unwritten self
Harriet Jacobs in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl uses clear detail and straightforward language, except when talking about her sexual history, to fully describe what it is like to be a slave. Jacobs says that Northerners only think of slavery as perpetual bondage; they don't know the depth of degradation there is to that word. She believes that no one could truly understand how slavery really is unless they have gone through it. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl do not only tell about the physical pains and hard labor that she went through. It mostly concentrates on the emotional viewpoints on it and what it did to shape who she is. When writing her story, Jacobs had a clear motive. Her motive was one of a political taking. She writes through her experiences and sufferings to make it clear to people, mainly the Northerners, and more specifically white women in the North, how slavery really is. She does not want sympathy, however, she does want "to arouse the women in the North to a realizing sense of the condition of two millions of women of the South, still in bondage" (460). Jacobs wants people to take action in antislavery efforts. Jacobs in telling her story uses many techniques to make it effective. So
She did it for a greater purpose; she did it to help her persecuted people, and this is what she wants the readers to be directed to. She talks about her children and the unfortunate death of one of them. Her technique of just hinting at her master's acts is a way of conveying that. She also uses it to let the readers know that they have done things in their life that they are not proud of either, so why judge her on what she had done. She had to write about an unconventional thing, slavery, in a conventional way. She had her own way of getting her points across, one being that a person could not possibly fully understand the degradation of slavery if he/she did not go through it themselves. For instance, the topic of sexual abuse of slave women is a topic that was not usually publicly discussed. She presents it as a public political concern; this was not usual in conventional nineteenth century polite discourse. It lets readers know and realize that this is happening to not only her but also many of her people. In the end she is thought of as a "new kind of female hero" (497). Jacobs wanted to show how her life got more difficult as the years went by. In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs does not use her real name. Her story was very powerful and probably helped in the antislavery movement, therefore fulfilling her goal. Throughout Jacobs story you could see that family was a big part in her life and the reader sees how she shows love for them.
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Acceptance Essays
