harriet jacobs life of a slave girl essay

Literature Analysis: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs Essay

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Introduction

There are two reasons that explain the tribulations that Harriet Jacobs went through in her life. Foremost, there is her being deemed black. Secondly, there is her being a member of the female gender. In this essay, I will show that her troubles are more attributable to her perceived race rather than her gender.

She faces all the following problems due to her race: her being a slave is wholly attributable to her being black; Dr. Flint obliterates Jacobs’ hopes of being freed by her lover; she is emotionally distressed after sacrificing her purity to hurt Dr. Flint; she suffers greatly on account of her son’s status as a slave; she is forced to live in hiding for seven years to escape Dr. Flint’s cruelty; Mr. Sands reneges on his promise to free her children; and, she eventually finds out that even in the North, she is maltreated on account of her race just like in the South.

To begin with, the root cause of Jacobs’ suffering is her status as a slave. Most importantly, her being a slave is wholly attributable to her being black. She would have had a chance at freedom in childhood but a promise made to her dying mother by her mistress was not kept. On her mother’s death, Jacobs had been left in the care of her mother’s mistress.

The mistress had promised to never let Jacobs and her siblings suffer, a promise she had made during the last moments of Jacobs’ mother: “on her deathbed her mistress promised her children should never suffer for a thing” (14). This promise to look after Jacobs and her siblings was kept, up to her mistresses’ death.

Instead of freeing 12 year old Jacobs, she bequeaths her to the five year old daughter of her sister. Jacobs realizes that a promise made to a dying slave is not at all binding and that her fate is solely the business of her masters. On this realization, she harbors great bitterness towards her dead mistress (16).

This act of disloyalty by her mistress was not carried out because Jacobs or her mother were women. Rather, it was for the reason that they were black, and therefore slaves, that her mother’s mistress found no reason to live up to her words. This would lead to Jacobs’ troubles at the hand of Dr. Flint and in her bid to escape from the south.

Secondly, Dr. Flint obliterates Jacobs’ hopes of being freed by her lover. When Jacobs falls in love with a free black man, Dr. Flint refuses to let her marry him saying that he would only allow her to get married if it were to one of his salves.

He forbids her from seeing or speaking to her lover and declares that he would shoot him if he ever came to seek her in the doctor’s premises (63). This callous behavior by Dr. Flint could be explained by the fact that he was sexually attracted to Jacobs. He refuses to sell to Jacobs her free lover on the pretext that Jacobs belonged to his daughter and not to him.

It could be argued that denying Jacobs her right to marry could be attributable to the fact that she was a woman, and because Dr. Flint was interested in her. However, it is purely because Jacobs was black, and therefore a slave, that Dr. Flint was able to exercise such power over her destiny. He refused to sell her off thereby ruining her chance at freedom and love. For this reason, Jacobs would suffer greatly; in the Flint household, and later in attempting to relocate to the northern states.

Jacobs is emotionally distressed after sacrificing her purity to hurt Dr. Flint. Jacobs decides to offer herself to Mr. Sands in order to have a basis to refuse Dr. Flint’s offer to build her a house. In an apparent change of tact in his pursuit of Jacobs, Dr. Flint tells her that he would build her a house (82).

In another bid to free herself from Dr. Flint’s control, she sleeps with a single white lawyer, Mr. Sands. Her hope was that Dr. Flint would be so angry with her that he would decide to sell her off at which point Mr. Sands would buy her. She however becomes pregnant with Mr. Sands’ child in the process.

When Dr. Flint finally orders her to move to the new house, she reveals to him that she was expecting a child by another man (87). While Dr. Flint does not take the news well, as she had hoped, she finds out that her actions have an even greater effect on her. She felt that she had to sacrifice her purity as a woman in order to free herself from Dr. Flint. She is pained by the feeling that she had betrayed her family and greatly humiliated herself.

Her grandmother, thinking that Jacobs had slept with her master, throws her out of her house (88). It is essentially because Jacobs is deemed black, and therefore a slave, that she felt that the only way to free herself from Dr. Flint was to give her purity away to a man she did not love. She is forced to result to using her femininity to earn something that was rightfully hers: freedom.

Jacobs suffers greatly on account of her son’s status as a slave. Born to a black woman, he was bound to end up as a slave himself. Even if Mr. Sands was to accept him as his child, he still would have been legally incapable of freeing him from Dr. Flint. Her mother on the other hand, was utterly helpless in this situation.

It is the natural instinct of the mother to protect her child. Jacobs was however incapable of doing anything to change things for her son and this was the source of great inner pain for her. This feeling of inadequacy was apparently so strong that she even prayed that her son die rather than live to end up as a salve: “death is better than slavery” (54).

The extremity of her wish is evidence enough of the psychological torture that her inadequacy must have signified. It also signifies her belief that his son’s being black was equivalent to slave status. Had she been a member of the white race, she would have been more empowered as to be capable of directing her son’s life. As such, it is purely for the reason that she was black, and therefore a slave, that she has to endure such pain on account of her son’s fate.

Because she has no other way of escaping Dr. Flint’s cruelty, Jacobs is forced to live in hiding for seven years. She lives in a hidden attic in her grandmother’s house which let in neither light nor sufficient air. Owing to its low ceiling, she has to stay seated because she otherwise would hit her head had she attempted to stand (174).

