In Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents In the Life Of A Slave Girl, Jacobs illustrates how her life swings around from extremes while in slavery. At first Jacobs even states that she does not even know she was born a slave until she was six years old (8). Her father’s expertise in carpentry and her mother’s exceptional work to her mistress, earned the comfort of feeling free for Jacobs herself. This feeling of “freedom while enslaved” was taken away when her parents pass away with only Jacobs’ grandmother to care for her, and is soon replaced with violence, pain, and fright.
Under the care of her grandmother and many masters and mistresses, Jacobs came to a point in her life where she is to serve a Dr. Flint and his family. As stated in the text, Jacobs’ was now fifteen and she saw this as a “sad epoch in the life of a slave girl.” Being of age, Jacobs not only had to deal with being a slave, but also had to fight with the thoughts of abuse she received from her new master. Dr. Flint used his powers to remind Jacobs that she was his property and that he could do anything he pleased to her.
Jacobs’ story is a perfect example of how life as a slave girl was treacherous and dangerous. Geneva Moore writes in A Freudian Reading Of Harriet Jacobs’ “Incidents in the Life Of A Slave Girl, that in slavery, most enslaved girls who soon turn to ladies, become sexed bodies (4). This of course would happen to Jacobs’, and soon would be the most common destiny for female slaves.
Females slaves not only had to be scared every minute of their lives from their perverted thought- minded masters, but also from their mistresses. Stated by many seminars and even by Jacobs herself, the mistress would most likely become jealous and begin to hate the female slaves the masters take a liking to. Many female slaves had no one to confide in for help and Jacobs was no different.
The dangers of being a slave were always outweighed by death, but according to Jacobs’ she would rather have her children exhaust their lives on a plantation field then be a live in slave (28).
A Freudian Reading of Harriet Jacobs' "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" Geneva Cobb Moore The Southern Literary Journal, Vol. 38, No. 1 (Fall, 2005), pp. 3-20 Published by: University of North Carolina Press
Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in The Life of a Slave Girl. Dover Publications, 2001.
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This essay really helped me think about how different a slave’s life can be depending on their maters’ natures. Harriet went through a pretty decent childhood, almost a happy one if compared to others, but her life later on was full of toils and troubles. But I also imagine other slaves in Harriet’s situation would probably have accepted their fate and would have deemed this life as a happy one. The thing is, there is always someone worse off than you somewhere else in the world, and a female slave who works in the field, who gets flogged everyday and gets physically and mentally tortured would probably kill to be in Harriet’s position. Harriet got to be with her family most of her life, even when she had her children; she had her grandmother as an aid, and her uncles and even other white folks who were kind to her. Some slaves consider a sinful life (as in sleeping with their masters) worthwhile if they can be with their loved ones. Nevertheless, being a slave, no matter how well treated, is still humiliation to human nature and it makes perfect sense why people like Jacobs and Douglass and many others fought hard to gain their rightful freedom.
ReplyDeleteI agree that fear is a way the owners use to control their slaves. Also because the mistresses must conform to the cult of domesticity they cannot do much about the owners raping the slaves. However it does not stop them to become violent with the slaves.
ReplyDeleteThis blog really adds to the themes we talked about in class. The master's use of women as "sexual bodies" portrays an additional hardship women slaves had to endure and shows the differences between men and women's experiences with slavery. We can also see an example of social control coming from the masters power over the women.
ReplyDeleteThis blog talk about how Jacobs would rther have her children die then go through slavery. It really helps seeing how difficult slavery might have been. This shows how horrible it was and how much she cared about her children. We can see what kind of a person she was.
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