Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl Summary

To love, means to have a deep affection for someone or something. Two people grow and develop with one another to eventually create a bond for each other that makes them one. People experience the feeling of love everyday but back in the 1800’s, slaves were not free individuals and were denied the freedom of being in or experience love firsthand. Slaves were not treated as free human beings and as a result, they were not given the same opportunities. In the narrative, “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” by Harriet Jacobs, she explains her story of her struggles and experiences during her life of slavery. During her experiences with different slave owners, she endured sexual and emotional abuse from her owners which was common for female …show more content…
She struggles with the idea of the love because she feels like she will never have the freedom to experience it since she’s a slave. Jacobs states, “Why does a slave ever love? Why allow the tendrils of the heart to twine around objects which may at any moment be wretched away by the hand of violence” (Jacobs, 913). She depicts an image of the tendrils of the heart being twined around objects to show how love is exemplified. The tendrils are the feelings that are formed by individuals. They are what connects one person to another. Jacobs draws the picture up of the tendrils wrapping around an object and then lets in her true feelings of love by saying, that any moment it can be “wretched away by the hand of violence” (Jacobs, 913). The hands of violence represented here is slavery. As a slave, they were not able to choose or pick who you wanted to marry or be with because your slave owner would not approve of it. Jacobs talks about how she struggled with the idea of leaving her lover because of her responsibilities as a slave. Slave owners did not see the slaves as people like them and just viewed them as workers, they did not have the time to love another. Slaves had every reason and or right to love whoever but the consequences that were endured for doing so, became a fear to the slaves, particularly Jacobs herself. Jacobs describes in her narrative how slavery affected her ability to love by stating, “if slavery was abolished, I, also, could have married the man of my choice” (Jacobs, 918). By her stating this, it shows how slavery was the overall issue as to why she was not able to marry the man she loves. The reader gets a sense of how difficult slavery had on a slave’s life and their internal