Similarities Between Frankenstein And Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl

For Mary Shelley and Harriet Jacobs, author of Frankenstein and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, the dilemma of male power and its relations with authorships as an act of masculinity alters the writers’ identity as both hide their real names through anonymity or pseudonym. Both Jacob and Shelley, however, use a strong authoring through their central characters that are forced to discover/recover their sense of self in a male patriarchal society. In the physically restricted space of their hiding space, Linda and the monster come to redefine themselves and gain an authority of self and voice.

Connection between the early slave narrative and the Romantic literature exposes the thread of patriarchal tyranny. These power shifts between Frankenstein

This metaphoric womb allows them to birth themselves as new, reflect, and reformulate plans. Linda’s retreatment in the garret is the beginning of her journey to freedom. However, her freedom from Dr. Flint is hindered by the reality that she is physically trapped in the crawl space. Linda has found an outlet but she is not completely free but rather it is a beginning to establish herself. Even after escaping to the North and being free from the crawl space and Dr. Flint, she still has not found freedom until she is not legally free. By hiding in the crawl space, Linda feels free, half-humane, just as the creature finds himself alive yet lacking human form because he’s an outsider due to lack of human skills. The crawl space becomes Linda refugee from oppression and harassment and the creature, the hovel allows him to hide his body from those who do not understand

Despite being uncomfortable in the crawl space, she suffers, she recalls, “But I was not comfortless. I heard the voices of my children” (Jacobs 135).Longing to be closer to them, she makes holes in the wall in order to see her children. Through these holes she “could watch the children, and when they were near enough, I could hear their talk” (Jacob 135). Like the creature, Linda takes comfort in what she can see and overhear, though she is denied the chance to interact. Both pose a risk in coming out of their seclusion and must love from a distance. For the creature, he hides in the hovel after realizing his hideousness and out of fear of being rejected and cast out again. For Linda, to reveal herself to anyone outside her family would mean putting herself back in the hands of Dr. Flint. The hovel and the crawl space becomes a place of restriction and silence for both the creature and Linda who are unable to interact with