Literary Analysis Essay on Incidents in The Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs

Introduction

Harriet Jacobs's account of the life she lived as a slave in North Carolina is among the numerous narratives printed as a way of promoting the abolitionist cause. At the time, however, it was remarkable in highlighting not only the threat of the sexual exploitation but also in making a direct appeal to the female readers. The authenticity of the book, as can be seen between the pages 910 and 931, was established from the time of its inception. However, Jacobs's story dramatic to the point it so vividly illustrates the unthinkable trials and horrors of slavery, including the potential wastage, sickening violence, not being able to predict the lives lived in accordance to the caprices of a slave owner, and almost reads as a novel.

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Actively looked for by her owner, Dr. Flint, Jacobs, who was now writing as Linda Brent, allows him to father her two children with the hopes that their freedom can be secured. Before the goal can be approached, Jacobs hide for seven years inside a claustrophobic garret and finally headed due north to discover another type of racism. It might have been heavily laced with biblical metaphors, but the force that drives the story still rings down in the later years, that slavery is damnable.

In the excerpt, Jacobs describes slavery as being terrible for men, and far worse for women. Due to such citations, her book can be considered as among the first literary works to address the sexual exploitation of women during slavery. The rhetorical strain of the outspokenness in the excerpt can be noted. The narrative can be acclaimed to have been weakened by conflict. However, the books troubled voice and ambivalence also act as its strength. While the thrust from page 910 to 931 can be noted as coming from a denunciation of equal voice on the evil system, the exhibited tension originates from the painful confrontation with the moral ambiguity as well as moral conflict. Linda Brent, the narrator who was essentially pseudonymous, is left negotiating between the exploitative, brutal bonds of in the idealizations and bonds of slavery, as well as the altruist bondages that true womanhood faced. The first includes her resisting with no ambivalence as well as with Great Spirit, while in the other she is seen as resisting with great guilt and pain, after undergoing deep disillusionment. Both the systems denied her a sense of self, as she neither had words that can be used in authorizing her choices.

The threat of slavery was not only more sexual for the women, but also made the genteel codes in behavior as being more stringent. The standards of free people included that of women being different from that of men. She includes her own mother's chaste marriage as well as the prior courtship ever before her as an example of and shows how she was carefully indoctrinated by her family and mistress into what was understood as true womanhood. The ideology of a woman's innate purity, piety, domesticity, and submissiveness was a necessary weapon against male aggression and opened other areas that exhibited durability. As a human behavior model, as Linda notes, had crucial flaws. Angels inside the house may win private influence and self-respect only through renouncing public power and self-assertion.

Another area worth addressing with regards to the excerpt includes the question as to how Linda Brent's perception of an individual's life circumstance color her feelings towards her baby. The author uses the symbol of darkness and light in representing her emotional state. She explains, "My heart had grown gray in misery" (Jacobs 921). Linda considers a person's life as being affected by their circumstances: "Lives that flash in the sunshine, and lives that are born in tears, receive their hue from circumstances" (Jacobs 923). At the time her baby is born, she managed to find some solace in her baby's smile but fails to forget that he is a slave. After nearly dying she prays for her life, but her recovery is rather bittersweet. The circumstance in giving birth to an enslaved child portrays the good side of motherhood as intolerable.

Linda's tone is also rather angry in the excerpt, as she narrates about her forfeiting lover due to the jealousy of Dr. Flint. She established her fury by repeating the "I had rather..." phrase in showing her disgust for Dr. Flint's perversion. She says she would rather work tirelessly on the plantation the whole day, she preferred living and dying locked in jail that drugged through, from one day to another, by this living death. Using single-syllable words as well as alliterations of t- and d- sounds aid the readers in better understanding her explosive anger, one that sends her running into the arms of her new lover, the lowest blow she can inflict to her antagonist.

One of the advocated issues includes those of gender equality, literacy, motherhood, and ultimately slavery. In the issue of literacy, it can be noted how Linda was taught to write and read at an early age. Her call to action promotes literacy and the missionaries that are ready to do the work. As a pioneer in exposing the female experience in slavery, Linda addresses the issue of gender equality through writing that "Slavery is terrible for men, but it is far more terrible for women" (Jacobs 928). For the issue of motherhood, she puts into consideration the time she was staring at her children for what she understands can be the last time and contemplates her roles as a parent. Mr. Sands desired to be kind to them but were not as everything to him as they were to Linda's womanly heart. Abolition of slavery is also addressed, not only in the excerpt but in the whole book as a testament of the cruelty of slavery as well as well as the way it debases both the slaveholder and the slave.

It is also necessary to look at Linda' emotions in detail and how the author conveys them. On her journey, Linda Brent's use of exclamation points a reminiscent of a poem written by Walt Whitman, as well as the intense expressions warranted. Brent manages to spend a considerable amount of time on the deck while approaching Philadelphia, soaked up in the sun and feeling the blaming air of spring, her facing chapping and blistering from exposure. Their experiences in the excerpt beg for a flashback of the time she was coming to America in the first, and all that awaited her there.

Conclusion

Indeed, one definite conclusion can be made in the except, and that is martyrdom. Like the other seduction novel of Clarisse of Richardson, Linda preferred dying as opposed to living a life that was impure. As an opening story for choices made by characters such as William in the novel, the main lingering question behind Linda's text and life is the question as for when the time is when one's humanity becomes worth dying for. It also begs the question as to what the precise moment is when survival as a compromised individual becomes too painful, Brant presents her motto as giving me liberty of death, but there is still a difficulty in knowing the time the final choice must come.

Works Cited

Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the life of a slave girl: A Painful Memoir That Uncovered the Despicable Sexual, Emotional & Psychological Abuse of a Slave Women, Her Determination to Escape as Well as Her Sacrifices in the Process. eBook. Frankfurt and Main: Musaicum Books, 1861. Web.