Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: A Critical Analysis

Authorship and Authenticity. In her autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), Harriet Jacobs tells the story of her life, beginning with her childhood and ending with the purchase of her freedom by Cornelia Grinnell Willis. Although she is telling a true story, Jacobs chose to substitute pseudonyms for the real names of all of the characters in her narrative and leave the places in the South unnamed because, as she said, "I deemed it kind and considerate towards others to pursue this course" (1). Jacobs also chose to publish the book anonymously, so that the only name appearing on the title page was that of her editor, the prominent abolitionist Lydia Maria Child.

These choices, combined with the almost-incredible events of Jacobs's life, led many early scholars and historians to believe that Incidents was a work of fiction invented by Child and should be classified with other fictionalized slave narratives, such as Richard Hildreth's The Slave: or Memoirs of Archy Moore (1836) and Martha Griffith Browne's Autobiography of a Female Slave (1857). According to the historian John Blassingame, Incidents was "too orderly" and "melodramatic" to be an authentic narrative (373). However, extensive research by scholars, most especially Jean Fagan Yellin, has uncovered and verified the identities of most of the characters and places in Jacobs's narrative, and Incidents has since taken its rightful place as one of the most important antebellum slave narratives in existence today.

Family and the Institution of Slavery. Using the name Linda Brent, Jacobs opens her autobiography with the classic phrase "I was born a slave," but she follows up this declaration with the description of her happy childhood home, where she was cared for by protective and loving parents. This opening sets up a theme that Jacobs will carry throughout her narrative, which is the systematic destruction (or attempted destruction) of families by slavery. By placing the family at the center of her narrative, Jacobs is tapping into an important cultural ideal of 19th-century America.

During that period most social structures were built around the idea of the patriarchal family, with father, mother, and children each playing a specific role in the functioning family unit. Supporters of slavery even tried to cast the institution as offering slaves a stable and supportive family environment. For this reason, as Donald Gibson writes, "the analogy-to-family argument became one of the chief and most frequently employed to justify slavery," and the supposedly paternalistic nature of the institution was one of the falsehoods that antislavery activists worked hardest to eliminate (Gibson 158). Jacobs engages with this debate from the beginning of her narrative by contrasting her loving family home with the harsh realities of the auction block, where enslaved families are broken up and individuals sold to the highest bidder.

In a dramatic scene, Jacobs describes how Dr. Norcom attempts to sell her grandmother although it was widely believed in town that she had been freed in her mistress's will. His plan fails, and from that point on, Jacobs's grandmother becomes a dominant symbol of family values and respectability in the narrative. Molly spends the rest of her life struggling against the slave system to create security and legal freedom for her remaining family members in Edenton, such as Harriet and her children, but she is constantly thwarted by the callous and vindictive Dr. Norcom. The enforced fragmentation of Molly and Harriet's close-knit family due to their owners' abuse, debt, and death is meant to make the reader vividly aware of the unnatural and antifamilial nature of the institution of slavery.

Religious Hypocrisy and Spiritual Resistance. Jacobs's narrative also reflects the ongoing debate over the role of the church, another important cultural institution, in a society that supports slavery. During the antebellum period, churches were deeply divided over the question of slavery, some members embracing it as a biblical institution and others claiming that it was completely antithetical to the teachings of Christianity. Speaking from her own experience, Jacobs focuses her discussion around the hypocrisy of slaveholders who also claim to be Christians. "There is a great difference between Christianity and religion at the south," she writes. "If a man goes to the communion table, and pays money into the treasury of the church, no matter if it be the price of blood, he is called religious" (74).

By setting up this distinction between "Christianity" and "religion," Jacobs is able to contrast the whole-hearted piety of the African-American community and its religious traditions with the half-hearted efforts of the white community. Among them is her first mistress, who taught her to read the Bible but then failed to acknowledge her as a free soul. Looking back on that period, Jacobs wryly notes, "I was her slave, and I suppose she did not recognize me as her neighbor" (8). Jacobs uses these moments in her text to encourage her readers to think more deeply about the nature of Christianity aside from the trappings that surrounded the practice of religion. Although she clearly has strong religious feelings, most of Jacobs's spiritual experiences are centered on her private reading of the Bible rather than its presentation by white ministers of the established church.

