Haunting in American Slave Narratives Both Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl depict enslaved women hidden in attics or garrets in pursuit of freedom. These gothic allusions of people haunting or watching over either the town or the plantation are meant to suggest, among other things, a secret minority witness to the life of the slave society. Both stories portray their quests for autonomy in similar and also very different ways. Using their stories of haunting, literal and figurative, Stowe and Jacobs are able to interrogate the ideals of domesticity, virtue, and the slave society as a whole. Not many people in those days of slavery knew the truth of what was really going on. And if they did, just pretended like they didn’t, spreading the false ideas that slaves were happy and well treated. The “peephole” or “loophole”, through which the women of Stowe and Jacobs’ narratives are able to look out onto the town or the plantation, becomes their links to the outside world. Although they have been completely cut off and isolated from society and almost everyone they love, they still find a way to stay connected. Stowe imagines this link as a haunting, where they literally are able to control and manipulate the situation. Jacobs on the other hand uses the peephole as a means of exposing the truth. She “haunts” the town of Edenton, North Carolina in a very different way. Linda Brent is able to look down upon the town and reveal all its secrets. Jacobs and Stowe use their stories of the oppressed women, and their haunting link between confinement and truth, as another link to the public. Using it as means of getting their messages out there for the public to... ... middle of paper ... ... details. She wanted it to be more about slavery than about her. This story was a literary critique, as well as a political one, in the idea that writing back in those days was seen as a means of social control. It was a way recreating yourself and having control over your own story even if not everything from your life is included. Jacobs was able to create a ‘self’ that had otherwise been controlled by others. Jacobs’s story along with Stowe’s emphasizes the distinctive problems faced by female slaves, particularly sexual abuse and the suffering of slave mothers who are separated from their children. In spite of her suffering and possible criticism from the public, Jacobs was determined to make white Americans aware of the sexual victimization that slave women frequently faced and to stress the fact that they often had no choice but to give up their “virtue.”
In Harriet Jacobs’ autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, personal accounts that detail the ins-and-outs of the system of slavery show readers truly how monstrous and oppressive slavery is. Families are torn apart, lives are ruined, and slaves are tortured both physically and mentally. The white slaveholders of the South manipulate and take advantage of their slaves at every possible occasion. Nothing is left untouched by the gnarled claws of slavery: even God and religion become tainted. As Jacobs’ account reveals, whites control the religious institutions of the South, and in doing so, forge religion as a tool used to perpetuate slavery, the very system it ought to condemn. The irony exposed in Jacobs’ writings serves to show
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Olaudah Equiano’s Narrative of his Life both endeavor to stir antislavery sentiment in predominantly white, proslavery readers. Each author uses a variety of literary tactics to persuade audiences that slavery is inhumane. Equiano uses vivid imagery and inserts personal experience to appeal to audiences, believing that a first-hand account of the varying traumas slaves encounter would affect change. Stowe relies on emotional connection between the readers and characters in her novel. By forcing her audience to have empathy for characters, thus forcing readers to confront the harsh realities of slavery, Stowe has the more effective approach to encouraging abolitionist sentiment in white readers.
From 1813 to 1879, lived a woman of great dignity, strong will, and one desire. A woman who was considered nothing more than just a slave girl would give anything for the freedom for herself and her two children. Harriet Jacobs, who used the pen name Linda Brent, compiled her life into a little book called Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Mrs. Jacobs' story, once read, will leave nothing but pity and heart ache for her readers as they discover the life she had to endure. She however boldly states, "[I] earnestly desire to arouse the women of the North to a realizing sense of the condition of two millions of women at the South still in bondage, suffering what I suffered, and most of them far worse. I want to add my testimony to that of abler pens to convince the people of the Free States what Slavery really is."(preface 1) Harriet Jacobs wanted to show the people who were not experiencing slavery exactly was going on in hopes that it would influence them to bring a stop to it. Though you cannot help but pity Harriet Jacobs, you can also take her story and the hard ships she endured and realize how strong a woman she truly was.
In the earliest part of Harriet?s life the whole idea of slavery was foreign to her. As all little girls she was born with a mind that only told her place in the world was that of a little girl. She had no capacity to understand the hardships that she inherited. She explains how her, ?heart was as free from care as that of any free-born white child.?(Jacobs p. 7) She explains this blissful ignorance by not understanding that she was condemned at birth to a life of the worst kind oppression. Even at six when she first became familiar with the realization that people regarded her as a slave, Harriet could not conceptualize the weight of what this meant. She say?s that her circumstances as slave girl were unusua...
...f Jacobs’s narrative is the sexual exploitation that she, as well as many other slave women, had to endure. Her narrative focuses on the domestic issues that faced African-American women, she even states, “Slavery is bad for men, but it is far more terrible for women”. Therefore, gender separated the two narratives, and gave each a distinct view toward slavery.
Two books of the era that were influential in changing public opinion about slavery are The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, The African, Written by Himself , published in Britain in 1789 and Uncle Tom’s Cabin , written by a white woman abolitionist named Harriet Beecher Stowe. The first is an account of the author’s life from his capture in Africa to his eventual freedom and travel adventures around the world. The second is a fictional account of the lives of slaves and masters in the pre-war South. Written from different perspectives, at different times, and in different styles, both works employ the concept of home to advance the anti-slavery cause. Though Equiano promotes more of an adventurous manliness than Stowe’s Uncle Tom, both works exalt to some extent the “cult of dome...