She had to live without human company but for hasty correspondence through an opening with her grandmother, aunt or uncle during the night (174). She is tormented by rats and mice and has to endure the bites of “hundreds of little red insects, fine as a needles point” for weeks on end (175).

The compartment would get incredibly hot during the day since she only had shingles to protect her from direct sunlight (173). She is totally removed from society and it is only the sight of her children and engaging herself with sewing that helps retain her sanity. She does all this in order to free herself from Dr. Flint. By imprisoning herself in that small compartment, she feels that she is free from the control of her master.

She subjects herself to physical discomfort for the sake of psychological freedom. It is as a result of the relationship between slaves, a status that depended on one’s race, and their masters that Dr. Flint was capable of having such great power over Jacobs. Thus, Jacobs suffering in this respect, essentiality boils down to her being black, rather than the fact that she is female.

For the reason that Jacobs was black, and therefore a slave, Mr. Sands did not feel compelled to keep his word regarding her children’s freedom. On the day of reunion of Jacobs and her daughter in Washington, she learns that Mr. Sands had reneged on his promise to her children.

Instead, he bequeathed Jacob’s daughter to his eldest daughter as her maid (253). It is then that she realized that she was incapable of protecting her children if she herself was not free. Even though she says that she at times felt free, she lived in a state of insecurity for both her own sake and that of her children (253). It was a hurtful affair for her to realize that Mr. Sands had been dishonest with her.

This is especially so when she realizes that it is purely due to her being black that Mr. Sands found it so easy to break his promise. It is also of great significance that Ellen, is in the same situation as her mother even though they are both in the North. At the same time, Jacobs feels great helplessness in the face of her daughter’s suffering. She suffers all these tribulations due to her status as a slave.

Jacobs finds out that even in the North, she is maltreated on account of her race just like in the South. This is in spite of the fact that racism and slavery are differentiated in the north. When Jacobs travels to Albany with Mrs. Bruce in a steamboat, she is asked to leave her table by a fellow colored man (264).

This is despite the fact that other nurses, albeit white, were allowed to sit and have tea with their mistresses. It becomes clear that her race has been her primary disadvantage since the white nurses would have been victims of discrimination too. From this perspective, I fully believe that her being deemed black has the most blame for the persecutions she endures rather than her being a woman

Finally, it is obvious that part of Jacobs’ suffering is attributable to her gender. However, as shown above, her race, which incidentally dictates her status as a slave in society, is more influential in contributing towards it. The autobiography should therefore be read, foremost, as reporting the afflictions of a slave and then, secondly, as the story of a girl who is a slave.

Harriet, Jacobs. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Boston: Phillips and Samson, 1861. Print.

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Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

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The Dehumanizing Effects of Slavery

Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl tells the autobiographical story of one woman’s journey from slavery to freedom. Over the course of her memoir, in which she tells her story under the pseudonym Linda Brent , Jacobs broadly critiques slavery and its harmful effect on a society’s morals. While many of the slaves around Jacobs are good people of strong character, their owners and the legal system refuse to recognize these…

Sexual Virtue and Sexual Abuse

In her narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl , Harriet Jacobs uses the pseudonym Linda Brent to describe her own upbringing as a slave within a white household . In doing so, she focuses on the vulnerability and moral predicament of black women who are powerless against the sexual abuses of white men. Linda wants to fulfill contemporary norms of feminine chastity and respectability; moreover, she wants to present herself as a…

Motherhood and Family

In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl , Harriet Jacobs argues for abolition by detailing the impact of slavery on families in the Southern community where her alter-ego, Linda Brent , grows up. Slavery deprives black mothers of their legitimate rights over their children, who may be sold away or otherwise harmed at any moment; it also creates discord and moral decline among white families whose patriarchs are likely to father children by…

Christianity

In her autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl , Harriet Jacobs describes the youth of her alter-ego, Linda Brent , as a slave in the American South. The narrative often meditates on the existence of slavery within a society that purports to fulfill Christian principles. Linda observes the hypocritical Christianity practiced by her owners and the white community, who use religion as a justification for slavery. At the same time, she describes…

In her narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl , Harriet Jacobs chronicles her alter ego Linda Brent ’s quest for freedom. In the process, she gives a deft analysis of the social dynamics of slave-owning households, especially the interactions between enslaved women and white women. In many instances, white “mistresses” behave with appalling cruelty towards female slaves, often out of jealousy or worry that the slaves are sexually attracted to their husbands…

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Harriet Jacobs and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

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Book description

Harriet Jacobs, today perhaps the single-most read and studied black American woman of the nineteenth century, has not until recently enjoyed sustained, scholarly analysis. This anthology presents a far-ranging compendium of literary and cultural scholarship which will take its place as the primary resource for students and teachers of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. The contributors include both established Jacobs scholars such as Jean Fagan Yellin (biographer and editor of the annotated edition of Incidents), Frances Smith Foster, Donald Gibson, and emerging critics Sandra Gunning, P. Gabrielle Foreman, and Anita Goldman. The essays take on a variety of subjects in Incidents, treating representation, gender, resistance, and spirituality from differing angles. The chapters contextualise both the historical figure of Harriet Jacobs and her autobiography as a created work of art; all endeavour to be accessible to a heterogeneous readership.

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Frontmatter pp i-iv

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Contents pp v-vi

Introduction: over-exposed, under-exposed: harriet jacobs and incidents in the life of a slave girl pp 1-10.

