When I first taught Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, my students were particularly troubled by white women's complicitness in the abuses of slavery, particularly the inability of white women to stop sexual abuses.  "How could wives of slaveholders tolerate these abuses?" they asked; "why couldn't people see what was happening and stop it?"  As a result of my students' questions, I picked up Caroline Lee Hentz's 1854 novel The Planter's Northern Bride.  Upon first reading, Hentz's novel seems at odds with a text like Jacobs's.  However, after juxtposing The Planter's Northern Bride with Incidents, it becomes apparent that Hentz's text also addresses misegenation, though in much more coded and covert ways.

In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Jacobs is conscious about speaking the silences of slavery namely the sexual abuses of enslaved women.  In speaking these silences, she draws attention to the unspoken silences within a text like The Planter's Northern Bride.  As Pierre Macherey theorizes, "the work is revealed to itself and to others on two different levels: it makes visible, and it makes invisible.  Not because something has to be hidden in order to show something else, but because attention is diverted from the very thing which is shown. . . if the author does not always say what he states, he does not necessarily state what he says" (88).  Returning to the texts at hand, Jacobs's attention to what lurks below the "outward show of decency" points to a curious fissure in The Planter's Northern Bride: namely, as Macherey describes, the places where attention is diverted, where things are "said" though not overtly stated.  While sexual abuse of female slaves is not part of the overt text in Hentz's novel, there are silences in The Planter's Northern Bride which, in the context of Incidents, begin to speak and demand attention.  There are whispers in The Planter's Northern Bride which need addressing, namely the presence of mulattos in the text and the presence of the Planter's First Wife, Claudia. . . .