Harriet Jacobs Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl

“O virtuous reader! You never knew what it is to be a slave…” (Jacobs 49)

It is rare for an author to make a direct appeal to their audience, even more uncommon for them to establish characteristics for an unknown identity. General conventions of writing suggest that first and third person are for the narrative form while the secondary “you”, the address to the audience, is typically left out. However, Harriet Jacobs, in her autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, issues repeated statements to the “reader”, often referring to them as “you”. Perhaps the leap to second-person was not so great for Jacobs, as slave narratives often were preceded by introductions or letters written by white people to assert the validity of the story. In the most famous slave narrative, Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison concluded his preface

Instead, it is the fact that Jacobs establishes characteristics for her reader. Besides assuming the reader to be female and northern, Jacobs prescribes three adjectives to her: “happy”, to highlight the woman’s emotional freedom from slavery, “free”, to build on the previous point and to create the binary between slave and free woman, and “virtuous”. Virtuous is a word Jacobs uses nine times throughout her narrative, mostly to refer to her desire to be chaste or the fact that she no longer is a woman of virtue (virgin). Her use of the word “virtuous” is deliberate and calculated. [rhythmic sentence] This essay seeks to deconstruct the word “virtuous” as it is used in Jacobs’s work and how the use of that word helps her appeal to white northern women and call them to act for her enslaved female fellows. A close examination of the word reveals that it both literally highlights the white woman’s freedom from sexual violence and builds on Jacob’s subtle critique of Northerners’ role in the oppression of black