• By Rafia Zafar

“I Disguised My Hand”: Writing Versions of the Truth in Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the life of a Slave Girl and John Jacobs's “A True Tale of Slavery” pp 11-43

• By Jacqueline Goldsby

Through Her Brother's Eyes: Incidents and “A True Tale” pp 44-56

• By Jean Fagan Yellin

Resisting Incidents pp 57-75

• By Frances Smith Foster

Manifest in Signs: The Politics of Sex and Representation in Incidents in the life of a Slave Girl pp 76-99

• By P. Gabrielle Foreman

Earwitness: Female Abolitionism, Sexuality, and Incidents in the life of a Slave Girl pp 100-130

• By Deborah M. Garfield

Reading and Redemption in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl pp 131-155

• By Sandra Gunning

Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, and the Slavery Debate: Bondage, Family, and the Discourse of Domesticity pp 156-178

• By Donald B. Gibson

Motherhood Beyond the Gate: Jacobs's Epistemic Challenge in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl pp 179-198

• By John Ernest

“This Poisonous System”: Social Ills, Bodily Ills, and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl pp 199-215

• By Mary Titus

Carnival Laughter: Resistance in Incidents pp 216-232

• By Anne Bradford Warner

Harriet Jacobs, Henry Thoreau, and the Character of Disobedience pp 233-250

• By Anita Goldman

The Tender of Memory: Restructuring Value in Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl pp 251-274

• By Stephanie A. Smith

Conclusion: Vexed Alliances: Race and Female Collaborations in the Life of Harriet Jacobs pp 275-292

List of contributors pp 293-296, index pp 297-306, cambridge studies in american literature and culture pp 307-308, altmetric attention score, full text views.

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Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

104 pages • 3 hours read

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Summary and Study Guide

The memoir Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) is an account of the life of Harriet Ann Jacobs, who calls herself “Linda Brent” in the narrative . Written in the tradition 18th-century writer Olaudah Equiano, Jacobs’s work joins that of her American contemporaries and fellow anti-slavery activists Solomon Northrup and Frederick Douglass. It is a key text for understanding the conditions of the lives of the enslaved in the Southern United States in the 19th century.

Jacobs was probably born in 1813. Incidents , her only work, was one of the first rare slave narratives that explored the unique condition of enslaved Black women. Jacobs went on to become a teacher and an abolitionist, moving frequently to make ends meet. Her daughter, Louisa Matilda Jacobs, called Lulu, became the first female instructor at Howard University, after having trained in home economics. She then became a matron at the institution. Neither of these positions eased her family’s financial difficulties. Jacobs’s son Joseph became the subject of Mary E. Lyons’s fictionalized 2007 biography Letters from a Slave Boy: The Story of Joseph Jacobs , which focuses on the whaling voyages that Jacobs mentions in her narrative.

Jacobs died in 1897. Her family’s papers were published in 2008 by University of North Carolina Press.

Harriet Jacobs, who calls herself Linda Brent in the narrative, was born to two enslaved parents, both of whom died when she was a child. She and her younger brother, William (in reality, John S. Jacobs), were raised by their grandmother, Martha, who lived freely in her own home as a result of gaining a reputation and income from selling her homemade crackers.

Harriet’s first six years of childhood were relatively peaceful. When she became a teenager, her owner, Dr. Flint (James Norcom) expressed his sexual interest in her. Harriet did her best to elude him and asserted her independence, both by establishing a romantic relationship with a free Black man who was a childhood friend, and by employing various ruses to keep Dr. Flint at bay. Her efforts did nothing to prevent Mrs. Flint’s jealousy. Mrs. Flint blamed Harriet for her husband’s sexual advances. Harriet later decided to have a relationship and children with a local man named Mr. Sands (Samuel Treadwell). With him, she bore a son named Benjamin (Joseph Jacobs), and a daughter named Ellen (Louisa Jacobs). Mr. Sands promised Harriet that he would free their children. He employed a speculator who successfully purchased Harriet’s brother William and her two children. However, Dr. Flint refused to sell Harriet herself until he could get her to submit to his entreaties for a sexual relationship. Only her grandmother, who bore some influence in the community, protected her from rape and further violence, playing on Dr. Flint’s fears of being exposed.

When Harriet refused Dr. Flint’s offer for better treatment in exchange for a sexual relationship, he arranged for her to go to his son’s plantation. The more cruel Mr. Flint worked Harriet incessantly. He also beat children, which made her worry about how her own would be treated if they were moved there. Mr. Flint’s new wife was similarly vicious—she did not even believe that elderly slaves should be fed. When Harriet received news from a local White man that Mr. Flint intended to bring Harriet’s children onto his land, Harriet quickly made plans for her escape and theirs.

Harriet hid in an unused pantry in the home of a slave owner. The slave owner’s wife had agreed to keep her there until it was safe to move her. Harriet was then taken to her grandmother’s attic, where she remained for seven years until her father’s best friend, Peter, could get her on a ship going north. When the opportunity finally arrived, Harriet initially balked, but her grandmother convinced her—the house was becoming less safe.

A friendly ship’s captain and sailors took Harriet and her friend Fanny, also a fugitive slave, to Philadelphia. In Philadelphia, an African American clergyman and his wife took in Harriet, while one of his friends housed Fanny. Soon, the clergyman secured Fanny and Harriet second-class train tickets to New York. In New York City, Fanny and Harriet parted ways.

