Narratives of Resistance: An Examination of Slave Life

Many of life’s fantasies can resemble someone from our past or someone we care about. Every so often, a reader may come across a story that feels as if the narrator is telling the story through his or her own life experiences. The nonfictional story “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” is a convincing third person limited omniscient narration by Harriet Jacobs, and it shows a diverse use of extreme cruelty and hardship slaves resisted in their condition and created their own ways of living, which allow the readers to learn how narrators can use their emotions and feeling to explain their life experiences. The story’s main purpose was to show how slaves created their own culture and ways of life through the bible and their religion, Jacobs

In addition, possibly the greatest burden of Linda 's life is that her children will become slaves. Harriet Jacobs writes, "There is a great difference between Christianity and religion at the south. If a man goes to the communion table, and pays money into the treasury of the church, no matter if it be the price of blood, he is called religious. If a pastor has offspring by a woman not by his wife, the church dismisses him, if she is a white woman; but if she is a colored, it does not hinder hiss continuing to be their good shepherd(8)." Pious slave owners were often the ones who beat, raped, and killed their slaves, but you would find them in the pew of church every Sunday. Many slave owners of that time used the Bible to justify slavery. Jacobs, whose grandmother was a God-faithful woman, understood the hypocrisy of the "pious" slave owners of the south. The people in the north did not understand the true atrocities of slavery. The novel was written to open their eyes to a "Christian" nation that so desperately needed the true love of

However, the man had to endure abuse by enslaved men. To compound their pain and degradation, enslaved women were often used as sex slaves and forced to bear children to add to their master 's family and then denied the right to care for them. Controversy, Jacobs ' Incidents bears numerous similarities to Frederick Douglass ' Narrative, it is radically different because it addresses the issues of female bondage and sexual abuse from a woman 's perspective. For example, Douglass ' story focuses on the quest for literacy and free speech, while Jacobs ' story focuses on the rights of women to protect their families and raise their children. And although Douglass ' narrative revolves around the fight for freedom of one independent individual, Jacobs ' describes the struggle for freedom of a woman supported by her family and