Nettie And The Virgin Slave Analysis

years old." I think that before her former master died and she was sent to her

In the non-fiction book “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” by Harriet A. Jacobs and published in Boston in 1861. The author Jacobs was born into slavery in 1813, in a town called Edenton, North Carolina. Jacob uses the pseudonym Linda Brent to narrate her first person account. The book opens with Jacobs stating her reasons for writing a biography of her life story. Her story is agonizing and she had rather have kept it confidential, although she felt that by making it public that perhaps it might help the antislavery movement. A preface by Linda Child, states in the beginning of the book, “READER, be assured this narrative is no fiction. I am aware that some of my adventures may seem incredible; but they are, nevertheless, strictly true” (Jacobs 5). I would like to explain the main themes in this story, they include family and community, dangers of slavery for women, motherhood, and altogether the corrupting power of slavery, religion, and last but not least perseverance.

After reading the assigned literature, I have now cast a light on several issues that are currently causing problems today. The article titled, “Let’s Make A Slave,” was depressing because it almost forced one to go back in time and feel the plight of Africans Americans before slavery was outlawed. William Lynch traveled a great ways to inform the people of the Virginia Colony about slavery and how it should truly be done. As I was reading, it seemed as though William Lynch was reading the instructions for a product (and not a human being) but he actually was talking about people (African Americans). The speech that he prepared was delivered was so much conviction that it made it very hard to believe that African Americans could have been treated any other way. The Europeans (during slavery) did not respect Black people and regarded to them as “uncivilized niggers” (The Black Arcade Liberation Library, 1970,p2) and sought nothing more than to treat them like the “money making machines” they were.

During the antebellum South, many Africans, who were forced migrants brought to America, were there to work for white-owners of tobacco and cotton plantations, manual labor as America expanded west, and as supplemental support of their owner’s families. Harriet Jacobs’s slave narrative supports the definition of slavery (in the South), discrimination (in the North), sexual gender as being influential to a slave’s role, the significant role of family support, and how the gender differences viewed and responded to life circumstances.

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

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.

No one in today’s society can even come close to the heartache, torment, anguish, and complete misery suffered by women in slavery. Many women endured this agony their entire lives, there only joy being there children and families, who were torn away from them and sold, never to be seen or heard from again.

Blassingame, John W. The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972.

“On their third meeting he buys her a lemonade and makes a young guy in the carriage stand up so that she can sit down.” (Father’s actions) pg.3

In "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl", Harriet Jacobs writes, "Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women" (64). Jacobs' work shows the evils of slavery as being worse in a woman's case by the gender. Jacobs elucidates the disparity between societal dictates of what the proper roles were for Nineteenth century women and the manner that slavery prevented a woman from fulfilling these roles. The book illustrates the double standard of for white women versus black women. Harriet Jacobs serves as an example of the female slave's desire to maintain the prescribed virtues but how her circumstances often prevented her from practicing.

Harriet Jacobs wanted to tell her story, but knew she lacked the skills to write the story herself. She had learned to read while young and enslaved, but, at the time of her escape to the North in 1842, she was not a proficient writer. She worked at it, though, in part by writing letters that were published by the New York Tribune, and with the help of her friend, Amy Post. Her writing skills improved, and by 1858, she had finished the manuscript of her book, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.

Harriet Jacob was the first African American women to have authored a slave narrative in the United States and was instinctive into slavery in Edenton, North Carolina. Living a good life with her skilled carpentered father and her mother, Jacob didn’t much of being a slave. However, when her mother had passed away, Jacob and her father were reassigned to a different slave owner were her life as a women slave began. Because of this change, she fled to New York where she started working in the Anti-Slavery movement. During this period, she focused more on her family then she did the issue of slavery. Family is an emotional anchor in the Incident in the Life of a Slave Girl because Linda was devoted to her children. She uses symbolism, imagery, and allegory because she wants to demonstrate what families should be like.

Harriet Jacobs autobiography, “The Incidents in The Life of a Slave Girl”, narrates her life as a slave and journey to freedom under the pseudonym, Linda Brent. The central message was to appeal to abolitionists and gain support of the women in the North, to expose the anecdotes of sexual victimization and abuse slave women commonly faced. The ideals of womanhood at the time of Jacob’s writing process, asserted that all women should have virtues of piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness. In the narrative, Jacobs remarks how slavery prevented women from obtaining these virtues. Jacobs writing was also influenced by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, permitting the recapture of fugitive slaves to their masters. This led to abolitionists

Sethe is the only daughter of her mother who was kept alive. As a captured women, Sethe’s mother had rough choices to make. Either keeping children who reminds her of the endless rapes or give them to death for care. Through the course of the narrative, Sethe’s mother takes the miserable yet wise choice of letting her children go to the other side. Ma’am’s decision of keeping Sethe alive is because she was the daughter of black male. However, being alive did not make Sethe much happier. As a child, Sethe witnessed the loss of her mother at an early age. This loss was not a matter of life and death; rather it was a result of being a slave. Under the slave regime, slave mothers faced difficulties in having the opportunity and freedom to

A slave was then basically anyone who was not white, but color was forced to have a master in which all of the commands that came out of their mouths definitely would have to be done by a slave. Many times they were treated badly and none of the slaves had a say in anything that they would do. Slaves had no rights at all and they were considered basically nothing or a piece of property; a property in which masters could share and buy slaves for themselves. White people who could afford to buy a slave would. Slaves were mainly used for manual labor. The general function of a female slave was mainly to do chores, while men, on the other hand grew crops and worked in many other different things that involved a “men’s job”.