Harriet first worked as a seamstress. She then quickly found employment with Mrs. Bruce, an Englishwoman who needed a nurse for her infant daughter Mary. When Harriet and Mrs. Bruce traveled to Rockaway Beach, Harriet experienced discrimination in public accommodations when she was refused service.

Harriet used her income to support her daughter Ellen who lived with a relative of Mr. Sands. Harriet soon realized that Mr. Sands would not help Ellen become free—he had made plans for Ellen to become a lifelong maid.

After Mrs. Bruce died, Harriet traveled with Mary and Mr. Bruce to England, so that the little girl could see her mother’s relatives. Harriet stayed in that country for nearly a year and recorded experiencing no racism.

Mr. Bruce married an aristocratic American woman who shared her predecessor’s anti-slavery sentiments. They, too, had a baby whom Harriet agreed to nurse. Harriet confessed that she was a fugitive slave. Worried both over Ellen’s condition and Dr. Flint’s fervent pursuit of Harriet after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, the second Mrs. Bruce had Harriet go to New England for several months with the baby. Harriet returned to New York only after Dr. Flint died. Harriet learned that Dr. Flint’s remarried widow and her new husband were trying to get Harriet back to make up for their lost fortune. To secure Harriet’s safety permanently, Mrs. Bruce met with a speculator who paid Mr. Dodge $300 for Harriet. Mrs. Bruce, as promised, promptly freed Harriet.

Harriet ends the narrative by telling the reader that she remained with Mrs. Bruce. Though she did not yet have a home of her own, she was free and close to her daughter.

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Some of the differences in the readership and reception of Jacobs’s 1861 narrative and Douglass’s first, 1845 autobiography (he wrote two more, in 1855 and 1881, the latter expanded in 1892) reflect simply the differing literary and political circumstances that prevailed at the Prescribed formats governed the publication of slave narratives. time of their construction and publication. When Douglass published his Narrative of the Life , the Abolitionist movement was beginning to gain political force, while the long-delayed publication of Jacobs’s Incidents in 1861 was overshadowed by the start of the Civil War. Douglass was a publicly acclaimed figure from almost the earliest days of his career as a speaker and then a writer. Harriet Jacobs, on the other hand, was never well-known. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl disappeared from notice soon after its publication, without a large sale, while Douglass’s first book went through nine editions in its first two years and eventually became the standard against which all other slave narratives—even his own later ones—are measured.

Douglass’s 1845 narrative grew out of the story of enslavement that he honed as a speaker for the Massachusetts Antislavery Society. “Discovered” and hired to lecture on the abolitionist circuit by William Lloyd Garrison in 1841, three years after he had made his escape from Baltimore, Douglass developed rhetorical devices common to sermons and orations and carried these over to his narrative, which abounds with examples of repetition, antithesis, and other classical persuasive strategies. His narrative was the culmination of Douglass based his narrative on the sermon. his speech-making career, reflecting his mastery of a powerful preaching style along with the rhythms and imagery of biblical texts that were familiar to his audiences. Douglass also reflected the Emersonian idealism so prominent in the 1840s, as he cast himself in the role of struggling hero asserting his individual moral principles in order to bring conscience to bear against the nation’s greatest evil. In addition, his story could be read as a classic male “initiation” myth, a tale which traced a youth’s growth from innocence to experience and from boyhood into successful manhood; for Douglass, the testing and journey motifs of this genre were revised to highlight the slave’s will to transform himself from human chattel into a free American citizen.

Harriet Jacobs, on the other hand, began her narrative around 1853, after she had lived as a fugitive slave in the North for ten years. She began working privately on her narrative not long after Cornelia Grinnell Willis purchased her freedom and gave her secure employment as a Jacobs modeled her narrative on the sentimental or domestic novel. domestic servant in New York City. Jacobs’s manuscript, finished around four years later but not published for four more, reflects in part the style, tone, and plot of what has been called the sentimental or domestic novel, popular fiction of the mid-nineteenth century, written by and for women, that stressed home, family, womanly modesty, and marriage. In adapting her life story to this genre, Jacobs drew on women writers who were contemporaries and even friends, including well-known writers Lydia Maria Child and Fanny Fern (her employer’s sister in law), but she was also influenced by the popularity of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin , which appeared in 1851.

Stowe’s genius lay in her ability to harness the romantic melodrama of the sentimental novel to a carefully orchestrated rhetorical attack against slavery, and no abolitionist writer in her wake could steer clear of the impact of her performance. Jacobs, and also Frederick Douglass in his second autobiography of 1855, took advantage of Stowe’s successful production of a work of fiction that could still lay claim to the authority of truth. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl did not fictionalize or even sensationalize any of the facts of Jacobs’s experience, yet its author, using pseudonyms for all of her “characters,” did create what William Andrews has called a “novelistic” discourse, 1 including large segments of dialogue among characters. Jacobs used the devices of sentimental fiction to target the same white, female, middle-class, northern audiences who had been spellbound by Uncle Tom’s Cabin , yet her narrative also shows that she was unwilling to follow, and often subverted, the genre’s promotion of “true womanhood,” a code of behavior demanding that women remain virtuous, meek, and submissive, no matter what the personal cost.

