Harriet Jacobs Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl

From learning this we know Harriet is not in for a good future with this family. The way Jacobs describes the importance of the women in her life is inspiring, given that, at the time they had such little power and such few rights. “Mrs. Flint, like many southern women, was totally deficient in energy. She had not the strength to superintend her household affairs; but her nerves were so strong, that she could sit in her easy chair and see a woman whipped, till the blood trickled from every stroke of the lash” (Jacobs 360). The way she describes Mrs. Flint perfectly captures what all women in the south were like. This portrays an excellent example to Northern women how serious slavery can affect a person.

Slavery was common in the eighteenth century. Slaves were seen as property, as they were taken from their native land and forced into long hours of labor. The experience was traumatic for both black men and black women. They were physically and mentally abused by slave owners, dehumanized by the system, and ultimately denied their fundamental rights to a favorable American life. Although African men and women were both subjected to the same enslavement, men and women had different experiences in slavery based on their gender. A male perspective can be seen in, My Bondage and My Freedom by Frederick Douglass. A female perspective is shared in Harriet Jacobs’ narrative titled, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Upon reading both of the viewpoints provided, along with outside research, one can infer that women had it worse.

Harriet Jacobs wrote, “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” using the pseudonym Linda Brent, and is among the most well-read female slave narratives in American history. Jacobs faces challenges as both a slave and as a mother. She was exposed to discrimination in numerous fronts including race, gender, and intelligence. Jacobs also appeals to the audience about the sexual harassment and abuse she encountered as well as her escape. Her story also presents the effectiveness of her spirit through fighting racism and showing the importance of women in the community.

Harriet Jacobs and Emily Dickinson convey the female experience in very different ways. Dickinson was a white-American poet known for and secluded because of her eccentric nature. Jacobs was an African-American writer enslaved and isolated because of her race and gender. It is easy to see the differences in Dickinson and Jacob’s personal lives, but it is also easy to draw parallels between Dickinson and Jacobs as their work shares a very common theme; the power of silence. While Dickinson suggests that a woman who understands how to use silence can be powerful, Jacobs finds empowerment in silence itself, but what is most interesting is how the two women navigate silence in order to become powerful.

In these two tales of brutal bondage, Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Frederick Douglass' Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, the modern reader can decipher two vastly different experiences from circumstances that were not altogether that dissimilar. Both narratives tell the story of a slave gaining his or her freedom from cruel masters, yes, but that is where the most prominent similarities end. Not only are they factually different, these stories are entirely distinct in their themes.

Harriet A. Jacobs Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Jacobs’s construction of black female empowerment despite the limitations of slavery

The feminist movement sought to gain rights for women. Many feminist during the early nineteenth century fought for the abolition of slavery around the world. The slave narrative became a powerful feminist tool in the nineteenth century. Black and white women are fictionalized and objectified in the slave narrative. White women are idealized as pure, angelic, and chaste while black woman are idealized as exotic and contained an uncontrollable, savage sexuality. Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of A Slave Girl, brought the sexual oppression of captive black women into the public and political arena.

Most authors use many effective strategies in order to persuade or inform their readers of a specific topic. In this case, Harriet Jacobs uses many rhetorical strategies to highlight the significance of slavery and how most slaveholders abused their slaves with lies and physical harm. In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs uses rhetorical strategies such as rhetorical questions,vivid dictions, and euphemism to inform these white Christian women from the north about the struggles a female slave goes through. During the passage, Harriet Jacobs asks specific rhetorical questions in order to put more emphasis on her passage.

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was written to appeal to an audience of free white women and to involve them in the antislavery struggle. At a more personal level, it was written to vindicate Harriet Jacobs, both to reveal her history and to account for it in a public setting.

