Slave Girl
FDA

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

This report aims to present views of how ever since slavery, femininity and race have at times posed problems for a vast majority of minority women in the workplace and throughout history. Gender roles and definitions alter expectations which then affect how women experience life. Take for instance osa Parks who is best known for her role in the civil rights movement after refusing to give up her seat to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955. She was obviously not the first black woman to resist constricting segregation rules, but through her actions, she helped increase pressure by helping to widen the boycott of the bus system. This role helped her get noticed by Martin Luther King Jr. And the other civil rights leaders. Being a prominent black female in history does not stop black on black crime or reduce….

Life of a Slave Girl ritten by Herself" by Harriet Jacobs.
"Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl ritten by Herself"

"Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" by Harriet Jacobs seems too horrific to be true. One feels that it is a fictional account rather than an autobiography. Jacobs's life was one of unmentionable cruelty and sorrow. It is also one of great courage and sacrifice. ritten under the pen name Linda Brent, the book was first published in 1861. Jacobs tells of her years as a house slave before the Civil ar, of the sexual exploitation she endured and the incredible sacrifices she made to gain her freedom and that of her children. That was her only dream, to be free with her children. It is interesting to note the class differences of slavery, the field slave verses the house slave. Growing up in the master's home,….

Life of a Slave Girl
In Harriet Jacobs' novel, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, the narrator takes several steps to assert her status as a person and to make a case against the dehumanization inherent in slavery. The dehumanization of Jacobs' and other slaves in the novel is clearly shown through the sexual exploitation that they face, and the separation of women and their children. Jacob's continually fights against this degradation, and asserts herself as a person. She refuses the advances of Mr. Flint, chooses another man with which to have an affair, and ultimately goes to the extremes of hiding in a cramped garret to assert her independence. Ultimately, Jacobs' is successful in obtaining her freedom, but she only obtains freedom through an extraordinary perseverance and force of will.

Jacob's account is a clear description of the degradation that women slaves face through sexual exploitation and the….

Scarlet Letter and "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl"
Traditionally, the society presented women as objects of submission to men. omen suffered significantly in the arms of men, as they appeared as objects of desire and mere satisfaction of the will of men, in addition to respecting and bowing, to their every wish. The set in 'The Scarlet Letter' and "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" have a similar ground concerning the themes about the relationship between men and women. The two literatures are set in the mid 17th and 18th century, where the age of slavery and other forms of maltreatment of people along different lines of alienation were prevalent. The authors of the stories present themes that indicate the actual feeling of the happenings that took place in that age. The use of characters, symbols, and literature devices to the expected effect in presenting these….

Chapter 10 of Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is entitled “A Perilous Passage in the Slave Girl’s Life.” This title is significant because it does not merely refer to Jacobs’s passage through girlhood into womanhood, which would be regarded as a perilous passage for any women during the 19th century, but also the infamous middle passage of African Americans from freedom to slavery. Jacobs’s passage is doubly perilous, both as a slave who runs the risk of being sold further down the river, or to a cruel master, and also as a woman living in constant fear of rape. Eventually, Jacobs feels compelled to submit to Dr. Flint against her will, as a kind of rite of passage of enslaved womanhood, where women have to sacrifice their chastity and dignity to survive. Jacob paints a poignant portrait of herself striving to uphold her family’s values based….

Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs relates to the readers her experiences as a slave girl in the Southern part of America. Her story started from her sheltered life as a child to her subordination to her mistress upon her father's death, and her continuing struggle to live a dignified and virtuous life despite being a slave. Her struggle involves her constant degradation from her master; the danger of being sexually exploited by her mistress' husband, Dr. Flint; her broken relationship with a free colored man; her pregnancy to a man named Mr. Sands; and her fight for her and her children's freedom from slavery. All of these experiences helped Linda learn to fight justly for her right to become a free individual, but most of all, to be subordinated to Dr. Flint, the man who wanted so bad to exploit her, yet, was not able to because….

She thought that these women deserved more than what they were receiving.
As I stated before, appearances seem to be something very important in this excerpt. Everyone appeared to be one thing, while secretly being another in order to cover their tracks. Slave owners fathered children left and right with the slaves and some didn't even claim the children, even though it was so apparent and obvious. The slave girl refused to be just one more of these female slaves who gave in to her Master's desires. Even though the Doctor promised her everything and said that she would be living like a queen, she stood her ground and refused to give in. In times of slavery, that was something that was practically unheard of. Whatever the master told her to do was supposed to be done. The slave girl was actually pretty lucky that more severe consequences weren't taken….

Life of a Slave Girl
"Incidents in the Live of a Slave Girl" is a moving story of one black woman's struggle in early America. Jacobs shows how she became part of the families she lived with and who held her as a slave, but shows how her own family came first. She saved her children from slavery, but white people also used and abused her. She shows she was a strong woman who knew right from wrong, but could not help but "sin" at times because of her background and her circumstances. Black slaves had very little choice except to submit to their masters' wishes or run away. Jacobs did both at times in her life, and they were the right choices at that particular time.