Gender considerations account not only for many of the differences in style and genre that we see in Douglass’s and Jacobs’s narratives, but also for the versions of slavery that they endured and the versions of authorship that they were able to shape for themselves in freedom. Douglass was a public speaker who could boldly self-fashion himself as hero of his own adventure. In his first narrative, he combined and equated the achievement of selfhood, manhood, freedom, and voice. The resulting lead character of his autobiography is a boy, and then a young man, who is robbed of family and community and who gains an identity not only through his escape from Baltimore to Massachusetts but through his Douglass focuses on the struggle to achieve manhood and freedom. Jacob focuses on sexual exploitation. ability to create himself through telling his story. Harriet Jacobs, on the other hand, was enmeshed in all the trappings of community, family, and domesticity. She was literally a “domestic” in her northern employment, as well as a slave mother with children to protect, and one from whom subservience was expected, whether slave or free. As Jacobs pointedly put it, " Slavery is bad for men , but it is far more terrible for women." The overriding concern of Jacobs’s narrative was one that made her story especially problematic both for herself as author and for the women readers of her time. Because the major crisis of her life involved her master’s unrelenting, forced sexual attentions, the focus of Jacobs’s narrative is the sexual exploitation that she, as well as many other slave women, had to endure. For her, the question of how to address this “unmentionable” subject dominates the choices she delineates in her narrative—as woman slave and as woman author.

Like Douglass, Jacobs was determined to fight to the death for her freedom. Yet while Douglass could show “how a slave became a man” in a physical fight with an overseer, Jacobs’s gender determined a different course. Pregnant with the child of a white lover of her own choosing, fifteen year old Jacobs reasoned (erroneously) that her condition would spur her licentious master to sell her and her child. Once she was a mother, with “ties to life,” as she called them, her concern for her children had to take precedence over her own self-interest. Thus throughout her narrative, Jacobs is looking not only for freedom but also for a secure home for her children. She might also long for a husband, but her shameful early liaison, resulting in two children born “out of wedlock,” meant, as she notes with perhaps a dose of sarcasm, that her story ends “not, in the usual way, with marriage,” but “with freedom.” In this finale, she still mourns (even though her children were now grown) that she does not have “a home of my own.” Douglass’s 1845 narrative, conversely, ends with his standing as a speaker before an eager audience and feeling an exhilarating “degree of freedom.” While Douglass’s and Jacobs’s lives might seem to have moved in different directions, it is nevertheless important not to miss the common will that their narratives proclaim. They never lost their determination to gain not only freedom from enslavement but also respect for their individual humanity and that of other bondsmen and women.

Guiding Student Discussion

• Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) is available, along with introductory material, at http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/douglass/douglass.html
• Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) by Harriet Jacobs is available with introductory material at http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/jacobs/jacobs.html

A particularly interesting gender comparison can be made of Douglass and Jacobs through examining the identical disguises that they wore as they maneuvered their way to freedom in southern port cities that were their homes (Baltimore and Edenton, NC, respectively). They each appeared in their city’s streets wearing the outfit of a merchant seaman. This costume enabled Douglass to board a boat and sail away to freedom. In Compare disguises. his first narrative, Douglass actually refused to give any details of his escape, insisting on his power, as narrator, to withhold or reveal information as he saw fit, so his sailor disguise emerged only in later versions of his story. 2 Jacobs, her face “blackened” with charcoal, wore her costume only long enough to walk through her town unrecognized on her way to her free grandmother’s house, where she was to spend seven years of hiding in a crawl space over a storage shed. Jacobs’s brief gender transformation through cross-dressing, followed by her long “retreat” into total physical concealment, is telling evidence of how differently an enslaved man and an enslaved woman responded to the challenges of their lives as slaves as well as autobiographers.

By bringing together other specific scenes from each text, students can follow, for a time, what Anne G. Jones calls in her article (sited below) “the forking path of gendered binary oppositions.” Do Douglass and Jacobs, in their lives and in the stylistic features of their writing, conform to our stereotypical expectations regarding how men and women respond, speak, and act? Jacobs is of necessity much more deeply concerned with her own family, with the community that surrounded her as a “town” slave, with the wellbeing of the children and grandmother who depended on her. Like most other women of her time, her life was more private, her sphere of action more limited to the home, her relationships with others more interdependent, less autonomous, than men’s. Douglass’s circumstances were as different as his gender; he had few family contacts, he lived on remote plantations as well as in a town, he was of a different “class” as well as gender from Jacobs. So which of the two slaves’ opportunities were related to gender, and which to time, place, class, or other forces?

Beyond gender and circumstances, students can see the narratives of Jacobs and Douglass as remarkable works of both literature and history. In these arenas, what do the narratives show us when compared to other works of their time? Slave narratives and students. What do they tell us about life in our own time? Has an understanding of slavery from the perspective of the slave him/herself become irrelevant? Another way to study the narratives fruitfully is to see the many different expressive purposes they embody. They functioned in their own time as propaganda as well as autobiography, as Jeremiad as well as melodrama. In our time, can they bring the past alive in ways that invigorate students’ understanding of history? Can they show students how to imagine their own selfhood and circumstances through writing personal stories that takes them, through trials and struggles, on a journey to freedom and fulfillment? Can the slave narratives show students how to argue forcefully for what they believe in, how to attack major problems in their society? Few writers illustrate better, through more powerful voices, the threat to as well as the promise of the American dream of freedom. This is perhaps the most important legacy they have left for students to ponder.

