Incidents in the Life of a Sla
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl In her essay, "Loopholes of Resistance," Michelle Burnham argues that "Aunt Marthy's garret does not offer a retreat from the oppressive conditions of slavery - as, one might argue, the communal life in Aunt Marthy's house does - so much as it enacts a repetition of them...[Thus] Harriet Jacobs escapes reigning discourses in structures only in the very process of affirming them" (289). In order to support this, one must first agree that Aunt Marthy's house provides a retreat from slavery. I do not. Burnham seems to view the life inside Aunt Marthy's house as one outside of and apart from slavery where family structure can exist, the mind can find some rest, comfort can be given, and a sense of peace and humanity can be achieved. In contrast, Burnham views the garret as a physical embodiment of the horrors of slavery, a place where family can only dream about being together, the mind is subjected to psychological warfare, comfort is non-existent, and only the fear and apprehension of inhumanity can be found. It is true that Aunt Marthy's house paints and entirely different, much less severe, picture of slavery than that of the garret, but still, it is a picture of slavery differing onl
No home, even Aunt Marthy's, no matter how much love it holds, can offer retreat from the horrors of slavery until those horrors cease to exist. Throughout her novel, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs presents these and several other structures that suggest a possible retreat from slavery, may appear from the outside to provide such a retreat, but ideally never can. Yes, for the deceased the life of slavery has ended, but it is the life of slavery has ended his life. Even her elaborate scheme, which drove Dr. Because it offers them the possibility of community and identity, many slaves find themselves strongly attached to religion. The slaveowner may have financially lost, but to his own ethics, he has won. Flint is working from a reality that does not see Linda as a person who has the right to a family or a self. Many slaves felt that the answers to their problems lied in a place that was unattainable by most of them, the Bible, and that to read and interpret it would afford them "access to and participation in the discursive formations of bourgeois society" (Mullen, 256), thus allowing them to finally taste "the water of life" (61). However, for Linda, possession of such a gift did not prove this assertion. The garret's close proximity to the house is symbolic of the ever-lurking presence of slavery and its power to break down and destroy families and lives until there is nothing left. His returning presence affirmed that her freedom from him was as fictional as her letters and that she was as likely to find freedom in her present situation as he was to find her in New York The refuge that one often finds within the confines of family and self are unattainable in the life of a slave because, in essence, he is entitled to nether.
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Acceptance Essays
