The Life Of A Slave Girl By Harriet Jacobs

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.

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.

Women were not only used for their labor, but were also exploited sexually. Slave owners felt they had the right to use black women for their own sexual desires, and felt they had the right to use their bodies for slave breeding. This obscenity between the master and slave were not only psychologically damaging for black women, but would also lead to physical abuse. In her narrative, Ms. Jacobs gives us a firsthand description of the abuse that would occur if she were to upset her master, “Some months before, he had pitched me down stairs in a fit of passion; and the injury I received was so serious that I was unable to turn myself in bed for many days”

In this book, Jacobs writes about her personal life as a slave. As a young girl, she has no idea that she is a slave because her parents and mistress treat her as a human, instead

Harriet Jacobs, a black woman who escapes slavery, illustrates in her biography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) that death is preferable to life as a slave due to the unbearable degradation of being regarded as property, the inevitable destruction of slave children’s innocence, and the emotional and physical pain inflicted by slave masters. Through numerous rhetorical strategies such as allusion, comparison, tone, irony, and paradoxical expression, she recounts her personal tragedies with brutal honesty. Jacobs’s purpose is to combat the deceptive positive portrayals of slavery spread by southern slave holders through revealing the true magnitude of its horrors. Her intended audience is uninvolved northerners, especially women, and she develops a personal and emotionally charged relationship with them.

With these words, Harriet Jacobs begins her autobiography, “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.” Written under the pseudonym Linda Brent, Jacobs harrowing account details her experiences as a slave in North Carolina, her escape to freedom in the north, and her ensuing struggles to free her children. It is one of the celebrated examples of the genre known as the slave narrative; a written or orally related account of the life of a slave, in the words of said slave. From 1760 to the end of the Civil War, approximately 100 autobiographies of fugitive or former slaves appeared. After slavery was abolished in the United States in 1865, at least 50 more former slaves wrote or dictated accounts of their lives (Gates, Introduction). The authors of these narratives typically began by writing about what it was like to be a child in bondage, giving us the first recorded accounts of African American child life. This is not surprising, considering the distinctive youthfulness of the “home-grown” slave population in the South. While other slave societies in the Americas relied upon continuing imports of slaves, most slaves in the antebellum United States were native-born (The Domestic Slave Trade). As a result, over 50% of the slave population in the South was younger than sixteen (Mintz). In this paper, I will explore how these children were represented in slave narratives and what these tales tell us about what life was like for a child born into slavery in the United States during

The ideology of true womanhood that operated in the United States in the nineteenth century was a thoroughly middle-class social ethic. A set of sexual stereotypes decreed women pious, pure, submissive, and oriented toward the home. Slave women suffered silently trying to adhere to the white middle-class ideas of how women were to behave. Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl chronicles the abuses of slavery and emphasizes the special problems faced by female slaves. Jacobs highlights sexual abuse, the struggle for self-definition, and the angst of slave women torn between their desire for personal freedom and their maternal responsibility to their family. While slave women certainly faced horrible physical and mental tortures, Jacobs suggests that there were distinct similarities between slavery and women’s oppression that southern white women faced in the south.Throughout

While some may argue that women had an advantage over men because of fewer occasions of severe treatment, they do not realize how psychologically messed up enslaved women can become because of brutal rape and pregnancies. A mixture of emotional and physical pains experiences not only affects the body of the slave, but also the psychological mental health of the slave. Throughout her story, Jacobs highlights sexual assault and problems of women in slavery. She explains the mental health of enslaved women by revealing her personal feelings toward

Along with losing a child on the auction block, Jacobs also describes the added degradation of slave women being used by their masters. Describing the beauty of a slave girl as her “greatest curse” because it would bring about the unwanted attentions of the master (38). Jacob’s master Dr. Flint caused her “days and nights of fear and sorrow” (40). Women often bore children from these unions and these same children were often sold to protect the honor and dignity of the slaveholder 's wife, who would otherwise be forced to face the evidence of her husband 's infidelity (74). Jacobs’ purpose in writing about her degradation by her lecherous master was not to garner sympathy for herself. As stated in her preface she wanted her story to bring about change and “to kindle a flame of compassion in your hearts for my sisters who are still in bondage, suffering as I once suffered” (40). She wanted the women up North to understand what it was like to be a slave woman in the south so that they in turn could work to end slavery.

This profoundly moving, first-hand account of Slavery during the 19th century, gives the reader invaluable and in-depth insight into the horrifying treatment of African-Americans slaves and completely unveils the true ugliness that will permanently mark the country’s beginnings. Written by Harriet Jacobs under the pseudonym Linda Brent, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl depicts how it was to grow up somebody else’s property as a female slave, as well as, her grueling fight to liberate herself and her children.

Growing up as a slave Jacobs was constantly exposed to sexual abuse from her master. She was forced to learn what it meant to be a slave that was

The primary function of the American slave narrative in the eighteenth and nineteenth century was to garner the support of abolitionists and deconstruct the system of chattel slavery. Through authentic and personal accounts of slavery through the voice of those who endured slavery first hand, slave narratives served as proof to abolitionists of the corruption of slavery. In Harriet Jacobs 's slave narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Jacobs explicitly addresses white women of the North in hopes that they may see the humanity of enslaved people. Throughout her autobiography, Harriet Jacobs subverts the dominant image of the “immoral Black woman” by asserting her agency and redefining morality in order to appeal to white women

Harriet Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, depicts a personal and true account of how woman were sexually and physically abused rather than just physically abuses as that of an enslaved man. Enslaved woman struggled tremendously to not only be considered equal to man though to be seen equal pure and virtuous identical to the white women. Jacob’s female slave narrative was a special kind of autobiography, were she not only used another person to represent her, however, she wanted the reader to just try and understand the pain the enslaved woman were forced to tolerate. In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs uses Christian biblical passages and references to expose how white people did not live up to the Christian lifestyle they said they had, while simultaneously exposing the lack of inclusion the enslaved woman had in the true cult of womanhood.

Harriet Jacobs escaped from slavery and at great personal risk wrote of her trials as a house servant in the South and later fugitive in the North. Her slave narrative entitled Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl gave a true account of the evils slavery held for women, a perspective that has been kept relatively secret from the public. In writing her story, Jacobs, though focused on the subjugation due to race, gave voice subtly to a different kind of captivity, that which men impose on women regardless of color in the patriarchal society of the ninetenth century. This form of bondage is not only exacted from women by their husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons, but also is accepted and perpetuated by women

Harriet Jacobs focuses on her experiences as a female slave, rather than a slave who happens to be a slave, and points out how difficult the situations were for the female slaves compared to that of the male slaves. She prints the picture of a situation whereby the fate of the female slave depends on the kindness of her master or mistress, the situation worsening when her master would make sexual advances and in most cases, rape her, whilst all the while threatening to make conditions worse for her should there be resistance on her part. In addition to labor and rape, women experienced their children being sold, robbed of their purity, constant abuse from a jealous mistress and constant fear of vengeful acts from the jealous mistress (61).