Changing Approaches to the Study of the Narratives

After the Civil War ended, the narratives written by fugitive slaves inevitably lost much of their attraction for most readers. As historians began to study the institution of slavery in the early twentieth century, they unfortunately tended to dismiss the slaves’ life writings as unreliable propaganda or as too heavily edited to be considered valid testimony from the slaves themselves. The most important of these early historians, Ulrich B. Phillips, indicated in his authoritative American Negro Slavery (1918) that the slaves’ narratives as sources were untrustworthy, biased accounts, and assessments such as his helped to keep them in relative obscurity until the 1950s. In 1948 Benjamin Quarles published the first modern biography of Douglass, which was followed in 1950 by the first volume of what was ultimately a 5 volume work from Phillip Foner: Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass . These texts were part of the new consciousness that began the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s, and the black studies programs that followed in the 1960s and 70s brought about more re-evaluations asserting the centrality of the slave narratives to American literary history. In this new era, Douglass’s 1845 narrative, given its first full, modern publication in 1960, was considered the classic example of the genre. 3

Among historical studies, works such as John Blassingame’s The Slave Community: Plantation Life in Antebellum South used the fugitive slave narratives, Douglass’s works prominent among them, to provide much needed credibility for the slaves’ perspective on bondage and freedom. Ironically, Blassingame spurned Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents as unreliable primarily because he found it to be too “melodramatic,” and he voiced suspicions that the narrative was the work of Jacobs’s friend and editor, Lydia Maria Child. In this dismissal of Jacobs’s authorship he ignored the fact that Child, in her introduction to Jacobs’s work, stressed that she had made only the most “trifling” editorial changes and that “both ideas and the language” were Jacobs’s own. Incidents began receiving new interest with a 1973 edition (published by Harcourt Brace). However, its complete recovery of as an authentic slave-authored account was not accomplished until historian Jean Fagin Yellin, through extensive archival research published in a 1981 article, proved the truth of Jacobs’s story as well as the painstaking process involved in her struggle to write and publish her book. 4 Yellin has continued to lead in the reclamation of Jacobs’s work, publishing her own Harvard University Press in 1987.

Beginning in the late 1970s, book-length studies began to stress the importance of the fugitive slave narratives, including prominently both Douglass’s and Jacobs’s, as literary works valuable not only as historical evidence but as life writing that employed a wide range of rhetorical and literary devices. Frances Smith Foster's Witnessing Slavery (1979), Robert B. Stepto's From Behind the Veil (1979), and two collections of essays— The Art of the Slave Narrative (edited by John Sekora and Darwin Turner in 1982) and The Slave's Narrative (edited by Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., 1985)—provided the critical groundwork for bringing the slaves’ texts into the American literary canon. William S. McFeely’s 1991 definitive biography assured Douglass’s status as a major historical figure, as did Yellin’s biography of Jacobs, published in 2004.

William L. Andrews's definitive To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865 (1987) marked a significant new stage in the study of the written antebellum slave narrative. In a single, comprehensive book he traced the development of and changes in the form from its eighteenth century beginnings, offering closely detailed readings of individual texts, including particularly innovative analyses of Douglass’s first two autobiographies and Jacobs’s Incidents . By the late 1980s, as well, feminist critics following Jean Fagin Yellin’s lead, began to stress the value of Jacobs’s work in expressing the specific problems of women’s voice and experience, often contrasting her narrative’s structure and style, as well as her story, against Douglass’s masculinist vision in the 1845 Narrative . 5 Important articles continue to appear, some of them gathered into collections such as Deborah Garfield and Rafia Zafar, eds., Harriet Jacobs and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: New Critical Essays (1996), Eric Sundquist’s Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays (1990), Andrews’s Critical Essays on Frederick Douglass (1991), and The Cambridge Companion to Frederick Douglass (2009) edited by Maurice S. Lee.

1 See William Andrews , To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865 (Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1986): 271. Andrews points out that Frederick Douglass's 1855 autobiography also "novelizes," unlike the 1845 narrative, arguing that both Jacobs and Douglass's works exhibit "the deliberate fictionalizing of texts in the 1850s and 1860s, notably through the use of reconstructed dialogue."

2 This article, "My Escape from Slavery," The Century Illustrated Magazine 23, n.s. 1 (Nov. 1881), 125-131 is available online. Douglass chastised fugitive slave writers who told how they escaped, as he believed it gave away secrets that slave catchers could use.

3 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave , edited by Benjamin Quarles, was published by Harvard University Press in 1960.

4 In 1981, Yellin's invaluable article, "Written By Herself: Harriet Jacobs' Slave Narrative" (published in American Literature 53.3: 379-486), opened the door to all the extensive critical work on Jacobs that has followed.

5 Three articles focus sharply on gender differences between Douglass and Jacobs: Winifred Morgan's "Gender-Related Difference in the Slave Narratives of Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass" in American Studies 35 (1994). Anne B. Warner's " Santa Claus Aint a Real Man:" Anne G. Jones's "Engendered in the South: Blood and Irony in Douglass and Jacobs," both of which appear in Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts (U Va Press, 1997).

Lucinda MacKethan is Alumni Distinguished Professor of English Emerita at NC State University, where she taught Southern and African American Literature for 37 years and also served as Director of the teaching major in English. A Fellow at the National Humanities Center in 1984-85, she served as faculty for three Summer Institutes for High School Teachers. At NC State she won the Board of Governors Teaching Award twice and received the university's highest teaching honor, the Holladay Medal. She is author of two books in southern studies and editor of three plantation memoirs, as well as co-editor of The Companion to Southern Literature , which received the National Library Association's best reference award in 2002. She is also a senior consultant for the NEH award winning website, Scribblingwomen.org and is an NC Humanities Council Road Scholar.

