A Fallen Woman In Harriet Jacob's 'Our Nig'

864 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: The role of women through history

A Fallen Woman During different time of a history women were named and judged by different names, prejudices, norms and principals. Two hundred years ago, any sign of adultery or sexual relationship before or outside of marriage would be considered an act of impudence and cruelly charged by the society. Women’s innocence and sexuality meant for her husband only and must be kept to her marriage entirely. Nowadays, however, marrying, remarrying, having different sexual partners at the same time means nothing to a majority of people. But what if a woman had no choice and was pushed in the situation where she fell in love, trusted a partner with all her heart and then was left to raise her child by herself? What if there was no love …show more content…

In Harriet Jacob’s book Our Nig, Mag Smith, being a white, fallen woman, lost her status in the society and married Jim who was Afro-American to resolve her poverty. Whereas her daughter Frado, being black and having no status in the society, no position in the community, no title, profession or any rights ultimately cannot be defined as fallen women because there is no other lower level that could possibly exist for the enslaved women. Our Nig is a story of a mixed-race girl named Alfrado Smith, or Frado. Even though the most of the novel is about Frado and her struggle in Belmont’s family, her mother Mag Smith is a very important opening character who represent a fallen woman. Coming from law-class and having no experience in life, love, education or parenthood falls in love with an upper-class white gentleman who makes her pregnant and leaves her. She describes his voice as a voice that “seemed like an angel’s, alluring her upward and onward. She thought she could ascend to him and become an equal” (6). Mag wants a better life for herself and hopes that she can obtain it through a good marriage. Having no experience in love she does not …show more content…

As a tempted and fallen woman, Mag is despised from her own family, community and becomes an outcast of the society, a fallen woman. Losing her position in the society and having no money to support herself, she decides to merry a black man who feels sympathy towards her and wants to make her future better. It seems that Mag has no other choice to survive but to merry a black guy despite the “evil amalgamation” (13). White community sees such act as another fall of her dignity and completely turns out from them. Mag and Jim have two children, “pretty mulatos,” and one of the children is Frado (14). When Jim dies, Mag merries another black man named Seth. After a living for two years they decide to escape poverty by leaving the town and giving away Frado to a white family. Despite Mag’s horror and knowledge about cruelty of Mrs. Bellmont, she still decides to leave her daughter with this family. Motherhood is a key concern for Wilson in the text. Opening the novel with Mag’s story, Wilson establishes parallel themes and conditions that Frado will face throughout her life.

Show More
Related

  • Marian Minus "Girl, Colored"

    747 Words  | 2 Pages

    Much of life results from choices we make. How we meet every circumstance, and also how we allow those circumstances to affect us dictates our life. In Marian Minus’s short story, “Girl, Colored," we are given a chance to take a look inside two characters not unlike ourselves. As we are given insight into these two people, their character and environment unfolds, presenting us with people we can relate to and sympathize with. Even if we fail to grasp the fullness of a feeling or circumstance, we are still touched on our own level, evidencing the brilliance of Minus’s writing.

    Read More

  • Women In Slavery in Harriet Jacob's Incidents in the life of a Slave Girl and Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative

    935 Words  | 2 Pages

    The notion of slavery, as unpleasant as it is, must nonetheless be examined to understand the hardships that were caused in the lives of enslaved African-Americans. Without a doubt, conditions that the slaves lived under could be easily described as intolerable and inhumane. As painful as the slave's treatment by the masters was, it proved to be more unbearable for the women who were enslaved. Why did the women suffer a grimmer fate as slaves? The answer lies in the readings, Harriet Jacob's Incidents in the life of a Slave Girl and Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative which both imply that sexual abuse, jealous mistresses', and loss of children caused the female slaves to endure a more dreadful and hard life in captivity.

