Harriet Jacobs Struggles

Decent Essays
The slave narratives by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs both show the struggles of an slave.They use physical, emotional, and sexual aspects to show the dehumanization of slavery. Harriet Jacobs' narrative "Incidents in the life of a slave girl" tells her story of what she seen and how she was treated. Frederick Douglass' "Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass" tells his story of how he struggled being a slave. The quote "Slavery is bad for men, but is far more terrible for women" is not truthful, because it was both horrible for men and women.

The women struggles during slavery in the 1800s were very difficult. The women dealt with emotional and physical struggles throughout slavery. Harriet Jacobs witnessed these situations with

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    Although, as a slave girl her experiences are far different from Frederick’s experience in slavery as a slave man. From her experience, she reveals how young slave girls experienced lots of sexual harassment from their masters. In the documentary Slavery in the Making of America’s “Seeds of Destruction,” an excerpt of Harriet’s narrative discusses how “no matter what slave girl looks like dark, light, medium if she’s attractive it’s a curse because the master will be after her” (Slavery). Essentially displaying the psychological struggles young slave girls endured as their masters’ men far older than them preyed on them sexually. Yet, never seeing herself as a victim instead seeing her predator master as an enemy Harriet demonstrates the strong willed nature African Americans had to still continue to fight no matter the…

    • 1349 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    During the Antebellum period, slavery was ordinary, especially in the south of the U.S. Although such events occurred we are able to read about the truths and perspectives of a slave’s life. In Incidents in the Life of Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs talks about her life and the struggles of being a slave. In addition to her life, the book describes first-hand encounters of events that also took place during this period such as the Nat Turner rebellion and how the character Harriet Jacobs was involved in such events.…

    • 952 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Harriet Jacobs Analysis

    • 852 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Harriet Jacobs was put into many difficult situations. In chapter X, she is only a fifteen-year-old girl who is put into a tight spot. In order to try and take some control of her own life she makes the decision to sleep with, and become pregnant, by a white man that was not her master. She gives many reasons for why she chooses to do this, and each of her reasons boil down to that of fear and hope.…

    • 852 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Patrick Bauer 11/9/15 HIST-105-519 Harriet Jacobs Essay In the book Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs, Jacobs’ tells of the many trails and hard experiences that the average slave goes through from day to day. From malicious punishments to extreme acts of hatred we see the treatment that African-Americans were subject to as they spent their lives in servitude to the slaveholders. These actions of the southern slaveholders are personified in this book by the first person account of Jacobs’ as the slave-girl Linda who she uses to help us better understand and imagine the hardships that she and other slaves had to fight through.…

    • 1104 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In the early 19th century, American literature witnessed the birth of a new genre by the name of the North American slave narrative. It has often been said that this genre was the byproduct of the pressure from white abolitionist to encourage former slaves to write a formulated narrative that would later be utilized as propaganda. This is important to note in respect to how writers often framed this notion of freedom that is commonly discussed among slave narratives, most notably done by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs. While both authors appear to find commonality in their understanding of both the systemic effects of plantation life and the importance of this abstract notion of obtaining freedom by mean of literacy, Jacobs also understood freedom to be familial, whereas Douglass understood it to be predominantly ego-literary. Literacy came to Jacob far before it…

    • 997 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    A slave narrative is a type of literary work that is written by a former enslaved Africans in Great Britain and its colonies, including the later United States, Canada, and Caribbean nations. Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs both wrote slave narratives. They differentiate from slave codes, the being bible used to justify slavery, running away in concern of safety for children and the time of slave rebellion. Their similarities varied from them both learning to read and write, and their white masters were abusing them. Underground railroad and Fugitive slave act were important things that contributed to the life of slaves.…

    • 629 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    At the beginning of the 17th century, many African-Americans were captured and brought to North America in order to serve as slaves for wealthy white Americans. For 245 years a vicious cycle of capturing slaves, selling/keeping them, and working them as much as the owners pleased, continued until Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation went into effect. During this time, many generations of African-Americans were then born into a lifetime of slavery, most of which could only dream of freedom (Vox). Harriet Jacobs was one of the unfortunate children born into such a life, but she was also one of the lucky few who escaped. Several years after she was officially freed she published an autobiography in which she detailed her life from slavery…