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Biography of Harriet Jacobs, Writer and Abolitionist

Author of 'Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl'

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Harriet Jacobs (February 11, 1813-March 7, 1897), who was enslaved from birth, endured sexual abuse for years before successfully escaping to the North. She later wrote about her experiences in the 1861 book " Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl ," one of the few slave narratives written by a Black woman. Jacobs later became an abolitionist speaker, educator, and social worker.

Fast Facts: Harriet Jacobs

• Known For: Freed herself from enslavement and wrote "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" (1861), the first female slave narrative in the U.S.
• Born: February 11, 1813, in Edenton, North Carolina
• Died: March 7, 1897, in Washington, D.C.
• Parents: Elijah Knox and Delilah Horniblow
• Children: Louisa Matilda Jacobs, Joseph Jacobs
• Notable Quote: ''I am well aware that many will accuse me of indecorum for presenting these pages to the public, but the public ought to be made acquainted with [slavery’s] monstrous features, and I willingly take the responsibility of presenting them with the veil withdrawn.”

Early Years: Life in Slavery

Harriet Jacobs was enslaved from birth in Edenton, North Carolina, in 1813. Her father, Elijah Knox, was an enslaved biracial house carpenter controlled by Andrew Knox. Her mother, Delilah Horniblow, was an enslaved Black woman controlled by a local tavern owner. Due to laws at the time, a mother’s status as “free” or “enslaved” was passed onto their children. Therefore, both Harriet and her brother John were enslaved from birth.

After her mother’s death, Harriet lived with her enslaver, who taught her to sew, read, and write. Harriet had hopes of being freed after Horniblow’s death. Instead, she was sent to live with the family of Dr. James Norcom.

She was barely a teenager before her enslaver, Norcom, sexually harassed her , and she endured psychological and sexual abuse for years. After Norcom forbade Jacobs from marrying a free Black carpenter, she entered into a consensual relationship with a White neighbor, Samuel Tredwell Sawyer , with whom she had two children (Joseph and Louise Matilda).

“I knew what I did," Jacobs later wrote about her relationship with Sawyer, "and I did it with deliberate calculation…There is something akin to freedom in having a lover who has no control over you.” She had hoped that her relationship with Sawyer would offer her some protection.

Freeing Herself From Enslavement

When Norcom found out about Jacobs’ relationship with Sawyer, he became violent toward her. Because Norcom still controlled Jacobs, he controlled her children as well. He threatened to sell her children and raise them as plantation workers if she refused his sexual advances.

If Jacobs fled, the children would remain with their grandmother, living in better conditions. Partly to protect her children from Norcom, Jacobs plotted her escape. She later wrote, “Whatever slavery might do to me, it could not shackle my children. If I fell a sacrifice, my little ones were saved.”

For nearly seven years, Jacobs hid in her grandmother’s gloomy attic, a small room that was only nine feet long, seven feet wide, and three feet tall. From that tiny crawl space, she secretly watched her children grow up through a small crack in the wall.

Norcom posted a runaway notice for Jacobs , offering a $100 reward for her capture. In the posting, Norcom ironically stated that "this girl absconded from the plantation of my son without any known cause or provocation."

In June 1842, a boat captain smuggled Jacobs north to Philadelphia for a price. She then moved on to New York, where she worked as a nurse for the writer Nathaniel Parker Willis. Later, Willis' second wife paid Norcom's son-in-law $300 for Jacobs' freedom. Sawyer purchased their two children from Norcom, but refused to release them. Unable to reunite with her children, Jacobs reconnected with her brother John, who also freed himself from enslavement, in New York. Harriet and John Jacobs became part of New York's abolitionist movement. They met Frederick Douglass .

'Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl'

An abolitionist named Amy Post urged Jacobs to tell her life story to help those still in bondage, particularly women. Though Jacobs had learned to read during her enslavement, she had never mastered writing. She began to teach herself how to write, publishing several anonymous letters to the "New York Tribune," with Amy Post’s help.

Jacobs eventually finished the manuscript, titled "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl." The publication made Jacobs the first woman to author a slave narrative in the U.S. Prominent White abolitionist Lydia Maria Child helped Jacobs edit and publish her book in 1861. However, Child asserted that she did little to change the text, saying “I don't think I altered 50 words in the whole volume." Jacobs’ autobiography was “written by herself,” as the subtitle to her book states.

The subject matter of the text, including sexual abuse and harassment of enslaved women, was controversial and taboo at the time. Some of her published letters in the "New York Tribune" shocked readers. Jacobs wrestled with the difficulty of exposing her past, later deciding to publish the book under a pseudonym (Linda Brent) and giving fictitious names to people in the narrative. Her story became one of the first open discussions about sexual harassment and abuse endured by enslaved women.

Later Years

After the Civil War , Jacobs reunited with her children. In her later years, she devoted her life to distributing relief supplies, teaching, and providing health care as a social worker. She eventually returned to her childhood home in Edenton, North Carolina, to help support the recently freed enslaved people of her hometown. She died in 1897 in Washington, D.C., and was buried next to her brother John in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Jacobs’ book, "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl," made an impact in the abolitionist community at the time. However, it was forgotten by history in the wake of the Civil War. The scholar Jean Fagan Yellin later rediscovered the book. Struck by the fact that it had been written by a formerly enslaved woman, Yellin championed Jacobs' work. The book was reprinted in 1973.

