Reform as a Sympothy Strategy

Sympathy as a Reform Strategy

By writing personal accounts of their lives, many women of the nineteenth century used the emotion of sympathy to share their feelings. According to Rosemarie Garland Thompson, "Sympathy is an effective rhetorical strategy in women's writing because it combines and embodies the fundamental elements of the feminine script." (Thompson 131) By using sympathy in their writing, Harriet Jacobs and Elizabeth Barret Browning, both nineteenth century women writers, made their readers want to help reform the South.

Harriet Jacobs wrote a moving slave narrative where she describes in great detail how her master constantly verbally and sexually harassed her. She was scared for her life many times when both her master, and his wife, threatened her. She tried many methods of escape, including becoming involved with a white lawyer who lived next door. Reading of her affair with a white man was completely shocking to northern white women. At the time, women were supposed to be pure by keeping their chastity. If you were pure, you had something to offer a future husband. By having this affair, Jacobs loses her purity, which was very important for women to have at the time; without it you weren't a woman. Jacobs appealed to her white readers saying, "You never knew what it is to be a slave; to be entirely unprotected by law or custom.... You never exhausted your ingenuity in avoiding the snares and eluding the power of a hated tyrant." (Jacobs 506) She couldn't find protection anywhere, from anyone. Her master was continually after her, finding new tricks to bother her, and attempt to seduce her. Not even the master's wife was willing to help. She was so lost in her jealousy, that she became blind to the fact ...

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...closer to home, making the readers ask themselves, "Is this really happening?" According to Thompson, "Literature became a major tool of reform as literacy and print culture expanded. This was especially so for women because the literary rhetoric of reform offered one means of negotiating domesticity's inherent contradiction that women were responsible for national morality but restricted from morality's larger public arenas." (Thompson 131) Social reform was started, and pushed along by women authors like these. They dared to write and publish their stories for the good of their people.

Work Cited

Mary K. DeShazer. The Longman Anthology of Women's Literature: from Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. New York: Longman, 2001.

Mary K. DeShazer. The Longman Anthology of Women's Literature: The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point. New York: Longman, 2001.