Imagine living day to day unable to control anything that happens, being shoved around like a nobody, and treated so poorly that the only way to escape this torture is to run away. Harriet Jacobs goes through three stages in her life, Innocent, Orphan, and Warrior. Nellie McKay defines the stages in her opinion through the essay “The Girls Who Became the Women.” Jacobs illustrates her life and the true stages through her autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Jacobs goes from being a harmless slave child to being rebellious, through three life changing stages.
Innocence is a very short stage during Jacobs’ childhood. In this stage she is completely “unaware of her slave condition” (McKay 241). In her childhood, “she [lives] with and [enjoys] the love and security” of her grandmother after her mother, father, and mistress pass away (241). These family members help her get through the beginning of her life and try to do what is best for her by making sure she doesn’t have to go into slavery until the last possible moment. According to McKay, Jacobs ends the Innocent stage when she is six.
Jacobs actually goes through the Innocent stage from the day she is born until the age of twelve. While Jacobs’ mother is “on her death-bed her mistress [promises] that her children should never suffer for any thing” and she holds to this promise until she dies six years later (Jacobs 5). Jacobs’ mother never wants her children to suffer, therefore her mistress feels as if she has to take this role over and make sure they don’t struggle. When her mistress dies, Jacobs is “sent to spend a week with [her] grandmother” (6). She strictly relies on her grandmother’s help, no matter what the situation is. The stage of Innocence truly ends...
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...egins to view life differently. Lastly, the Warrior stage is when she begins to escape because she views life on her own, becomes independent, and acts more like a mother figure to Joseph and Louisa. Not only does this autobiography make one wonder why slavery ever existed, but also how anyone survived this torture. One wouldn’t realize how women were treated during slavery without this story by Harriet Jacobs.
Works Cited
Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Ed. Lydia Maria Child. Orlando, Florida: Harcourt Brace, 1973. Print.
McKay, Nellie Y. “The Girls Who Became the Women: Childhood Memories in the Autobiographies of Harriet Jacobs, Mary Church Terrell, and Anne Moody.” Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Contexts, Criticism. Ed. Nellie Y. McKay, Frances Smith Foster. New York, N.Y.: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2001. 236-253. Print.
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.
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 and Fredrick Douglass are both very incredible and powerful writers who narrated their enslavement encounters in a passionate and compelling manner. Jacob’s narrative describes the abuses she had to go through personally especially because of her gender. She describes how the women slaves were exploited not only for their productive capabilities but reproductive ones as well. This is why she remarked, “Slavery is terrible for men but is far more terrible for women”. This is a clear indication that in addition to being enslaved, Jacob’s had to overcome the hurdle of being a female as well.
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
Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. New York, NY: W. W. Norton &
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.
Jacobs, Harriet A. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself. 1861. Ed.
Harriet Jacobs story clearly shows the pain she suffered as a female slave, but it also showed the strength she proved to have within herself. At such a young age she went through things that I have never experienced. Her way of surviving is what truly inspires. Imagine just having to watch your children grow up before your very eyes and not being able to give them a hug or kiss. The simple things that our parents do today for us, the things we take for granted, are what she hoped and prayed she could do one day. Jacobs died in 1897, but she continued to fight for the rights of African
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