Incident In The Life Of A Slave Girl

In The Incident in the Life of a Slave Girl, Jacobs wrote in her preface, “Reader, be assured this narrative is no fiction” (Preface). Jacob’s narrative was unlike no other narrative; not because her story explained the opportunity of escaping the shackles of slavery, but how a female was a major trope. Jacobs writes her experience in slavery to not only let people know the dangers and mistreatment, but to encourage white women abolitionists to stand up for African American women and women in general. Jacobs’s narrative displayed the relationship between mother and child, the balance of reading and writing, and the evils of white men. Harriet Jacobs truly describes a slave narrative through personal voice, through adventure, and through sympathy.

Many of the common slave narratives have been told by men and how skilled and strong they have been with escaping. It has been almost always the treatment of the narrative of heroic male slaves, not their wives or sisters. By focusing almost exclusively on the narrative of male slaves, critics have left out half the picture (Braxton 380). Scholars have been misled or have forgotten the heroic African American women like Harriet Tubman, Phillis Wheatly, and Jacobs herself. These women risked their lives in not only what they believed in freedom, but what was right for their culture and for their society as a group. A slave narrative usually does not incline a main protagonist in a woman because, “There has been a resistance to a gynocrtitical or gynocentric approach to the slave narrative genre has been dominated by male bias, by linear logic, and either by thinking. We have been paralyzed by issues” (Braxton 380). Women continued to lose notoriety because of the traditional male slave narratives. The slave narratives were written from a first person point of view, were written to display sympathy for the character. Also, it was a sense of strength and heroism. In various narratives, Mr. Douglas shared his life of escaping to the Promise Land by standing up to his master, to Mr. Northup, a free African America, finding his way home after experiencing the hardships of slavery, and of course Uncle Tom’s Cabin which directs the personal accounts of how slaves were treated well or treated cruelly from different slave masters. However, it is critical to focus on Jacobs lens as a female protagonists because she shares the big picture in her journey. An example that does not display the big picture of a feminist slave narrative is “Belinda, or the Cruelty of Men Whose faces were Like the Moon,” because it did not give a big