Women were perhaps naïve in the sense that they accepted that men were head of the universe. Instead Jacobs refuses to accept Dr. Flint, escapes and not with her benefit in mind but with the hope of freedom for her children. She knows that Dr. Flint would not sell her children if she were there for fear of her escape in search of them, but she figured that if she were no longer around her children would instead be a burden to the doctor and he would eventually consent to selling them. When her children are finally safely in the North and Jacobs is able to flee the south in search of them, her main concern was to find employment and being able to provide for them, she told her daughter Ellis “I had laid up a hundred dollars and before long I hoped to be able to give her and Benjamin a home, and send them to school.” A woman supporting her children, with no man as head of the household was not viewed as domestic; she was degraded for not marrying and having children out of wedlock. Jacobs gives a new definition of domestic, it may have been too futuristic to people of her era, but today a domestic person is devoted to home life or household affairs. Jacobs did not need to accept Dr. Flint’s attempt to domesticate her or need to conform to the domesticity expectations of needing to be married, she provided for her children even when she had the bare minimal for herself, she always thought of their welfare first even if it meant an anguished

Jacobs is born to her mother in the southern states of America. She is born without freedom and rights as she is black, property to her master as a slave. Her mother is a slave to a man name Dr. Flint and so therefor she too is a slave of his property. On page 26, the first sentence of chapter 5, Jacobs states "During the first years of my service in Dr. Flint's family I was accustomed to share some indulgences with the children of my mistress. Thought this seemed to me no more than right, I was grateful for it, and tried to merit the kindness by the faithful discharge of my duties." Harriet shows gratefulness for a period of time that she is a slave. The next line says "But I now entered on my fifteenth year -- a sad epoch in the life of a slave." Harriet starts to show hatred for her slavery and sadness. As a fifteenth year slave she is getting tired of how she is being treated, many girls that are her age at this time would be very frustrated with this too.

One particular aspect of Harriet Jacobs' diction in "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" that I have noticed in the readings for October 4, is the pitying of Jacobs; specifically, the verbal expression of her as "poor". There were three instances I found when the term "poor" was used in relation to Jacobs. The first being where Jacobs describes her being unaware of the situation of her children's emancipation from Dr. Flint and is only able to hear a few voices discussing about it until Betty is able to tell her the true story. Betty calls Jacobs a "poor creeter" for having to wait so long about hearing of her kid's fate (88). Later, Jacobs' grandmother calls her a "poor thing" for having to drag herself from her confined hiding place

Harriet Jacobs was a strong woman who endured the hardships of slavery since childhood in the nineteenth century. She was treated well as a child, but when her mistress passed away, she was willed to her deceased mistress 's niece. It was upon living with that family where she faced her greatest problem. In that household, she dealt with Dr. Flint 's harassment and his wife 's jealousy. Jacobs later on had a bay in hopes that it would lead a better life than she did. Through describing events, conversing with the audience and having a strong voice, Harriet Jacobs speaks to northern women, slaves and southerners.

The introductory line of Harriet Jacob’s preface to Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, “Reader, be assured this narrative is no fiction”, is short yet serving (Jacobs 224). Although brief in its nature, this statement manages to encompass two major aspects that characterize African-American literature: audience and truth. In all writing, understanding the target audience and how to arrange an argument or essay to appeal to that specific crowd is paramount. However, it is especially important for African-American authors, who typically need to expose injustices or call for social change in their works. In particular, two African-American authors who understood their audience and how to manipulate that understanding were Charles W. Chesnutt and Marcus Garvey. Although they were born only twenty-nine years apart, Chesnutt and Garvey technically wrote for different time periods. While Chesnutt’s work is associated with “Literature of the Reconstruction”, Garvey was grouped with authors and activists from the Harlem Renaissance (Gates and Smith 580 ). The separation of their literary epochs drove Chesnutt and Garvey to write for contradistinctive audiences that demanded unique written techniques and rhetorical strategies, but that both asked for utmost honesty.

Harriet Jacobs and Susanna Rowson writers of different times dealt with issues of sexuality in their writings. Both of them wrote stories for different specific audiences but with the same purpose for others to learn from their stories and avoid repeating them again. Susanna Rowson with Charlotte Temple and Harriet Jacobs with Incidents in the Life of a Slave girl show us and explain to us the struggles that two different young girls went through and how they dealt with it.