of Frado is interesting for a number of reasons. In her youth, Frado is described as full of vitality and spirit. Once Frado is bound to serve Mrs. Bellmont, her body becomes increasingly feeble as it is ruined by the ceaseless tyranny of harsh physical labor and abuse. Frado's exuberance is strikingly similar to descriptions of Eva in Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. While Eva does not become an invalid because of physical labor, she dies an early death quite typical of the "beautiful death" common in nineteenth-century sentimental fictions and culture. Finally, Frado literally embodies the complexities of nineteenth-century issues of racial identity as signified by her mulatta status.

BACK

"Home" is another important thematic concern throughout the text. Oftentimes in nineteenth-century sentimental novels, home is pictured as a place of security and domestic bliss set apart from the labor-intensive reality of the growing industrial world. For Frado, the Bellmont home is far from blissful. Not only is she physically abused by Mrs. Bellmont and Mary, but she is responsible for a number of chores involving harsh physical labor. Note the ways in which Wilson continually subverts the expected serenity of domestic space in her portrayal of life in the Bellmont household.

BACK

See Diane Price Herndl's Invalid Women: Figuring Feminine Illness in American Fiction and Culture 1840-1910. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1993 for a study of the figure of the invalid woman in nineteenth-century literature and culture.

BACK

Wilson stridently uses the epithet "our nig" in a number of ways. While the name demeans Frado, it is also the name that Wilson ironically empowers in an unexpected way as it becomes the name of the author of the text. In a sense, Wilson subverts the expected use of the term, and masters it with the authority of authorship.

BACK

These tight quarters are not unlike the "loophole of retreat" that Harriet Jacobs' hides out in for several years to escape Doctor Flint.

BACK

The abusive exchanges between Frado and the Bellmont women are often meted out in the terms of who ultimately gains the power of speaking as occurs here. See Cynthia J. Davis's "Speaking the Body's Pain: Harriet Wilson's Our Nig." African American Review 27 (1993): 391-404.

BACK

The kitchen, an archetypal domestic space, is a place of terror in the Bellmont household.

BACK

Note the similarity in the dog's name and Frado's.

BACK

John's comment invites an understanding of the tyranny that Wilson describes in the text on gendered terms--violence is solely an experience of exchange between women. The men here, including Mr. Bellmont and his sons and even Mag's husband, are characterized as quite passive.

BACK

The brothers' call to Frado invites yet another connection between her and the dog, perhaps quite purposeful on Wilson's part.
BACK

The following verbal exchange---or question-answer session--between Frado and James is rendered like a catechism. The exchange resonates with several of the key themes that Wilson constructs throughout the text such as motherhood, religious salvation, and racial difference.

BACK

Wilson employs the image of an internal storm to suggest the tyranny of the Bellmont household.

BACK

Nig's sickness is perhaps modeled after Wilson's own, which necessitates the text's very existence. Wilson implies in the Preface that writing is one of the few physical labors that she can endure in her invalid state.

BACK

Nineteenth-century medical writings by proslavery southern physicians and northern doctors alike were engaged in justifying slavery on the basis of biological difference. Blacks were said to be immune to certain diseases, climate conditions, and to actually benefit from physical labor unsuitable for the imagined, fragile constitution of whites. That Frado grows increasingly feeble from the labor forced upon her, works against such racist cultural assumptions that were quite prevalent when Our Nig was written.

BACK

Just as Mrs. Bellmont forbids Frado from protecting her skin from the sun, so she cuts her hair in an attempt to mark her as distinctly different from the Bellmont women. Frado's dark skin and androgynous hairstyle set her outside from mainstream ideas of beauty.

BACK

See Ann Douglas's The Feminization of American Culture. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977 for her discussion of the nineteenth-century cultural fascination with the beautiful death, and images of heaven as the ideal domestic space, the true home that all good Christians will one day reside in.

BACK

Douglas excerpts Congregationalist minister George Cheever's vision of the kind of blissful future existence that Frado wonders if blacks can attain. In The Powers of the World to Come (1853), he writes that heaven "is not the dim incomprehensible universality of omnipresence merely, but a place for our abode. . .and with as intimate a home circle, as the dearest fireside on this earth can have, nay incomparably more intimate and personal and definitely local in our Father's House in Heaven" (Douglas 222).

BACK

See Miriam Bailin's The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction: The Art of Being Ill. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994 for a discussion of the role of sickroom and death bed scenes in nineteenth-century literature. Although Bailin focuses primarily on British novels, her assertion of the sickroom as a liminal space is intriguing. Note how Mrs. Bellmont's reign of terror does not pervade James's sick room.

BACK

When Frado's parents gave her up to the Bellmonts, their agreement was for a specified amount of time in which Frado would work as an indentured servant. Now a young woman, Frado's indentured status is over.

BACK

Shelter, retreat, sanctuary for the destitute (not the mentally ill).
BACK

Narrative voice shifts in this moment and the third-person narration of Frado's fictional story merges with a seemingly autobiographical account of Harriet Wilson's own struggles which are further delineated in the appendix to follow.

BACK