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

Slavery is a key theme for people to understand the history of the United States. Born in North Carolina in the nineteenth century, Harriet Ann Jacobs, as a former female slave, provided a different perspective of understanding how slavery was inflicted on enslaved women by writing the book “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl”. According to Harriet Jacobs, enslaved women’ s physical and mental trauma surrounding sexual abuse and motherhood makes the slavery for women distinct from the slavery for men.

Besides the devastating experience of physical and mental brutality suffered by both enslaved men and women, the latter suffered their own tragedies. Many enslaved women were looked upon as sexual objects that existed for their masters. Masters

It was the simplest way for those masters to increase the number of slaves under his control or slaves for sale. They just needed to consult their sexual brutality to make their slaves be pregnant so that there was no need for those masters to worry about other stable way of increasing their wealth. Also, any child of a slave woman would always be limited to become a slave. The social status of those enslaved women was unchangeably descended to their children. Masters had the right to use those children as their new labor or sell them to the market. Thus, enslaved women were often forced to bear children of their masters but not to care for them, acting as "breeders" of their masters. It was not unusual for the plantation masters, according to Harriet’s experience as a female slave, to force their female slaves to bear his offspring. These masters were often the father of many little slaves: they regard such children as property, as marketable as the pigs on the plantation (57). They used these children as backing labor or passed these children into the slave-trader's hands to gain money (57). Also, Harriet mentioned her own experience about how her master, like most masters at that time, regarded the children of those enslaved women. Her master continued his visits to remind me that her child was an addition to his stock of slaves after Harriet's first baby was born (94). To threaten Harriet and reaffirm that the son and daughter of Harriet might be sold as property, her master said, "these brats will bring me a handsome sum of money one of these days." (122). Under such circumstance, Harriet had the feeling that slavery was far more terrible for women than for men when she knew her second baby was a girl because this girl might not only inherit her social status but also experience the same tragedies as hers (119). Those