Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

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 in faith, free choice, and chastity, though she unable to do it and eventually succumbs to Dr. Flint. “I tried hard to preserve my self-respect; but I was struggling alone in the powerful grasp of the demon Slavery; and the monster proved too strong for me. I felt as if I was forsaken by God and man; as if all my efforts must be frustrated; and I became reckless in my despair” (Jacobs 84). Jacobs makes a compelling argument that slavery is not simply evil because it denies freedom of the will to men and women, but also because it conspires to create conditions in which women have no choice but to submit to their masters’ sexual demands. Dr. Flint built Jacobs a cottage and attempted to evade his wife, but Jacobs made it extremely clear she had no interest in him.
As well as the language of purity and faith, Jacobs also commands the interest in her reader by using melodrama. In the scene in which Jacobs informs her grandmother she is pregnant because she has been taken advantage of, her grandmother calls her a disgrace to her family, even though it is clear it is not Jacobs’s fault. "The mother of slaves is very watchful. She knows there is no security for her children” (Jacobs 87). This would make the story of the poor, wronged girl seem very familiar to the reader. Jacobs makes use of literary conventions and language that her readers would have experienced in other contexts, underlining the similarity between herself and her likely readers. Slaves too had a sense of disgrace and what was right, even if they were forced to deviate from that path, Jacobs underlines in such scenes.
The reference to a passage also highlights the physical passage in the attic which Jacobs secrets herself to survive. Jacobs portrays the tremendous suffering caused by slavery in a physical as well as moral sense in her description of her attic, Of one slave-catcher, she notes, “Every body knew he had the blood of a slave father in his veins; but for the sake of passing himself off for white, he was ready to kiss the slaveholders’ feet” (Jacobs 181). Her grandmother is very crafty, and even invites the man to her house on Christmas, to show him that the house did not contain Jacobs. The Christmas celebration makes a stark contrast between the sufferings endured by Jacobs in her narrow attic passage and the joy experienced by others, including the slave-catcher.
The fact that Jacobs is willing to undergo her captivity in the attic for freedom, and that slaves are willing to risk brutal punishments and even death for freedom likewise highlights the terrible nature of slavery. Slavery may corrupt women and cause moral decline, but ultimately Jacobs’s striving for freedom, and the desire of all slaves for freedom, cannot be daunted.
Works Cited
Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 1861. Web. 7 Oct 2020. https://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/jacobs/jacobs.html#jac179