Frederick Douglass And Harriet Jacobs Analysis

For instance, Douglass tries to change his readers' beliefs about what it means to be dedicated to the idea that "All men are created equal" by telling about the physical abuse of slavery. One example, Douglass writes about is when Douglass witnesses his Aunt Hester being brutally whipped. According to the text, " I

A young African boy, impacted by the society in mid-nineteenth century, wrote about him growing up with negative viewpoints all around and not being able to learn like other kids did . This boy was Frederick Douglass and this autobiography was “My Bondage and My Freedom”. In “My Bondage and My Freedom”, Frederick Douglass illustrates the impact of a like-minded society, the impact knowledge had on a slave, and slaves having knowledge allowed for them to have free thought but still not being free as a person.

In the Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass: an American Slave, written by himself, the author argues that slaves are treated no better than, sometimes worse, than livestock. Douglass supports his claim by demonstrating how the slaves were forced to eat out of a trough like pigs and second, shows how hard they were working, like animals. The author’s purpose is to show the lifestyle of an American slave in order to appeal to people’s emotions to show people, from a slave’s perspective, what slavery is really like. Based on the harsh descriptions of his life, Douglass is writing to abolitionist and other people that would sympathize and abolish slavery.

“Pity me, and pardon me, O virtuous reader! You never knew what it is to be a slave; to be entirely unprotected by law or custom…entirely subject to the will of another.” Jacobs’ story conveyed pathos, or emotional appeal, as she spoke directly to her readers several times throughout the narrative. Her language choice affected the audience's emotional response, especially when they became aware that she was telling the truth. Jacobs was willing to share her personal, and in some ways shameful, past for the greater good. She wanted her readers to understand the perils of enslavement, and try to relate to what it feels like to be owned by another human being. Only then could they sympathize with the antislavery movement.

After about nine chapters detailing his slave life, he says, “You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.” (Douglass, 75) He then goes on to describe the turning point for him that sparked his quest for freedom. By structuring his narrative this way, he reveals both sides- how slavery broke him “in body, soul, and spirit” (Douglass, 73) and how it eventually “rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom” within him (Douglass, 80). In doing so, he gives the reader an insight into how he became himself, and reinforces the evils of slavery in the way it shapes a man’s life. Douglass’ use of diction and structure effectively persuades the reader of the barbarity and inhumanity that comes as a result of slavery.

Douglass was young when he found his identity through his escape from Baltimore to Massachusetts. Jacobs, on the other hand, became trapped in her community, family, and domesticity. She was “domestic” where she worked, as well as a slave with children. Jacobs expressed, "Slavery is bad for men but it is far more terrible for women." Jacobs’s narrative was explicit and frightening for herself and for the woman of her time because of the involvement with her master’s forced sexual interactions. Jacobs’s narrative is the sexual exploitation that she and all other woman who were slaves at the time had to face and endure. In comparison to Douglass, Jacobs was determined to fight for her freedom. Although, Douglass showed his audience “how a slave became a man” by being in a physical fight with a superior, Jacobs’s gender demonstrated a different perspective. She was pregnant with the child of a white man when she was fifteen and believed that it would encourage her master to sell her and her child. Once she was became mother with “ties to life,” her concern for her children had taken over her own self-interest. Throughout Jacobs narrative, she is not only looking for freedom but a home to protect her children.

Starting from a slave’s birth, this cruel process leads to a continuous cycle of abuse, neglect, and inhumane treatment. To some extent, slave holders succeed because they keep most slaves so concerned with survival that they have no time or energy to consider freedom. This is particularly true for plantation slaves where the conditions of slave life are the most difficult and challenging. However, slave holders fail to realize the damage they inadvertently inflict on themselves by upholding slavery and enforcing these austere laws and attitudes.

Men and Women’s treatment has been different as long as the two have been around to notice the difference. Even in the realm of slavery women and men were not treated the same although both were treated in horrible ways. Harriet Jacobs and Fredrick Douglass’ story is very similar both were born into slavery and later rose above the oppression to become molders of minds. In time of subjugation to African Americans these two writers rose up and did great things especially with their writing. Both Douglass and Jacobs’ experienced different types of slavery, it shaped their perspective on everything and it also shows the importance of their freedom.