Jacobs wanted people to understand what she went through, and her story does that. Her grandmother loses a loan to her owner, her own….

Slave, Not Born a Slave
The Making of Slavery

The sense of proprietorship of slave traders, owners, and other propagators of chattel slavery that was prevalent in the United States until the middle of the 19th century would be absurdly laughable -- were it not steeped in a legacy of perversion, of anguish, of tragedy and of perniciousness. The notion that one had the right to actually own another, the latter of whose sole existence would be to serve the former in any way, shape or method which the "owner" deemed appropriate, has been disproved as largely imaginary, and not something based on any sense of right or morality (no matter how such a historically ambiguous term was defined) numerous times, both during the tenure of slavery in the United States and well afterwards. A casual examination of the wording of the Declaration of Independence confirms this fact (McAulifee, 2010, p.….

Mary also remembers the days of the war, when they heard stories about being set free and prayed for their freedom. Then one day all the slaves were asked to come to the Grand House. Here they were told by the master and his wife that they were no longer slaves. They were now free. "The Yankees will soon be here." The two of them then brought their chairs to the front of the house on the porch and waited. In about an hour, the Yankees arrived and repeated: "You are now free." The slaves and Yankees ate and drank together in celebration, while the owners continued to "humbly" sit on the porch and watch. This story by Mary was indeed very different from the movies, such as "Gone with the Wind" with the fires and mayhem. It is actually as if the master and his wife were glad --….

He was not just some compassionate liberal advocating freedom for the oppressed, he was an actual victim of the system who had risen above it. This strengthened his leadership abilities even further because he was able to use his personal experiences to relate the horrors of slavery to those who had only read about it.
When he tells about the cruelty of the slave overseer Mr. Gore, stating "His savage barbarity was equaled only by the consummate coolness with which he committed the grossest and most savage deeds upon the slaves under his charge" (p. 356), one cannot helped but be moved and outraged. There is no denying that his experiences were as horrendous as Harriet's. But there is also no denying that the male and female experiences of slavery were different. The fact is, the male and female experiences in just about any walk of life are different, no….

Slavery
The American government was directly complicit in slavery and passed a number of laws that supported the institution. One of the most severe and notorious of those laws was the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. The Fugitive Slave Law highlighted the vast gulf between the slaveholding and free states of the union, leading eventually to the Civil War. However, the law also impacted the lives of countless people who attempted to escape slavery or those facilitated their passage. In her memoirs, Harriet Jacobs writes about the Fugitive Slave Law. The author calls those who enforced the law "cruel human bloodhounds" who were no better than slave owners themselves (Jacobs 68). To properly understand slavery, it becomes essential to comprehend the entirety of the system that supported it.

In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Jacobs does not spare the North from its participation in the subjugation of people of….

life of slaves in Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and the lives of the mentally ill in Victor LaValle's Devil in Silver
The theme of freedom and escape was common in antebellum literature written by former slaves -- and is also common in narratives of the lives of the mentally ill today. Both Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of Slave Girl and Victor LaValle's Devil in Silver chronicle unjust imprisonments: in Jacob's case, the narrator's life as a slave; in LaValle's novel, the horrors perpetrated upon the mentally ill. These texts indicate that those who are marginalized in our society are selected in an arbitrary fashion based upon categories such as race or class rather than have intrinsic properties that make them uniquely different. Over the course of the narrative, both protagonists overcome the societies of fear and tyranny that are created by their….

hen Jacobs was transferred to the Norcoms, the reality of slavery suddenly hit the author hard because prior to her being sold to them she enjoyed a relatively happy childhood in a secure home environment. Dr. Norcom frequently made advances on Jacobs and she was forced to find solace in the arms of a white lawyer to help resist Dr. Norcom. She had two children by the lawyer, and was separated from them. Being separated from her parents and then from her children is a poignant dimension of slavery that Jacobs explicates in the narrative. Moreover, Jacobs describes the insidious psychological abuse that many domestic servants endured.
Jacobs also explains what might be new information for many readers: the different types of slavery and different ways slavery manifested. Not all slaves were field workers and not all slaves were treated poorly. Some, like her parents at the outset of the….

Douglass did not have those options and he had to locate ways to become free that involved saving money and escaping. In the end they both used similar methods to escape but the initial decisions were gender based.
The final similarity in the lives of the two was what they chose to do with their lives following their escape. They both worked to help free slaves who had not been able to get away and they both worked to help those who had been freed to set up their lives.

CONCLUSION

hile Jacobs and Douglass started out as slaves they worked hard to escape and then used their abilities to help others who had been enslaved. Instead of turning bitter and inward they both penned their experiences to help the world understand the true ramifications of slavery.

orks Cited

Harriet Jacobs (accessed 10-26-06) (http://xroads.virginia.edu/~Hyper/JACOBS/hj-site-index.htm)

Harriet Jacobs (accessed 10-26-06)

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p2923.html

Hariet Jacobs, Incidents in the life of a….