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Analysis Of Harriet Jacobs Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl

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Harriet jacobs “Incidents in the life of a slave girl”, explores her story of slavery and the fight for motherhood and freedom. Her story explores the harsh brutality of slave owners both phsically, emotionally,and sexualy. “Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women. Superadded to the burden common to all, they have wrongs, and sufferings, and mortifications peculiarly their own”.(Jacobs, p. 86). She fights for years for the freedom of her family and the pursuit to live a family life. In Barbara Welters essay,”The Cult of True Womanhood”, she explains what a true woman is supposed to be. She speaks of the housewife appearance she must keep, and the duties that come with that. Both reading relate in the views of what …show more content…

At a young age she did not face these harsh acts but as she gets older in age she begins to experience the unwanted sexual attention from her slave master, Dr.Flint. As the book goes on she is vigorously pursued by Dr.Flint who does all he can to get her to have sex with him. She is then forced to have sex with another white man in hopes it will stop Dr.Flints advances and deny him her purity, yet it doesn't work and just infuriates him and increases his pursuit. She says she “felt as if she had been forsaken by God and man” (Jacobs, p. 54) This is something that often happened during slavery and didn't only affect the slaves but also the slave owners wives. the wives of the slave owners would often get jealous of these girls for having babies by their husbands and in turn the would be very harsh to the girls out of …show more content…

She says, "In view of these things, why are you silent, ye free men and women of the north? Why do your tongues falter in maintenance of the right?" (Jacobs,33) She uses a couple different strategies to show this. She writes deeply into the horrors of slavery, mainly based on women slaves, and the love these women had for their children to play on the readers sympathy and compassion. She keeps the readers engaged in the her intensive want to secure the safety of her children no matter what. She plays at the hero/heroine role that the slave goes through in their life to accomplish their goals of freedom while pulling a sympathetic emotion out of the reader. The thought of family is heavy within this story. There is a longer search in her life to have the family she once had as a child. The want for a husband that she loves, a father to her children that can have his last name, and a house that she can own with her family. Jacobs ends her story unlike most heroin style stories. She says that marriage isn't something she gets to experience at the end but freedom is instead the reward. The way she was forced to have children with a man that she didn't truly love just out of spite of Dr. Flint and the children she had couldn't even have the name of their father helped to express the harshness she had to face with being

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Harriet A. Jacobs was born a slave in North Carolina in 1813 and became a fugitive in the 1830s. She recorded her triumphant struggle for freedom in an autobiography that was published pseudonymously in 1861. As Linda Brent, the book 's heroine and narrator, Jacobs recounts the history of her family: a remarkable grandmother who hid her from her master for seven years: a brother who escaped and spoke out for abolition; her two children, whom she rescued and sent north. She recalls the degradation of slavery and the special sexual oppression she found as a slave woman: the master who was determined to make her his concubine. With Frederick Douglass 's account of his life, it is one of the two archetypes in the genre of the slave

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When Jacobs escapes to New York, she is employed as a nurse to a white family and often accompanies them to dinners and events. This experience teaches Jacobs that even though most people in the North considered themselves abolitionists, they were still racist toward African Americans. While at a dinner with the family she is employed by, she is asked to “seat the little girl in the chair, and stand behind it and feed her,” (page 144) when she sits the child in her lap. She emphasizes the fact that no matter where she goes, slavery and racism will always follow

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Since these women were never exposed to this form of cruelty before, it would have been difficult for them to comprehend the problems that Jacobs faced as a slave. Her difficulties become evident when she starts working for Dr. Norcom at a very young age. Not only did he physically abuse her on a daily basis, but he also psychologically abused her with sexual threats regarding herself and her children. She goes into detail about the horrors of slavery when she

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