Harriet Jacobs

Faith as a Defence Mechanism In the memoir, Incidents in the life of a slave girl, Harriet Jacobs embraces her impeccable knowledge and creativity to her own benefit to escape the unfortunate life of slavery. Throughout the book, Harriet Jacobs uses religion and the illusion of her own faith to control the reader and their perceptions, beliefs, and attitudes towards her. Her faith is a defence mechanism for her to feel secure to the people around her and herself, for her to feel accepted in the slave community and to grandmother. She values her Faith to try to convince the reader that she truly has piety. Harriet Jacobs uses her faith as a shield from all of the baggage she carries from being a slave. She has high moral standards of her readers, she says to us, “Pity and pardon me, O virtuous reader! You never knew what it is to be a slave; to be entirely unprotected by law or custom; to have the laws reduce you to the condition of a chattel, entirely subject to the will of another” (61). In this quote Jacobs is explaining to us that we could never understand what she or slaves like her went through. Harriet Jacobs is revealing to us that slaves do not have any control over their bodies, and that they shouldn't be judge for what happens to them because it wasn't their choice. Harriet Jacobs is faithful to christianity but conclude that she finds it more difficult to be faithful when she, in the eye of the church, isn’t considered pure. She states “I want to keep myself pure; and under the most adverse circumstances, I tried hard to preserve my self-respect but I was struggling alone in the powerful grasp of the demon Slavery” (60). This excerpt reveals to us as readers that she had a want and desire to stay pure but under these circumstances she lost in the battle against slavery. She also expresses that she was alone and I interpret that as her saying she did not have God or some higher figure on her side and she did not feel like she could turn to him. God didn't bring her happiness, contentment even relieve her of her worries. But she also doesn’t understand the happiness the other slaves she interacts with have when they turn to God or Christianity. She notices about the other slaves that “They never seem so happy as when shouting and singing at religious meetings. Many of them are sincere” (78). From this we see that she didn't join them in the rejoicing, she always referred to them as a separate group of people, and she states that many of them are sincere but I believe that she is among the ones who weren’t completely sincere. Part of Harriet Jacobs faith is a mask for …show more content…
She also manipulates the slaves around her to believe she is a true christian girl as a point of connection to other slaves. Every single slave had a religious background. Escape from slave life wouldn't have been possible for Harriet Jacobs if she didn't mask herself with faith. Harriet Jacobs also would have never gotten out of slave life if she didn't have connections to other people. Even though she is extremely intelligent and creative she couldn’t have done this by herself. Harriet Jacobs shield of faith benefitted her more than she could have