Society’s systematic dehumanization of slaves claims that their lives are not their own, but rather belong to their oppressors. For instance, Jacobs’s cousin Benjamin decides to escape from his masters who equate him and his people to “dogs, […] foot-balls, cattle, [and] everything that [is] mean” and taunts them by saying, “Let them bring me back. We don’t die but once” (27). By metaphorically comparing slaves to dogs and pieces of property, he reveals how little slave owners care about their charges. Rather than remaining under the control of such oppression, Benjamin decides to live and die on his own terms at the risk of capture and punishment, because

The stories of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, slaves in the United States, as well as Olaudah Equiano, who spent time as a slave in North America, attest to the deeply embedded tradition of slavery in North American society. Slavery grew and was maintained through the dehumanization of the slaves, which was carried out through negligence and psychological and physical abuse. This allowed slave owners to exercise complete control over their slaves, extending to the objectification and rape of female slaves. Although the economic benefits of slavery served as a large factor for the continuation of the institution, a larger factor was the integration of the institution of slavery into American society. The narratives detailed the shift of slave owners from viewing slavery as a necessary evil to a positive good and social normality. Slavery became so ingrained in American society that slave owners used any justification necessary in order to retain their slaves, leading to the dehumanization of slaves and beginning a vicious, oppressive cycle that would continue for years to come in American society and accounting for slavery’s durability. American slavery grew and expanded as a direct result of the dehumanization of slaves, which created a culture of abuse and fear, allowing one population to become subservient to another and accounting for the durability of slavery.

During the final years of legal slave ownership in the United States, the slave narrative became a popular way for literate enslaved people to express their anti-slavery stance through their own testimony. Two of the most influential writers on the slave narrative topic were the autobiographical authors Fredrick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs. Since Douglas and Jacobs were both born in a similar time period, there are many similarities found in their works. Douglass’s Narrative of the life of Fredrick Douglass, an American Slave is closely comparable to Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl when analyzing how they represented their enslavement in their autobiographies. The two authors have similar ideas when portraying their struggles with forced ignorance. Their writing also contains parallels with the corrupting power of slavery for the slave owners, as well as the parallels in pointing out the hypocrisies of using the bible to defend slavery. These similarities can be explained in part due to Douglass and Jacobs following the same basic slave narrative outline to maintain the shared goal of abolishing slavery in the United States.

The use of slavery was a source of cheap labor that plantation and business owners depended on. Most plantations resided in rural areas with hardly any neighbors, it was mostly land that surrounded the plantations. This allowed for the plantation owners to be cruel and vicious towards their slaves. Some torture usually ended up with major injuries from whipping or sometimes even death. In the Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs narratives, both of the stories took place in an urban or town setting. This allowed for neighbors to see what was happening on the plantations and pushed the plantation owners to act differently towards their slaves in fear of being judged. Living in an urban or town like setting allowed for lighter punishment, the relationship between the master and the slaves would allow for a stronger connection because there would be less cruelty, and would provide for a more accessible escape.

write. Douglass uses irony and a sense of unawareness in his narrative to describe "the toils of women through his aunt’s afflictions but failed...to accurately address and interpret," (James 34) these strategies attempt to validate his role as a "fugitive American slave narrator, seeking a written document to prove that"(James 27) he has obviously suggested through language the free territory he claims. The connection for Douglass between the wanting of literacy and personal worth is what he focuses on primarily throughout the narrative. Douglass establishes himself as a man who is deserving of freedom, and that itself is a major significance to other slave narratives. This generalization doesn't extend to the slave narrative written by Harriet Jacobs who focuses on the brutality that women slaves face compared to men slaves. She states many times the fact that women slaves are degraded and treated "less than there worth." (Jacobs 29)

Douglass also carves the vivid picture of dehumanization into the reader's minds when he writes about the whippings slaves endure. When Douglass is a young boy, he witnesses for the first time a slave getting whipped, "he took her into the kitchen, and stripped her from neck to waist, leaving her neck, shoulders, and back entirely naked. He made her get upon the stool, and tied her hands to the hook." Douglass hides in a closet, thinking that he would be the next victim. This is Douglass's first encounter with the extreme cruelty of slaveholders. "She now stood fair for his infernal purpose...after soon rolling up his sleeves, he commenced to lay on the heavy cowskin, and soon the warm, red blood (amid heart-rending shrieks from her, and horrid oaths from him) came dripping to the floor" (Douglass 42). As it turns out, the slave

Harriet Jacobs, in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, demonstrates the plight of slaves in multifaceted angles when compared to Frederick Douglass, in Narrative of the Life. Both Jacobs and Fredric endure suffering as slaves, but Jacobs’s suffering is too much to bear. Harriet laments in the book: “Slavery is terrible for men, but is far more terrible for women. Superadded to the burden of all, they have wronged, and sufferings, and mortifications peculiarly their own” (Jacobs 86).