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

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Harriet Jacobs was a well-known slavery abolitionist in the 1800s. She was born a Slave and ended up gaining her Freedom by fleeing her master. A couple of years later she wrote the book “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” where she wrote about her experiences with slavery and how she felt being free. Harriet describes slavery to be extremely dreadful with a lot of abuse and immorality. She also describes how freedom gives her a sense of hope and security.
To Harriet slavery is atrocious and disheartening because they aren't seen as people but instead as property. They were mistreated, beaten, and forced to live in horrible conditions. There was no escape from slavery and the only way freedom could be obtained was to flee. This didn’t come …show more content…

“Everywhere men, women, and children were whipped till the blood stood in puddles at their feet. Some received five hundred lashes; others were tied hands and feet, and tortured with a bucking paddle, which blisters the skin terribly.” (Jacobs 98). If slaves were caught trying to flee they would be brutally beaten and sometimes killed. This doesn't even account for the brutality they experience every single day by being a slave. When Harriet's daughter escaped her master he was filled with the most uproar and he said: “She shall be my slave as long as I live, and when I am dead she shall be the slave of my children” (Jacobs 166). This shows the harsh reality of slavery and how there is almost no escape from its grasp. Slaves are seen as property, not human beings and they will keep getting passed down from generation to generation. This will be an endless cycle unless the slaves do something about it, this is what makes the north so desirable. Harriet was born into slavery, which led her to wonder why this is the life …show more content…

She never knew what freedom was or what it would be like until she decided to flee the south. She talks about the changes in perspectives when it came to slaves and whether they should be free or not. She mentions what it feels like to finally be free and be reunited with her children once again. Freedom seemed to be unattainable for so long and with the freedom, she finally felt secure. As time came around more (white) people started to see the blacks as more than just slaves and started to realize that they are human too. When Harriet's mother was in her 50’s she was up for auction but she had gained a reputation in her community and no one made a bid for her. Her mistress’s sister had known Harriet's mother for 40+ years and bidded on the auction. She then granted Harriet's mom freedom.“She had lived forty years under the same roof with my grandmother; she knew how faithfully she had served her owners, and how cruelly she had been defrauded of her rights; and she resolved to protect her.” (Jacobs 21). This is showing how some of the perspectives of the white slave owners are starting to shift. They knew she was a good honest person and because of that, she was able to gain her freedom. Harriet also speaks about freedom from her own experience. “I afterwards staid with that friend in New York, and found her in comfortable circumstances. She had never thought of such a thing as wishing to go back to slavery.” (Jacobs

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Secondly, Harriet wanted a social change because she had seen and went through the difficulty of it at such a young age. This caused her to notice how little freedom, if such, they had. Also, she knew that no one should have to go through such torture without any sort of protection. Moreover, they had limited supplies for the year and only had one day for themselves, which wasn’t fair considering the fact that they worked 6 days of the week all year. After all, some slaves had tried to escape, which she witnessed, but if “caught, would be whipped, and finally sold to the chain gang,” the text states.

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As a woman, Harriet Jacobs faced unique challenges in the slave society. She was forced to endure sexual abuse from her owner and struggled to protect her children from the same abuse. This experience is clear in her narrative, which focuses mainly on the sexual misuse of female slaves. She writes with passion, using her own experiences to gain the attention of free women in the North (Jacobs).

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Similar to Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs was taken into slavery as a child not quite as young being so that she was around the age of seven when her mother died. She was sold twice, each time being so that her previous slave owners had died. Yet each time she was sold her owner had become worse to her. As she grew older her slave owners had become sexually assaulting her, consequently having two children. As she endured this pain, and torment she became craving her freedom more and

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Harriet experience an internal match between wanting her child to live and wanting him to die so he’s not forced to experience the horror of slavery. As a slave mother, it’s impossible for Harriet to be able to protect her son because she’s considered as property. This is why she thinks in some ways it would be better for her children to die than rather experience the pain of slavery. Then, when her daughter, Ellen, is born, Harriet says, ““When they told me my new-born babe was a girl, my heart was heavier than it had ever been before. Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women.

