The Cambridge Introduction to the 19th-Century American Novel, the traditional sentimental novel’s storyline focuses around a young woman finding her way through life, usually without the support of a conventional family. The women overcome life’s hardships, and “the key to these women’s triumphs lies in their achievement of self-mastery” (Cane 113). According to Gregg Cane, these didactic novels are targeted at young women to instill the idea that a domestic home, marriage, and family are what construct a morally good woman. The plot is used to extract an emotional reaction from the audience. Nina Baym describes all sentimental novels as having the same plot,
In essence, [they are] the story of a young girl who is deprived of the
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Wilson’s novel takes place in the supposedly free north, and she uses the sentimental novel outline to expose the truth about the free north, and like Brent, connect herself to her audience. Both women portray their stories using the sentimental novel so that they can reach out to a white, female audience, and at the same time subvert their audience’s reality in order to reveal how similar slaves and free women are, and fight for freedom. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was first published in 1861, around the same time the civil war began. Francis Smith Foster notes that Jacobs takes conventional antebellum literary methods, the adored sentimental novel, and uses them to familiarize herself with her audience, while at the same time modifies them “in order to accommodate her testimony as she tests her readers’ abilities to accept and act upon that testimony” (97). Foster also sums up how closely Jacob’s story follows the sentimental outline,
Incidents reads like a story of pursuit and evasion, one full of heroes and villains, of bright young men claiming the freedom to seek their fortunes and of desperate maidens trying to preserve their virtue, of mothers trying to protect their children and of the hardworking poor trying to survive the greed and exploitation of the powerful and wealthy. (163)
Jacobs positions herself
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs strongly speaks to its readers by describing the brutalities of slavery and the way slave owners can destroy peaceful lives. After reading and rereading the story have noticed certain things regarding how Jacobs tries to educate her readers and her intended audience which is the women of the North. As if we do not know enough about how terrible slavery is, this story gives detailed examples of the lives of slaves and provokes an incredible amount of emotions. She uses several tactics in her writing to reach her desired audience and does so very well.
First and foremost, she silences herself when she chooses to tell her story under the pseudonym “Linda Brent”. In this way, she uses someone else as a vessel of power to tell her own story. As a female African-American slave, Jacobs is a member of perhaps the most systemically silenced group of all. However, she learns to use the secrecy forced upon her as power. She lets her voice break the silence as she informs readers about the sexual and emotional abuse that often couples females’ experiences of slavery. As the story progresses, Jacobs begins illustrating silence as a way of loosening the shackles of slavery. She talks to and informs readers through her narrative and communicates the importance of silence through Linda Brent. Linda shares secrets with other slaves and they use their hushed whispers as a way to empower each other and share common experience as silence transforms from something forced upon them to something that forestalls the power of their masters and
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, a slave narrative written by Harriet Ann Jacobs is highly commended for the portrayal of women during the excruciating times of slavery. Disregarding that the slave narrative was initially written for the audience of Caucasian women, “…, as white women constituted Jacobs’s primary audience at the time she wrote her narrative” (Larson,742) the struggles of being a female slave were emphasized throughout the narrative. Harriet Ann Jacobs elaborates on slave women’s worth being diminished. In the slave narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, written by Harriet Ann Jacobs, the theme of the perils of slavery for women was portrayed by women being viewed
In the Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs argues that her master had an undesirable obsession for her. An obsession she did not want, but could not escape. When Jacobs turned fifteen, life changed drastically; she had gained an unwanted eye of her master. Though her master was afraid to have his inappropriate behaviors and impure thoughts gossiped through town or reported to her grandmother, “he was a crafty man, and resorted to many means to accomplish his purpose” (Jacobs, 52). Despite the fact that Jacobs feared for herself, she felt as if she could not escape her unwanted fate. “My master met me at every turn, reminding me that I belonged to him, and swearing by heaven and earth the he would compel me to submit to him” (Jacobs, 53). Due to his undying
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.
Finally, Jacobs's narrative is distinguished by its sharp, specific focus on the sexual exploitation of slave women. Other narrators had touched on this issue to be sure, but none had explored it with the depth and passion of Jacobs. In this regard, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was a political effort designed specifically to help ameliorate the condition of black women in slavery. To achieve this end, Jacobs had to break deliberately with the genteel Victorian literary and
Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: A Harrowing Escape from Abuse
Harriet Jacobs' words in Incidents in the Life of A Slave Girl clearly suggests that the life as a slave girl is harsh and unsatisfactory. In this Composition, Jacobs is born a slave, never to be freed. She struggles through life in many instances making life seem impossible. The author's purpose is to state to the people what happened during slavery times in the point of view of a slave. Her life is so harsh that she even hides from her master for 7 years in a cramped space in the top of a shed without any room to walk. The theme of the story is a statement on how slavery was a much harder way of life than many people may have thought. Many people during these times thought that slaves were happy where they were and that their lives
The Black Body Throughout time, minorities have always been at the bottom on the hierarchy pyramid. They continue to be degraded and seen as the filth of the world, despite their fight to break free from that image. The African American race in itself is known to have a conflicting battle with the said “superior” race in the history of America. Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents of the Life of a Slave Girl and Ida B. Wells’s Light of Truth explain the idea that the black body has no say in how they are perceived.
What I personally hope to accomplish with this film is to educate my classmates about the book written by Harriet Jacobs called the life of a slave girl, all while accomplishing to showcase my group's qualities of working together and turning up with a good outcome. The book is a narrative biography about the author's life as she goes through Slavery; In the book, she refers to herself as Linda. As the different groups present their films to each other, we are all going to have different perspectives on each film. Some may think some are well done, which will result in the presenters actually getting a good response from the audience. However, I think many of the audience members will be too disinterested to give the film a chance in the first place. My group's goal is to make an
Incident in the Life of a Slave Girl had a different explanation narrative story than any other slavery stories we had read, especially with male-authored narrative because Jacob was engaging the readers with the issue she had challenged in her time period. Jacob mentions that her family was the most important people in her life because she gave us an idea that her family were depended to her emotional support (153-155). In fact, family was the most important mechanism for many slaves because they were dependent on each other for friendship, especially to maintain their confidence no matter what the situation they are going through.
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.
The female characters regularly confront occasions that abandon them swooning, startled, shouting, and crying. A desolate, thoughtful, and mistreated courageous woman is regularly the focal figure of the novel, so her sufferings are the concentration of