    Read More

  • Frederick Douglass and Harriet Wilson's Anger toward Northerners

    585 Words  | 2 Pages

    Although many white Northerners proclaimed to support the Abolition of Slavery, all of them did not have a genuine concern for the Blacks. During the Age of Abolitionism, many white Northerners were known for opposing the slavery that still existed in the Southern States of the United States of America, but writers such as Harriet Wilson and Frederick Douglass wrote literary works that exposed the white Christians and abolitionists from the North, who did not treat Blacks as their equals. In Douglass' narrative, The Narrative and life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, his autobiography, Douglass revisits his escape from slavery and his first encounter with the white abolitionists. The tone that he uses is similar to the one that Wilson uses in Our Nig; or, sketches from the life of a Free Black. In this novel, the life of Wilson is mirrored by the protagonist, Frado, who endures the harsh treatment of the Bellmonts, a white family with which she lives. Like Douglass, Wilson exhibits anger towards the white Northerners who, like their fellow white Southerners, were guilty of offending and mistreating Blacks. Wilson exhibits fury towards white Northerners who exploit Blacks by forcing them into indentured servitude.

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Our Nig

    953 Words  | 2 Pages

    Our Nig begins by introducing Mag Smith, a white woman who has been seduced and abandoned by a white male. In turn, people started to treat Smith coldly. Therefore, she left her home and

    Read More

  • Harriet Jacob Cult Of Domesticity

    116 Words  | 1 Pages

    The aim of this essay is to examine Harriet Jacob’s struggle to live up to the values encouraged by the Cult of Domesticity. This essay will advance the premise that this ideology of true womanhood fails to apply to nineteenth-century antebellum slave women of America, and was an impossible standard for them to attain due to the burden of slavery. It will do so through a threefold perspective: sexual purity, marriage, and motherhood. Loss and pain endured by the black antebellum family. By exploring these texts that record Jacob’s journey as a wife and daughter, it finds that the slave woman found America’s template for true womanhood as inadequate to express the realities of her

    Read More

  • Mother-Daughter Relationships In Toni Morrison's Sula And Nel Wright

    791 Words  | 2 Pages

    The lack of support and affection protagonists, Sula Peace and Nel Wright, causes them to construct their lives on their own without a motherly figure. Toni Morrison’s novel, Sula, displays the development of Sula and Nel through childhood into adulthood. Before Sula and Nel enter the story, Morrison describes the history of the Peace and Wright family. The Peace family live abnormally to their town of Medallion, Ohio. Whereas the Wrights have a conventional life style, living up to society’s expectations.The importance of a healthy mother-daughter relationship is shown through the interactions of Eva and Hannah Peace, Hannah and Sula, and between Helene Wright and Nel. When Sula and Nel become friends they realize the improper parenting they

    Read More

  • Rachel And Harriet Jacobs Summary

    780 Words  | 2 Pages

    “Line of Color, Sex, and Service: Sexual Coercion in the Early Republic” is a publication that discusses two women, Rachel Davis and Harriet Jacobs. This story explains the lives of both Rachel and Harriet and their relationship between their masters. Rachel, a young white girl around the age of fourteen was an indentured servant who belonged to William and Becky Cress. Harriet, on the other hand, was born an enslaved African American and became the slave of James and Mary Norcom. This publication gives various accounts of their masters mistreating them and how it was dealt with.

    Read More

  • Harriet Jacobs Incidents And A Slave Girl: An Analysis

    1129 Words  | 3 Pages

    Slavery is a term that can create a whirlwind of emotions for everyone. During the hardships faced by the African Americans, hundreds of accounts were documented. Harriet Jacobs, Charles Ball and Kate Drumgoold each shared their perspectives of being caught up in the world of slavery. There were reoccurring themes throughout the books as well as varying angles that each author either left out or never experienced. Taking two women’s views as well as a man’s, we can begin to delve deeper into what their everyday lives would have been like. Charles Ball’s Fifty Years in Chains and Harriet Jacobs Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl were both published in the early 1860’s while Kate Drumgoold’s A Slave Girl’s Story came almost forty years later

    Read More

  • Motherhood in Harriet Jacob's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

    1205 Words  | 3 Pages

    Motherhood, in its simplest definition is the state of being a mother; however, it isn't as clear cut and emotionless as the definition implies. Motherhood holds a different meaning for everyone. For some it is a positive experience, for others it's negative. Different situations change motherhood and the family unit. Slavery is an institution that twists those ideas into something hardly recognizable. The Master and the Mistress are parental figures. Slaves never became adults; they are called boy or girl no matter what their age. They are forced into a situation where biological parents have no say over their children. The slave owners control the slaves' lives and destroy the traditional idea of motherhood and family. Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl deals with the issues of being a woman in slavery. The mothers throughout the narrative are powerless in keeping their children from harm. They watch as their children are hurt or sold and can't do anything about it. The mothers use everything in their power to protect their children and succeed in their motherly duty.