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Harriet had a tough life for the fact that she lived in fear for ten years, because she didn’t want slave owners to find her once she escaped from slavery. She expressed her slavery life through a powerful book name Incident in the Life of a Slave Girl. In this book she spoke about her white owner who harassed her and on her life as a slavery

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Rather than immediately putting an end to slavery, Northern states took a gradual approach towards abolition. This method allowed for the steady growth in the population of free blacks, which the majority of Northerners generally accepted at the time. In the book, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs described her life as a slave in the early 1800s and her ultimate goal to escape to New York. She primarily focused on the abuses of slavery and the slave’s struggle for self-definition. Her story not only impacted the lives of other female slaves when it was published in 1861, but it also affected Northern women who were dedicated to the Cult of Domesticity.

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The life of Harriet Jacobs, as relayed in “Incidents,” reveals that there is no true freedom even upon escaping for enslaved Black people in the United States, yet unlike the typical slave’s life, she had a relatively less harsh life by being a house slave. Her life shares the fear Black slaves have to live with, particularly even after escaping. However, she does have her own experience in slavery that does not correspond with other slaves. Regardless, both her shared and personal experience illustrates the life of enslaved Black people.

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Harriet was the first woman to publish Incidents in the life of a slave girl, a narrative of an African American who escaped the chains of slavery. She used her work to honestly depict the harsh life slaves had. Harriet was born a slave in North Carolina. Though teaching a slave to read and write was unlawful, her first master taught her both skills which would later give her a literary voice. Harriet became a house slave under her master named Norcom.

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She had lived her first years as happy child, but when her mother died, Harriet Jacobs was sent to her mother’s master, Margaret Hornblow, who taught her to read, write, and sew. Harriet’s master Margaret, had always shown love and affection to Harriet, which she did not realize her life as a born slave girl. In the year 1825, Harriet’s master Margaret had passed

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Harriet was forced to work hard with chores and was always given harsh punishments. She knew that her youth was being wasted with her lack of freedom and education. At that time Harriet had made up her mind that she would find a way to escape from the unfair world she was forced to live in. Even though she had grown up in a bad place, she was still able to be a role model and a difference maker.

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"I was free," she said, "but there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom. I was a stranger in a strange land, and my home after all was down in the old cabin quarter, with the old folks, and my brothers and sisters . . . I was free, and they should be free also . . . 1 would bring them all here ..." Harriet shows her confidence and determination to bring her family to freedom.

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Her 8 siblings were separated no matter how hard she tried to keep the family together but at such an early age she only had the power to do so much. When Harriet Was around 5 years old, she was bought out for a Nursemaid. As a childcare helper at such a youthful age she was not only mentally and emotionally but physically scarred because when a baby cried or when she did something a higher established person did not approve of, she was beaten. At the age seven she was bought to be a Field hand and later said she preferred to do chores for others then to work out on the field. At 12, her desire for justice grew bigger as she risked protecting other slaves she worked with. "

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Harriet Ann Jacobs is the first Afro-American female writer to publish the detailed autobiography about the slavery, freedom and family ties. Jacobs used the pseudonym Linda Brent to keep the identity in secret. In the narrative, Jacobs appears as a strong and independent woman, who is not afraid to fight for her rights. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was published in 1961, but was unveiled almost 10 years later due to the different slave narrative structure. Frequently, the slave narratives were written by men where they fight against the slavery through literacy by showing their education.

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‘Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl’ is the tale of Harriet Jacobs, who, for her wellbeing, called herself Linda Brent in the account. Harriet starts by examining her youth. She has described her life starting “I was born a slave…his strongest wish was to purchase his children…she was a little girl and she was captured…” (1). She doesn't know she is a slave until after her mom passes on when she is six. Her most punctual years were not unpalatable, but rather she is soon given to the little girl of Dr. Flint and his wife Mrs. Flint.

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As a women, she did the domestic work as most women in slavery did. “Alas! slavery still held me in its poisonous grasp. There was no chance for me to be respectable. There was no prospect of being able to lead a better life.” To Jacobs, she had grown up with the notion that she would be a slave forever and so had no hope for herself to be free.

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