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Slavery in the late nineteenth century
Critical analysis of the slave girl
Slavery in the late nineteenth century
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The novel Letter From a Slave Girl by Mary E. Lyons, is based on a slave named Harriet Ann Jacobs. Harriet Jacobs created a autobiography through letters in the time period to 1825, at age 12, to 1842. Her letters were about the tragedies and struggles slaves faced. Through her letters, Harriet, usually writes to someone who she misses or recently passed away. Such as wen the novel begins and she is writing to her mother about where all the slaves were going to go since Margret !!!.Many more people she loves are inside the novel such as her father who passed from the hard work of slavery and her old boyfriend R. pours out her story as letters to dear ones she has lost. She writes to her dead mother about the her master, Margret !!, dying.
The story of Harriet Jacobs begins at North Carolina in 1813 she was born into slavery though she didn’t realize that she was a slave stating “I was born a slave; but I never knew it…”(Jacobs 1809-1829). Jacobs was with her mother until her death in 1819 then she lived with Margaret Horniblow, her mother’s mistress. Horniblow taught Jacobs to read, write, and sew then in 1825 she died and willed Jacobs to her five year old niece. Douglass born February, 1818 in Maryland was born into slavery than taken at a young age, from his mother to live with his maternal grandmother. At age seven he was sent with his master, Aaron Anthony, to Wye House plantation until Anthony’s death. Douglass was given to Lucretia Auld than to Auld’s brother in law, Hugh, in Baltimore. Auld’s wife taught Douglass alphabet. These similarities between the two are where the line is drawn after this the experiences they had with slavery were poles apart.
Jacobs, Harriet, and Yellin, Jean. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press
Jacobs, Harriet. "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl." The Classic Slave Narratives. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Mentor, 1987.
Jacobs, Harriet A.. Incidents in the life of a slave girl. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988
Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl. 2nd Edition. Edited by Pine T. Joslyn. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, INC., 2001.
Jacobs, Harriet A. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself. Ed. Jennifer Fleischner. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2010. Print.
Harriet Jacobs takes a great risk writing her trials as a house servant in the south and a fugitive in the north. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl gives a true account of the brutality slavery held for women. A perspective that was relatively secretive during Jacobs’ time. Jacobs’ narrative focuses on subjugation due to race but it also portrays many women an strong and often open roles. Women in these roles were minimal and often suffered for their outspoken roles.
She portrays an important message in her narrative and I think people need to read it. I thought her life and text was inspiring and important for me to learn and read about, since I am so unaware of what went on in the South to the African men and women during this time period. When we read this author’s text in class, I felt intrigued to read it. Her style of reading was more interesting than any of the other authors we have read in class so far. I am personally interested, because I could understand what she was trying to get across in her narrative and what she is trying to tell her audience. I am interested in analyzing Harriet Jacobs slave novel, “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” and analyzing her life
Slavery in the middle of the 19th century was well known by every American in the country, but despite the acknowledgment of slavery the average citizen did not realize the severity of the lifestyle of the slave before slave narratives began to arise. In Incidents in the life of a slave girl, Harriet Jacobs uses an explicit tone to argue the general life of slave compared to a free person, as well as the hardships one endured on one’s path to freedom. Jacobs fought hard in order to expand the abolitionist movement with her narrative. She was able to draw in the readers by elements of slave culture that helped the slaves endure the hardships like religion and leisure and the middle class ideals of the women being “submissive, past, domestic,
In Harriett Jacobs’s book, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, she informs her readers of her life as a slave girl growing up in southern America. By doing this she hides her identity and is referred to as Linda Brent which she had a motive for her secrecy? In the beginning of her life she is sheltered as a child by her loving mistress where she lived a free blissful life. However after her mistress dies she is not freed from the bondage of slaver but given to her mistress sister and this is where Jacobs’s happiness dissolved. In her story, she reveals that slavery is terrible for men but, is more so dreadful for women. In addition woman bore being raped by their masters, as well as their children begin sold into slavery. All of this experience
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
Today, we woke up at around 3:30 a.m. just to go eat and then go to work in the fields. Some days, the white people who owned us, liked to be nice and weren’t as harsh to us. But then some days, if we didn’t oink the amount of cotton or tobacco that they wanted, we would get lashed. But you see the number always changed. Some days they would want 40 pounds of cotton picked but other days, they would want 140 pounds. I am getting so tired of living my life like this, other blacks say that there is really nothing we can do, nut I believe there is. A lot of us, want to escape but don’t know how we could. We are always being watched, there is never a time when we are alone. They treat us like we are animals, like we are completely different but really we
Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. New York, NY: W. W. Norton &
In Harriet Jacobs Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, the author subjects the reader to a dystopian slave narrative based on a true story of a woman’s struggle for self-identity, self-preservation and freedom. This non-fictional personal account chronicles the journey of Harriet Jacobs (1813-1897) life of servitude and degradation in the state of North Carolina to the shackle-free promise land of liberty in the North. The reoccurring theme throughout that I strive to exploit is how the women’s sphere, known as the Cult of True Womanhood (Domesticity), is a corrupt concept that is full of white bias and privilege that has been compromised by the harsh oppression of slavery’s racial barrier. Women and the female race are falling for man’s
Harriet Jacobs wanted to tell her story, but knew she lacked the skills to write the story herself. She had learned to read while young and enslaved, but, at the time of her escape to the North in 1842, she was not a proficient writer. She worked at it, though, in part by writing letters that were published by the New York Tribune, and with the help of her friend, Amy Post. Her writing skills improved, and by 1858, she had finished the manuscript of her book, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.