    Read More

  • The Trial Of Girlhood And A Perilous Passage In The Slave Girl's Life Analysis

    758 Words  | 2 Pages

    In conclusion, women were considered property and slave holders treated them as they pleased. We come to understand that there was no law that gave protection to female slaves. Harriet Jacob’s narrative shows the true face of how slaveholders treated young female slave. The female slaves were sexually exploited which damaged them physically and psychologically. Furthermore it details how the slave holder violated the most sacred commandment of nature by corrupting the self respect and virtue of the female slave. Harriet Jacob writes this narrative not to ask for pity or to be sympathized but rather to show the white people to be aware of how female slaves constantly faced sexual exploitation which damaged their body and soul.

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Sigmund Freud Sexual Morality And Modern Nervousness

    814 Words  | 2 Pages

    The male is supposed to be the main bread winner of the family unit, making money and protecting the woman while she tends to the children and the house. In the modern day this mold has been challenged to a certain extent with more woman moving into careers beyond the home. However, in Freud’s time these set matrimonial roles were still in place, especially the ones limiting women from having any form of sexual relations prior to her wedding. As he puts it, a high value is placed on a women’s “preservation of sexual chastity”. Practices such as ‘slut-shaming’ represent a continuation of this tendency to stigmatize the sexual promiscuity of women. Freud argues that this lack of sexual experience and knowledge of a woman will lead to problems for both parties in a marriage. If a woman is suffering in an unhealthy marriage he posits that a woman will develop mental problems as “nothing protects her virtue so securely as

    Read More

  • Is Monogamy the Best Form of Marriage?

    579 Words  | 2 Pages

    The Western Religious leaders and moralists believe only one spouse for life is the highest form of marriage. Some of the most "primitive" peoples are strictly monogamous in their ideals, while some "highly advanced" cultures have moved away from the stri...

    Read More

  • A Defense of Polyamory

    1418 Words  | 3 Pages

    Mention the concept of polygamy in any “civilized” gathering, and you just may be able to see the shiver of repulsion that ripples through the crowd. By substituting the word “polyamory” in, you will be able to circumvent this reaction – but only because everyone is staring at you in baffled silence instead. So we begin, as always, with definitions.

    Read More

  • Wild Strawberries Analysis

    1069 Words  | 3 Pages

    Evald has repeatedly espoused to her that he does not want children. Thus when she becomes pregnant at the age of thirty-nine, Marianne is in an incredibly difficult position: leave her husband and raise the child on her own, or abort the child and stay with her husband. Neither of these options are ideal; Marianne repeatedly elucidates that she wants to keep the child, and so the decision is not one she can make lightly. This brings to mind other sub-optimal conditions faced by prospective mothers throughout the semester; particularly, the situation of Lucy in Disgrace, pregnant with her rapist’s child, conjures similar quandaries. Neither of these women is a teenager unable to support herself and her possible offspring, but still, the question of impending motherhood is a challenging one. Wild Strawberries tends to portray motherhood in a negative light; motherhood does not seem a harbinger of joy and happiness, but rather a necessary evil that should not necessarily be undertaken. Sarah, Isak’s betrothed who eventually marries his brother, cradles what is supposed to be a newborn child, but is obviously only a facsimile, a doll. Isak’s mother, of advanced age, is frigid and cold towards him, unwilling to show the least bit of affection for her last remaining

    Read More

  • Argumentative Essay On Polygamy

    1581 Words  | 4 Pages

    In today’s society the assumption asserts that there must be only two adults integrated in a relationship, however in polygamous environments, having more than one spouse is traditional. Some may argue that Polygamy is simply just an alternate lifestyle. This, however, ceases to be true. Young girls are being forced to marry older men and sometimes relatives. Little boys are often abandoned because it appears to be competition for older men. Children are victims of sexual and physical abuse. Whereas, for women, they generally become stripped of their money and experience competition against the multiple wives a husband. Although Polygamy is viewed as immoral by society, the main focus point should be saving young children and women because

    Read More

More about A Fallen Woman In Harriet Jacob's 'Our Nig'

Open Document