    • 1083 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Although Olaudah Equiano & Harriet Jacobs are both respected slave narrators there were profoundly diverse according to their gender and position. Equiano's story is very emotional, the physical pain and torture that he went through can't compare with the sexual abuse that Jacobs had to endure for years. Harriet Jacobs and Olaudah Equiano were both African Americans that were introduced into slavery at some point in their life. Jacobs believed that she lived an easy life for the time being, while Equiano lived through the hardship of being kidnapped and made into a slave. Both writers offer incredible insight into what was once a reality for numerous men and women.…

    • 774 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Harriet Jacobs’s Incidence and Life of a Slave Girl has a reoccurring theme of innocence and purity. Jacobs uses this theme to connect with her intended audience. This is not an easy feat being that she was a black woman and she was addressing white women during a time that in most cases there would not have been any relatability between the two. Because the narrative was a call to action, it was imperative that Jacobs created a theme that was universal and that could compel the audience to not only listen but also empathize. The first purity introduced by Jacobs is not a sexual one but one that describes the innocence of her childhood.…

    • 904 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Both agree than black men had a rough go of it in the slave days, but that was nothing compared to being a black slave woman. Harriet Jacobs makes the point that “slavery is terrible for men, but it is far more terrible for women” (p. 618). The enslaved men are treated like animals, whipped, beaten, and starved until they keel over and die, but female slaves, especially the unfortunately beautiful ones, “have wrongs, sufferings, and mortifications peculiarly their own” on top of the horrors all other slaves experience (p. 618). From the time the girls reach puberty, they are continually harassed until they are reduced to living sex dolls. Black men went through a lot, but they never had to endure such heinous…

    • 1329 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Harriet Jacobs, embodying women’s struggles to overcome a male-dominated society, demonstrates how agency is not limited to well-off white women. Jacobs, the first woman to write a slave narrative, was not even legally recognized as person, let alone as an individual on equal standing with any man, black or white. Although Fern and Jacobs both struggled to navigate complex relationships in a male dominated society, Fern at least enjoyed the luxury of citizenship. Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was extremely influential because it relayed the struggles of African American women struggling in the same society as white women, just in a very unique, often amplified way. Fern saw how women were seen as vessels to serve men’s needs…

    • 1364 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Great Essays

    The system of slavery, which brutally exploited the labour of a large and primarily Black population, shaped the history of the United States of America for over four hundred years (Davis: African Slavery, Sept 28). A primary tactic that was implemented in the system was to eliminate any motive of forming black communities by discouraging family ties. Many slaves resorted to documenting and preserving these experiences of slave cruelty through slave narratives, a genre of literature similar to autobiographies. Slave narratives can be regarded as a source that appeals to collective humanity through the complicated and multilayered acts of resistance carried out by the protagonists against their masters. By using Harriet Jacobs’ narrative entitled…

    • 2057 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Incident in the Life of a Slave Girl is a narrative autobiography by an enslaved black American woman who describes her experience during the slavery days and her escape from being enslave on the South to freedom in the North. Harriet Jacobs’s story is painful and she felt the need to make her story to exposed the behind the scene of slavery and tell what really goes on. She wanted to make it public, because she believed that it may help the antislavery movement. The slave narrative is closely related to the memoir. With that being said, in the Incident in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs, there are many ideas worth speaking about.…

    • 1115 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Superior Essays

    O You Happy Free Woman

    • 1857 Words
    • 8 Pages

    A traditional slave narrative is meant to speak out against slavery. It is read by the free, influential white men of the North to join the abolitionist movement to abolish slavery from the United States. Harriet Jacobs takes a different approach in her own slave narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. In a passage of her narrative, Jacobs says: “But, O, ye happy women, whose purity has been sheltered from childhood, who have been free to choose the objects of your affection, whose homes are protected by law, do not judge the poor desolate slave girl too severely! If slavery had been abolished, I, also, could have married the man of my choice; I could have had a home shielded by the laws; and I should have been spared the painful…

    • 1857 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Harriet Jacobs, as a former slave and abolitionist, aided the cause greatly by being one of the first to write a slave narrative that specifically addresses the struggles that female slaves had to endure. Though every slave experienced cruelty, women had the distinct widespread ordeal of having to cope with further physical, sexual, and mental abuses. Women during the 19th century where also caught up in the ideas that pushed for women to be domestic and virtuous, both things that Harriet was denied due to the fact that she was a slave. Knowing that it was mostly white abolitionist women reading her story Harriet chose to highlight how she, and many other female slaves, were essentially stripped of their femininity, and how because of that…

    • 1320 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays