Harriet Jacobs And Fanny Fern: A Literary Analysis

Harriet Jacobs and Fanny Fern both display different kinds of writing styles that shed light on women who could stand up on their own. The stories of those two women vastly contrast each other, however, the women display hardships and overcome their difficulties in a similar manner. Jacobs who goes by a different persona-- a woman’s name Linda, who is a young slave. Fern did a similar thing to Jacobs by going by a different persona, a young woman named Ruth Hall. What the two women display with their books released to the public is to give another look at what women go through. The readers of the book would explore the hardship of what the two women have experienced, thus bringing more awareness and light to women’s rights and the anti-slavery

Jacobs using an important figure of the abolitionist movement not only catches the eyes of the readers, but it also helps to make her argument more convincing to establish the antislavery movement. Even in the editor’s note provided by Child herself, it helps for the readers to believe that what Jacobs is saying is the truth, and further helps the argument that the slave narrative is not an exaggeration. With the help of getting a well known abolitionist, this helps Jacobs’s argument for the antislavery movement. Not only she has gotten her readers to sympathize with her, but use direct language to catch the attention of her reader. She tries to point out the privileges that the white women would have compared to the women who are kept in

The journey of Ruth Hall is having a family that would push her around to be more “ladylike.” She basically does what her family would tell her to do, which is not what Ruth Hall wanted. But to make her family happy, she ended up doing what her family told her to do in the first place. Her life is also tragic in her own way. It may not be like Linda Brent’s story of suffering through slavery. Ruth Hall’s story is more like suffering through the criticism of women. Hall’s life seemed to be okay at first since she has gotten married and had her first child. It was then that her life started to spiral with the death of her first daughter, then the death of her husband. Due to her husband passing away, her family and her in-law’s family believes she is no longer a capable woman to take care of her two children without a man in the house.

Throughout Ruth’s journey, after the death of her husband, she finds different ways to make a living for herself and her daughter. She does whatever she has to do for her daughters, even it means to leave the role of the “traditional” woman. Once she steps down as the role of the “traditional” woman, she looks for different jobs in order to support her children she cares about. Despite all of this, her own family still believes that she is incapable to take care of herself and her children. They put her down constantly by stating that she is much better