The Life Of Frederick Douglass And The Life Of A Slave Girl

Slavery is a common topic taught to most people in America. Most of what is learned comes from the personal stories of those who lived as slaves. The excerpt of the passage “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” written by Harriet Jacobs, goes beyond discussing the life as a slave. But discusses the hypocrisy and double standards that revolve slavery.

Slavery was an embarrassing time in America’s history. In 2016, slavery has become a distant memory. It’s easy for us to admit that slavery is wrong but, in Frederick Douglass’s time no one thought that it was. Frederick Douglass went on to write books and give speeches in hope that one day all slaves would be free. In the book called “The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass”, he attempts to shine light on the American Slave system in the 1800’s.

In their narratives Frederick Douglass’ and Harriet Jacobs’ recount the agony they have gone through in a slaveholding society, where gender played a deceiving role during the captiva-tion. For slaves it was impossible to achieve designated stereotypical roles of the sexes, respec-tively for male and female, as the only officially recognized gender at that time. While Harriet Jacobs was restricted in her aspire for freedom due to her role conflict as mother and slave, Fred-erick Douglass seems distant to family matters and focused on getting his independence and pride back with education and resistance. Both were constrained to follow the general pictures default to fit the American culture and the norms set by society towards gender throughout their captivation as slaves. Yet, these specific examples of their life are despite their differences, very similar in their desires.

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress.” This famous quote is from a speech given by one of America’s most influential abolitionist speakers, Frederick Douglass. Born into slavery, this great American leader led a life many of us would find impossible to bear. After gaining his freedom from slavery, Douglass shared his stories through impressive speeches and vivid autobiographies, which helped America move forward as a country liberated from racial inequality. Although Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave allows readers to understand what life was like for slaves in antebellum America, the most important and relevant lesson to take away from this narrative today is the importance of perseverance. Douglass’s courage to resist and learn paired with his determination to keep his faith and ultimately find himself, is something to which people from every culture and time period can relate.

A woman could not be virtuous while enslaved, as they were victims of slavery and men. This impeded women to possess the virtues of true womanhood. Jacobs in her narrative also gave examples of how these virtues were broken and she is not allowed to be a lady. Both Douglass and Jacobs assert and identify themselves through the notions of manhood and womanhood. They believed and tried to make us see how womanhood and manhood based on freedom cannot be achieved while slavery and all its infamy was still in effect.

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.

In this essay, I will be examining the women in the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. The women in the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass have a major lack of control over their material circumstances. This is due to the fact that they are slaves and have nothing of their own to begin with. This text’s portrayal of women and their material circumstances supports Woolf’s theories.

Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave and Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl portray very different aspects of this shameful time in history. The life of a slave was not a static or universal lifestyle, and those held in bondage led extremely different lives. While much of this could be attributed to the region, work available, or specific plantations, the biggest difference highlighted by comparing Douglass and Jacobs, is the difference in experience based on gender. Both Douglass and Jacobs are extremely expressive writers who

Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs: two humans born into slavery. These characters had twistedly abusive masters, forcing them to live in the upmost inhumane way that none, of any era, deserve to endure. Douglass and Jacobs both had an intense passion to be free in a time when freedom depended on the mere color of skin. Their vision was to break the shackles of slavery, to be free, and live free. The vision did not only concern their freedom, but rather, the vision encompassed all fellow slaves who deserved the same absolute freedom. During the 1800s, salve narratives were extremely unlikely because most of the slaves were illiterate. However, Douglass and Jacobs were relatively well educated and wrote their own narratives describing the hardships they suffered during their journey to freedom. These narratives share a vast number of similarities and differences. Douglass’ and Jacobs’ lives contrasted by experience, yet their sacrifices were similar in oppression, and illustrating their heartbreaking narratives in the first person point-of-view, which would eventually, and greatly help the most historical movement of righteousness and freedom: the path to end slavery.

The glaring, almost scorching sun beats down on the backs of the enslaved. The sweat rolls down, past their scared backs and down to the heel of their tired aching feet. The plantations roar of devastation, but not of its crops but the people that tend to it. From dusk they rise and to the rake of night they rest, laden with what little sleep, and what little time they have to dream. Their aching scars tell tales far beyond, their eyes seen what no other, and their ears hear like no other; the slaves, encumbered as they are living history. Freedom is all but a dream, and those who dare to even dream or think are those who are not blind and know that freedom is their right. Slavery has weakened the back and soul of Frederick Douglas but surely not his mind and not even slavery can destroy the paramountcy of motherhood and community as Harriet Jacob’s simply shown. In after all, slavery has made Frederick a man and Harriet, a mother. In the “Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave,” by Frederick Douglass, it details a momentous passage of conquering education and reconquering manhood; gaining glory even though he was left to his own devices from an early age dissimilar to Harriet Jacobs in the “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.” Family values are destroyed, can we even say some existed; what it means to be a man, a husband, and a mother is a trial all on its own. Slavery is a troubling situation; it can

During the final years of legal slave ownership in the United States, the slave narrative became a popular way for literate enslaved people to express their anti-slavery stance through their own testimony. Two of the most influential writers on the slave narrative topic were the autobiographical authors Fredrick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs. Since Douglas and Jacobs were both born in a similar time period, there are many similarities found in their works. Douglass’s Narrative of the life of Fredrick Douglass, an American Slave is closely comparable to Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl when analyzing how they represented their enslavement in their autobiographies. The two authors have similar ideas when portraying their struggles with forced ignorance. Their writing also contains parallels with the corrupting power of slavery for the slave owners, as well as the parallels in pointing out the hypocrisies of using the bible to defend slavery. These similarities can be explained in part due to Douglass and Jacobs following the same basic slave narrative outline to maintain the shared goal of abolishing slavery in the United States.

The experiences, memories and treatment in any situation are viewed upon differently between a man and a woman. Obvious in the case of slavery, the two sexes were treated differently and so therefore their recollections of such events were-different. In the following short essay, we look closely at the perspective of the female slave, Harriet Jacobs in “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl”, and respectfully compared to that of a man slave, Frederick Douglass in “The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass”. Although both experienced their freedoms despite facing great

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs and the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass written by himself are two captivating passages of a slave's narrative in terms of quality and quarrel. They both shared a foresight of freedom that led them through many indistinguishable but different barriers. Being that Douglas was a male and Jacobs a female, gender played a huge role in their attempt to secure freedom as a slave.

As a means of establishing control early on, slave owners would begin to strip the slaves of any identity they had. In the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself. Douglass writes how he, as well as many other salves do not even know their own birthdate. “I have no accurate knowledge of my age”, (pg 946). Douglass further reiterates that this is not an uncommon practice by stating, “By far the larger part of the slaves know as little of their ages as a horse knows of theirs” (pg 946).

The slave narrative genre is an important part of American history. These stories are not only portraits of individual history, but also of American history. By reading the stories of the past we can better determine the path of the future. The personal stories of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs are two excellent examples of the slave narrative genre in American literature. To be sure, bondage and oppression had a lasting and profound effect on both genders; however, men and women experienced slavery in different ways. By comparing and contrasting “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave” and “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” we gain very different insights into the truth about slavery from the vantage