Today, Jacobs’ story is commonly taught in schools alongside other influential slave narratives , including "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave" and "Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom," by William and Ellen Craft. Together, these narratives not only vividly portray the evils of slavery, but also display the courage and resilience of enslaved people.

Anthony Nittle contributed to this article. He teaches high school English for the Los Angeles Unified School District and has a master's degree in education from California State University, Dominguez Hills.

“About Harriet Jacobs Biography.” Historic Edenton State Historic Site, Edenton, NC.

Andrews, William L. “Harriet A. Jacobs (Harriet Ann), 1813-1897.” Documenting the American South, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2019.

“Harriet Jacobs.” PBS Online, Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), 2019.

"Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl." Africans in America, PBS Online, Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), 1861.

Jacobs, Harriet A. "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself." Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987.

Reynolds, David S. “To Be a Slave.” The New York Times, July 11, 2004.

"Runaway notice for Harriet Jacobs." PBS Online, Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), 1835.

Yellin, Jean Fagan. "The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers." The University of North Carolina Press, November 2008, Chapel Hill, NC.

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Harriet Jacobs (born 1813, Edenton , North Carolina , U.S.—died March 7, 1897, Washington, D.C.) was an American abolitionist and autobiographer who crafted her own experiences into Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself (1861), an eloquent and uncompromising slave narrative .

Jacobs, who was born into enslavement, was taught to read at an early age. She was orphaned as a child and formed a bond with her maternal grandmother, Molly Horniblow, who had formerly been enslaved. Beginning in 1825, Jacobs’s enslaver repeatedly sexually harassed and abused her. While in her teens she gave birth to two children fathered by a neighbour, Samuel Tredwell Sawyer, a young white lawyer. When she refused to become her enslaver’s concubine, she was sent to work on a nearby plantation. In an effort to remove her children from her enslaver’s control, Jacobs fled and spent the next seven years in hiding; meanwhile, her children were bought by their father and later sent to the North.

After escaping to the North in 1842, Jacobs worked as a nursemaid in New York City and eventually moved to Rochester , New York , to work in the antislavery reading room above abolitionist Frederick Douglass ’s newspaper, The North Star . During an abolitionist lecture tour with her brother, Jacobs began her lifelong friendship with the Quaker reformer Amy Post. Post, among others, encouraged Jacobs to write the story of her enslavement.

Self-published in 1861, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is arguably the most comprehensive slave narrative written by a woman. Writing as Linda Brent, Jacobs detailed the sexual abuse of enslaved women and the anguish felt by enslaved mothers, who frequently experienced the loss of their children. She explained her purpose in the book’s preface:

…I do earnestly desire to arouse the women of the North to a realizing sense of the condition of two millions of women at the South, still in bondage, suffering what I suffered, and most of them far worse. I want to add my testimony to that of abler pens to convince the people of the Free States what Slavery really is. Only by experience can any one realize how deep, and dark, and foul is that pit of abominations.

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was rediscovered in the 1960s during the American civil rights movement . It was often attributed to Lydia Maria Child —who is named as the book’s editor on its title page—and was considered a work of fiction, but in the 1980s the scholar Jean Fagan Yellin verified it as Jacobs’s own work.

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Incidents in The Life of a Slave Girl — Review of the Book “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” by Harriet Jacobs

Review of The Book "Incidents in The Life of a Slave Girl" by Harriet Jacobs

• Categories: Book Review Incidents in The Life of a Slave Girl Slave Trade

About this sample

Words: 1225 |

Published: Oct 2, 2020

Words: 1225 | Pages: 3 | 7 min read

Table of contents

Harriet jacobs' early years, life in slavery and search of freedom, major issues in jacobs narrative, references:.

• Jacobs, H. (1861). Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Self-published.
• Yellin, J. F. (Ed.). (2000). The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers. University of North Carolina Press.
• Painter, N. I. (1996). Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol. W. W. Norton & Company.
• Fuentes, M. V. (2017). Harriet Jacobs: A Life. The University of Georgia Press.
• Andrews, W. L. (1988). To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865. University of Illinois Press.

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National Historical Publications & Records Commission

The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers

Harriet Jacobs.

Pace University

University of North Carolina Press

Additional information at http://webpage.pace.edu/kculkin/staff.html

And http://www.worldcat.org/title/harriet-jacobs-family-papers/oclc/202544294

Harriet Ann Jacobs (1813 1897) was an African-American writer who escaped from slavery and became an abolitionist speaker and reformer. Jacobs' single work, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl , published in 1861 under the pseudonym Linda Brent, was one of the first autobiographical narratives about the struggle for freedom by female slaves and an account of the sexual harassment and abuse they endured. The Harriet Jacobs Papers consists of approximately 600 items, including writings by Jacobs, her brother John S. Jacobs, and her daughter Louisa Matilda Jacobs, all active reformers. There is also a small group of letters to the Jacobs family from other black and white abolitionists and feminists. In addition, numerous published and unpublished items discuss Jacobs and her family. These include legal documents pertaining to their enslavement, reviews and correspondence concerning Jacobs's book, and texts regarding her reform and relief work during the Civil War and Reconstruction. 

Complete in two volumes

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