Similarities Between Frederick Douglass And Harriet Jacobs

American Slave Narrators: Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs

As former slaves living in the same generation, both Harriet Jacobs (1813-1897) and Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) devoted their professional lives to telling their respective stories. As a matter of fact, Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) and Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) are considered the most important works in the slave narrative genre. Thus, their essays provide a ground for a meaningful comparison of their respective experiences of slavery in the nineteenth-century. While both writers present a significant contribution to the genre of the slave narrative, however, they differ in the way they highlight

Even readers considered her narrative factious or a sentimental novel. However, after the scholar Jean Fagan Yellin proved that her autobiography was legitimate in the 1980s, Jacobs was vindicated. Since then, many scholars have come to regard her autobiography as a crucial work in the fields of African-American and women's literature. Indeed, prior to the authentication and authorship of Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Douglass’s work served as the primary example of the slave narrative genre because it led to a rethinking and a new understanding of the genre (Riemer n.p). In addition, Douglass’s mainly focuses on the physical abuses, and most importantly, the turning point in his journey toward freedom, which came when Douglass was taught to read and write; in contrast to Jacobs, his account is purely based on the male experience, and it shows how literacy can play a crucial role in attaining freedom and

Despite the fact that they lost their mothers and realized their status as slaves at about the same age, Douglass’s and Jacobs’s feelings are very different. For instance, looking in the beginning of Jacobs’s autobiography, it is evident that she is filled with grief and sadness about losing her mother. She wrote, “I grieved for her, and my young mind was troubled with the thought who would now take care of me and my little brother” (Baym 923). After the death of her mother, Jacobs was attached to her grandmother, Aunt Marthy. For Jacobs, the relationship with her grandmother was a gift; her grandmother took over the mother’s role in her life. Douglass, on the other hand, seems indifferent about losing his mother. He says, “I received the tidings of her death with much the same emotions I should have probably felt at the death of a stranger" (Baym 1183). He is uncertain as to his age and to his father’s identity. He mentions that “my father was a white man” (1182). Douglass had a grandmother as well, but he did not maintain a connection with her because she lived so far from him (1194). Obviously, then, Douglass lacks Jacobs’s strong family ties. In addition, his childhood is totally different from Jacobs. He was exposed to the traumatic experience as a young boy when he witnessed the bloody whipping and torture of his aunt Hester. Douglass depicts this horrific experience as “the blood-stained gate, the