The Life Of A Slave Girl By Harriet Jacobs

Realism creates an authentic image of daily endeavors, notably most if not all that slaves faced, and constructs a bridge that connects the gap between the readers to the slaves who are subjected to the endeavors and hardships as seen through autobiographies of many former slaves such as Harriet Jacobs’s and Frederick Douglass’s. Jacobs’s “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” and Douglass’s “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass” both illustrate great examples of the obstacles and barriers that slaves had to overcome. The protagonists in both stories, Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass, are obviously not your everyday comic book superheroes who has their own hidden identities, rather, they are just ordinary commoners who are also facing real-life struggles like everybody else.

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

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is a novel by Harriet Jacobs. It is a story of the true events in Jacobs’ life. Growing up with very little education, she wrote and released her book in the 1850’s. She wrote the book under the pseudonym Lydia Maria Child; it would bring much trouble for her to write in her own name in that time. Remarkably, however, her book is the first full-length narration written by a former female slave. Jacobs’ writing was primarily for white women living in the North. Her white readers should judge slaves differently.

Incidents in the life of a slave girl by Harriet Jacobs accentuates that the slavery system is evil and no good can be associated with it. Jacobs shows that slavery by its very nature extinguishes the morality and ethical values of slaveholders. Likewise, she highlights on the physical, psychological, health, social, and mental adverse implications of the slavery systems to the victims. Contrary, the seventh Vice-President of the United States of America and longtime Senator John C. Calhoun propagates on the significance of the slavery institution citing the benefits to the slaveholders and the slaves. This paper will provide a critical evaluation of Harriet Jacob’s condemnation of slavery in the context of the address by

Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs are both prominent influential authors of the Reform Era. Both writers, who spring forth from similar backgrounds and unimaginable situations, place a spotlight on the peculiar circumstances that surrounded the lives of the African American slaves. After reading and analyzing both Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; readers discover the horrifying truths that belong to the past in connection to slavery.

In Incidents of the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs shares a narrative of her troubling experiences throughout her life as she overcomes slavery and the many obstacles in her path in doing so. Not only does she discuss her struggles within her journey of becoming a free black person, but she also gives the readers insight to what the daily life was like as a women, apposed to the daily hardships of a black man. Within the narrative she discusses several different issues while she challenges our traditional beliefs on what may have happened during the process of the abolition of slavery and how we have gradually developed today’s government and attitude towards others.

When someone mentions slavery in American history, one may imagine hard working African Americans planting cotton or plowing fields in the scorching heat. Others may recall learning about the Underground Railroad or how slaves would escape their cruel masters and flee to the North. While both ideas were true, not many people think of the harsh lives of African American women who were often treated worse than their male counterparts, both physically and mentally. Harriet Ann Jacobs, an American author and former slave, challenges the normal stereotypes we often encounter when discussing American slavery in her autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Furthermore, she gives a critical voice for slave women and writes to encourage the abolishment of slavery with true accounts from her life.

The novel Incidents in the Life of a Slave girl by Harriet Jacobs, is the story of Harriet Jacobs under the pseudonym Linda Brent. It tells the life story of Linda and her life as a slave, her battle of freeing her children, and her journey to freedom. The majority of the book is set in a North Carolina small, close knit community in the early 1800s on Dr. Flint’s plantation, Linda’s master and owner. It begins when Linda is a child. Her parents are free and the slave owner who possesses Linda and her brother will not sell their freedom. After her parents pass she is left in the hands of her grandmother known as Aunt Martha, whom is a free black woman as well. When Linda becomes a young teenager, Dr. Flint begins to pursue her, sexual harassing her restlessly. When Linda rejects his initial offer, he spends most of his time devising plans to win her over, having her in his presence always. Although Dr. Flint is her owner and can tell her what to do, according to law, he demands her acceptance and is persistent to win Linda’s affection. Linda never gives in and finds a way to evade her master every time he is around. Trying to escape the harassment and abusiveness, Linda bares two children to a white lawyer. Seeing no change after her second child, Linda decides to run away trying to free her children from living their lives in slavery. She hides in her grandmother’s storage shed crawlspace for seven years until fleeing to the north with the help of generous white

The book, Incidents in the Life of A Slave Girl starts off by introducing the us to a slave girl who is known as Linda who represents Harriet Jacobs. The books narrates the life Harriet who was born into slavery in 1813 near Edenton, North Carolina. The time period where racial slurs had been widely and slavery was very popular. She had not know she was a slave girl until the solid age of six years after her childhood had been demolished. The main idea for publishing this book was to show the hardship she had faced through her childhood and growing up as a slave. The book is suppose the appeal the sense of empathy towards those that still suffered in slavery or are still suffering in third world countries and provide a better point of view to historian. It was written for everyone to show compassion through her enslaved brothers and sisters. Chapter 1 starts off by introducing a girl that had lived a great life until her mother had died at the age of 6 and she is sent to work for the mistress her mother had worked for all her life and live with her Grandmother. The Grandmother had raised $300 dollars and the mistress had borrowed that money from her. Eventually the mistress dies and instead of letting all her slaves free in her will she gives her slaves to relatives. The slave girls is inherited by a five year old girl. The main point of this first chapter was to argue and support the suffering of slavery. The young girl who had only lived six years of her life is basically

“No pen can give an adequate description of the all-pervading corruption produced by slavery.” Harriet Jacobs through her narrator Linda Brent reveals why she has chosen to share the story of her life in bondage. In her book, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Jacobs’ recounts the hardships she endured and those she encountered throughout her life in slavery. In the of her book Jacobs’ wrote she states, “…I do earnestly desire to arouse the women of the North to a realizing sense of the condition of two millions of women at the South…” in this way she clearly identifies her audience and her reason for sharing her story. Harriet Jacobs composed her narrative in a way that would influence the Christian Anglo women of the 1800’s.

insulted. Harriet Jacobs was not allowed to marry the person she wanted to marry instead she was focus to be with her master and treated very cruelty until she got pregnant from another white man.

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

Karl Marx once said that “religion is the opiate of the masses.” Perhaps this is the ideology that kept some 3 million American slaves in bondage. Since the beginning of time, slavery has been well documented throughout the Bible. This proves that there is a direct correlation between slavery and religion. The Old Testament is comprised of stories and lessons that document these histories of mankind.

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.