A Note on Wilson's Agency

In Karyn Kohrs Campbell's work on agency, aptly titled "Agency: Promiscuous and Protean", she outlines her concept of agency to be "polysemic and ambiguous",  That the term "agency" refers to something which could be construed in more than one way there can be little doubt, though we can catch glimpses of Wilson's agency through context and examination. The historical context in which Our Nig was written indicates to us that, at least in part, Wilson wanted to both educate the populace as to the state of inequality and injustice (to note her subheading, "Sketches from the life of a free black [emphasis added], in a two-story white house, North, showing that slaver's shadows fall even there" [Wilson 1]). 

Certainly, then, because of the tense socio-political climate in the antebellum U.S. and the conflict between North and South over admission of free states vs slave states, a reader can infer that Wilson's narrative lens was tinted with the egalitarian concerns of the period (abolitionist causes being contemporary: John Brown's incident at Harpers Ferry the same year that the novel was published, Bleeding Kansas a few years prior, and Frederick Douglass' book was published 14 years before Wilson's). She (in context of Frado) had been disrespected by whites from the North, and especially women (from her mother to her mistress to Mrs. Hoggs, who betrayed her trust by ratting out Frado's supposed capacity to work); thus, her agency was influenced by this fact which seemed to contradict the division on the Mason-Dixon. Thus, Wilson's agency is seen through through a voice of the downtrodden, north and south, especially based on racial grounds (through her indentured servitude and maltreatment on account of race by her mistress), pursuant to a desire calling for the reexamination of values relating to equality in the north (as can be seen in the subheading), and one of psycho-therapeutic reflection based on contemporary egalitarian issues relating to (and thereby influencing her perceptions of) her story.