1. The most memorable part in the Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is the portion about Linda’s hiding for “nearly seven years” (Jacobs122) in a place that is not even bearable for mosquitoes to enter (101). Reading chapter after chapter about Linda hiding in such an uncomfortable space was enough to make my hatred for slavery even worse than I had ever imagined. For freedom, she lay day after day in a place that she was unable to stand up and easily move around in (96). I thought about how she was so close to her children, but unable to share their young lives (96). I could almost feel the cold and heat from the open exposure of the “thin shingle roof” (98). This tears at my thoughts beyond my understanding. It is most memorable to me because she suffered more in her attempts to be free than she spoke of suffering in slavery. She said her life as a slave was “comparatively devoid of hardships” (96), but was willing to imprison herself in a horrible, heart wrenching hide-away. She gave up involuntary servitude for voluntary confinement. She had nothing to protect her. All she had was freedom from emotional abuse, moral filth, and sexual mistreatment. I have to question was it all worth the suffering? Or what more could one have done?
2. Jacobs suggests that slavery affects the owners as well as the slaves. In her book, I see that slavery “deadens the moral sense” of the owners (Jacobs 33). Even Mr. Flint was “the father of eleven slaves” (32), but he did not hesitate on selling them or from calling “himself their master” (33). Slave owners viewed their slaves as property and did with them whatever they thought was appropriate. Mr. Flint emotionally abused Linda by “restless, craving, vicious…stinging words” t...
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... customs are apparent in both stories where wealth controls poor and white Americans control immigrants. Both slaves and mill workers would have to pay a high cost for a better life, money talks.
8. Peers – Do you feel that America still has the mind set that race puts one at a different social standing than others? Are there any current examples where we can see race portrayed as an evil, like the colored people in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl?
Works Cited
Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2001. Print.
Woods, Alex. WPA Slave Narrative Project, North Carolina Narratives, Volume 11, Part 2; pgs 415-419. Web.
Woods, Tom W. WPA Slave Narrative Project, Oklahoma Narratives, Volume 13; pgs 354-358. Web.
Woods, Uncle Wes. WPA Slave Narrative Project, Kentucky Narratives, Volume 7; pgs 24-26. Web.
If a family was wealthy enough, they would accommodate their property, meaning the slaves. They were a part of the owner’s family and were as brutally treated comparing to slaves of the Colonial
From 1813 to 1879, lived a woman of great dignity, strong will, and one desire. A woman who was considered nothing more than just a slave girl would give anything for the freedom for herself and her two children. Harriet Jacobs, who used the pen name Linda Brent, compiled her life into a little book called Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Mrs. Jacobs' story, once read, will leave nothing but pity and heart ache for her readers as they discover the life she had to endure. She however boldly states, "[I] 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."(preface 1) Harriet Jacobs wanted to show the people who were not experiencing slavery exactly was going on in hopes that it would influence them to bring a stop to it. Though you cannot help but pity Harriet Jacobs, you can also take her story and the hard ships she endured and realize how strong a woman she truly was.
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: Penguin Books, 1987. 333-513.
Jacobs, Harriet. "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl." The Classic Slave Narratives. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Mentor, 1987.
To understand the desperation of wanting to obtain freedom at any cost, it is necessary to take a look into what the conditions and lives were like of slaves. It is no secret that African-American slaves received cruel and inhumane treatment. Although she wrote of the horrific afflictions experienced by slaves, Linda Brent said, “No pen can give adequate description of the all-pervading corruption produced by slavery." The life of a slave was never a satisfactory one, but it all depended on the plantation that one lived on and the mast...
Jacobs, Harriet A. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. New York: Oxford UP, 1988. Print.
Incidents in the life of a slave girl is a memoir written by Harriet Jacobs, there she explained the hardships African-Americans experienced during slavery. Slaves were subjected to be just property and this gave their owners the right under the law to abused them, deny them of basic human rights, and liberty to protect their families from slave-owners. Many slaves would scape to the free states but soon realized that there was segregation between African-Americans and white-Americans and extradition laws that would sent runaway slaves back to the south to their owners. Slaves were seemed as property, their lives were controlled by someone else, and they encounter segregation and extradition laws in the Free states,
In 1861, Harriet Jacobs published her book “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.” The story is based in Southern United States of America during the time before Jacob escaped from slavery in 1835 (Reilly 649). Jacobs uses the name Linda Brent as a pseudonym (Reilly 649) and describes her experience as a female slave through a first person narration. The purpose of the selections featured in Kevin Reilly's, “Worlds of History,” is to show the victimization and emotional suffering female slaves feel against their white masters vs. the physical pain a male slave endures.
Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl. 2nd Edition. Edited by Pine T. Joslyn. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, INC., 2001.
In her essay, “Loopholes of Resistance,” Michelle Burnham argues that “Aunt Marthy’s garret does not offer a retreat from the oppressive conditions of slavery – as, one might argue, the communal life in Aunt Marthy’s house does – so much as it enacts a repetition of them…[Thus] Harriet Jacobs escapes reigning discourses in structures only in the very process of affirming them” (289). In order to support this, one must first agree that Aunt Marthy’s house provides a retreat from slavery. I do not. Burnham seems to view the life inside Aunt Marthy’s house as one outside of and apart from slavery where family structure can exist, the mind can find some rest, comfort can be given, and a sense of peace and humanity can be achieved. In contrast, Burnham views the garret as a physical embodiment of the horrors of slavery, a place where family can only dream about being together, the mind is subjected to psychological warfare, comfort is non-existent, and only the fear and apprehension of inhumanity can be found. It is true that Aunt Marthy’s house paints and entirely different, much less severe, picture of slavery than that of the garret, but still, it is a picture of slavery differing only in that it temporarily masks the harsh realities of slavery whereas the garret openly portrays them. The garret’s close proximity to the house is symbolic of the ever-lurking presence of slavery and its power to break down and destroy families and lives until there is nothing left. Throughout her novel, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs presents these and several other structures that suggest a possible retreat from slavery, may appear from the outside to provide such a retreat, but ideally never can. Among these structures are religion, literacy, family, self, and freedom.
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,
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
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.
The issue of Slavery in the South was an unresolved issue in the United States during the seventeenth and eighteenth century. During these years, the south kept having slavery, even though most states had slavery abolished. Due to the fact that slaves were treated as inferior, they did not have the same rights and their chances of becoming an educated person were almost impossible. However, some information about slavery, from the slaves’ point of view, has been saved. In this essay, we are comparing two different books that show us what being a slave actually was. This will be seen with the help of two different characters: Linda Brent in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Frederick Douglass in The Narrative of the life of Frederick