In her essay, “Loopholes of Resistance,” Michelle Burnham argues that “Aunt Marthy’s garret does not offer a retreat from the oppressive conditions of slavery – as, one might argue, the communal life in Aunt Marthy’s house does – so much as it enacts a repetition of them…[Thus] Harriet Jacobs escapes reigning discourses in structures only in the very process of affirming them” (289). In order to support this, one must first agree that Aunt Marthy’s house provides a retreat from slavery. I do not. Burnham seems to view the life inside Aunt Marthy’s house as one outside of and apart from slavery where family structure can exist, the mind can find some rest, comfort can be given, and a sense of peace and humanity can be achieved. In contrast, Burnham views the garret as a physical embodiment of the horrors of slavery, a place where family can only dream about being together, the mind is subjected to psychological warfare, comfort is non-existent, and only the fear and apprehension of inhumanity can be found. It is true that Aunt Marthy’s house paints and entirely different, much less severe, picture of slavery than that of the garret, but still, it is a picture of slavery differing only in that it temporarily masks the harsh realities of slavery whereas the garret openly portrays them. The garret’s close proximity to the house is symbolic of the ever-lurking presence of slavery and its power to break down and destroy families and lives until there is nothing left. Throughout her novel, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs presents these and several other structures that suggest a possible retreat from slavery, may appear from the outside to provide such a retreat, but ideally never can. Among these structures are religion, literacy, family, self, and freedom.
...mark by saying, “Reader, my story ends with freedom; not in the usual way, with marriage. I and my children are now free! We are as free from the power of slave holders as are the white people of the north; and though that, according to my ideas, is not saying a great deal, it is a vast improvement in my condition” (Jacobs 302). Throughout the book, Jacobs’s uses common literature of the time as an example to help her audience understand and connect with the stories being told. Unlike the common stories, Jacobs’s states here that her story did not end like a happily ever after fairytale. She was still unmarried, did not have a house, and was poor. Her story may seem to have ended abruptly and without a “good ending”, but as previously shown through the book, her point that the lives of slaves cannot be illustrated based on natural or normal guidelines is shown here.
“Line of Color, Sex, and Service: Sexual Coercion in the Early Republic” is a publication that discusses two women, Rachel Davis and Harriet Jacobs. This story explains the lives of both Rachel and Harriet and their relationship between their masters. Rachel, a young white girl around the age of fourteen was an indentured servant who belonged to William and Becky Cress. Harriet, on the other hand, was born an enslaved African American and became the slave of James and Mary Norcom. This publication gives various accounts of their masters mistreating them and how it was dealt with.
The illumination of the brutal treatment of the slaves, both physically and mentally, are also apparent in the works of Stowe and Jacobs. Stowe, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, uses the stories of Eliza, Harry, Uncle Tom and Cassy to show how slavery, with both cruel and kind masters, affects different members of the slave community. In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Jacobs focuses her work on the how the institution is “terrible for men; but is far more terrible for women” (B:933), adding sexual abuse to the atrocities of slavery. Douglass’ Madison gives the reader a masculine perspective on the
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,
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
As female slaves such as Harriet Jacob continually were fighting to protect their self respect, and purity. Harriet Jacob in her narrative, the readers get an understanding of she was trying to rebel against her aggressive master, who sexually harassed her at young age. She wasn’t protected by the law, and the slaveholders did as they pleased and were left unpunished. Jacobs knew that the social group,who were“the white women”, would see her not as a virtuous woman but hypersexual. She states “I wanted to keep myself pure, - and I tried hard to preserve my self-respect, but I was struggling alone in the grasp of the demon slavery.” (Harriet 290)The majority of the white women seemed to criticize her, but failed to understand her conditions and she did not have the free will. She simply did not have that freedom of choice. It was the institution of slavery that failed to recognize her and give her the basic freedoms of individual rights and basic protection. Harriet Jacobs was determined to reveal to the white Americans the sexual exploitations that female slaves constantly fa...
Harriet Jacobs and Olaudah Equiano were two African American writers who first handedly wrote and told about the cruel, savage experiences about the hardships of slavery. In Harriet Jacobs, “Incident in the life of a slave girl”, Jacobs endured numerous cases of sexual abuse as opposed to Equiano who, “ The Interesting Narrative Life of Olaudah Equiano” who suffered from various incidents of physical torture. Upon review of both captivity narratives, Jacobs and Equiano share common characteristics of their experiences from their sufferings, loss from family and resilience to escape their current situation.
For this very reason Jacobs uses the pseudonym Linda Brent to narrate her first-person experience, which I intend to use interchangeably throughout the essay, since I am referencing the same person. All throughout the narrative, Jacobs explores the struggles and sexual abuse that female slaves faced on plantations as well as their efforts to practice motherhood and protect their children from the horrors of the slave trade. Jacobs’ literary efforts are addressed to white women in the North who do not fully comprehend the evils of slavery. She makes direct appeals to their humanity to expand their knowledge and influence their thoughts about slavery as an institution, holding strong to the credo that the pen is mightier than the sword and is colorful enough to make a difference and change the the stereotypes of the black and white