The Bible as a Contested Text. In her story, Jacobs does not just comment on the religious hypocrisy of white people in her community but also makes the Bible a point of literal contention in her narrative, dramatizing its contradictory position in the slavery debate. In a chapter entitled "The Church and Slavery" she describes how, the day after he became a confirmed member of the Episcopal Church, Dr. Norcom attempted to combine allusions to the New Testament text "Servants obey your masters" with the idea of Old Testament concubinage to convince Jacobs that giving in to his sexual demands was a Christian act. When she answers that "the Bible didn't say so" (presumably referring to the commandment "Thou shalt not commit adultery"), Norcom responds, "How dare you preach to me about your infernal Bible!" (75). Although this exchange centers on the specific topic of adultery, it acts overall to destabilize the Bible as a uniform source of truth, particularly as the self-serving interpretations of biased slaveholders are contrasted with the spiritual empowerment African Americans gain from reading and interpreting Scripture for themselves.

Literacy and the Fight for Freedom. Harriet Jacobs's familiarity with the Bible, which gives her the authority to "preach" to Norcom, is just one of the many examples of the power of literacy in her narrative. For many slaves the ability to read meant unprecedented access to religious and political knowledge, and it is often credited by them as the first step toward freedom. For this reason, the governments of most slave states discouraged owners from teaching slaves to read and write, and some even made doing so illegal.

In Incidents Jacobs recognizes the central importance of literacy in her own struggle for freedom. Her ability to read not only gave her a sense of personal independence, but also allowed her to engage with and resist her master on the level of language. At one point she mentions that "he knew that I could write, though he had failed to make me read his letters; and he was now troubled lest I should exchange letters with another man" (40). Once she goes into hiding, Jacobs uses her ability to write to lead Norcom on a wild goose chase by sending him letters postmarked and written as though she were in New York City. These letters represent a new form of active resistance to slavery that extends beyond the physical confrontations more often described in slave narratives.

This strategic use of literacy in Jacobs's narrative highlights the importance of writing by African Americans, be it newspaper articles, autobiographies, or speeches, in the fight for abolition. By taking up the pen, Jacobs and others like her insisted that they not only have the opportunity to share their stories, but to write them themselves, thereby taking an active, rather than passive, role in their fight for equal rights. Jacobs's fight to determine the shape of her own life did not end with her escape from slavery but extended into her decision to publish her story. After rejecting Stowe's offer to publish bits of it in her Key, Jacobs set herself to the task of improving her writing style and crafting her story. The anonymous letters she wrote to the Tribune can be seen as exercises in storytelling, as Jacobs experimented with the most effective way to tell the story of her own life and the lives of those around her.

Publication and Editorial Control. This is not to say that Jacobs was able to publish the book entirely on her own. As were other writers of slave narratives, Jacobs was informed that her work could only be published if it were accompanied by an introduction by a famous white abolitionist. However, letters written by Jacobs and her white editor, Lydia Maria Child, have given us insight into the extent of Child's influence on the finished product.

According to a letter of August 1860, Child's input was limited to "transposing sentences and pages, so as to bring the story into continuous order, and the remarks into appropriate places." The language, Child wrote, was "wonderfully good" and needed almost no alteration (266). We can tell from these letters that the unique aspects of Incidents can be attributed to Jacobs herself. With its publication, the book signified Jacobs's literary and verbal triumph over both Dr. Norcom and the well-meaning but patronizing abolitionists like Stowe who would deny her the power to narrate and control her story and her life.

Sexual Exploitation and Redefining Purity. Jacobs's success in writing and publishing her own book with only minimal editorial alteration becomes even more significant in light of the central conflict of her story. Sexual abuse was not a topic that was commonly discussed in slave narratives. Some narrators, such as Frederick Douglass, alluded to it, and melodramatic tales of miscegenation and beautiful, tragic slave women were not uncommon, but no narrative had ever explored from a factual point of view the complex pressures and choices that made up the life of the sexually abused slave woman. The closest attempt was Louisa Picquet, the Octoroon, a narrative based on a series of interviews the editor, the Reverend Hiram Mattison, had with Louisa Picquet about her life as a young slave, who was almost raped by her master and then sold into concubinage around the age of 14 or 15.

Published in the same year as Incidents, the narrative of Louisa Picquet forms an interesting contrast to the story Jacobs tells. Mattison's prying and almost pornographic interest in the details of Picquet's sexual and physical abuse dominates the text and allows the reader only glimpses of Picquet's own feelings and thoughts about her situation. By writing her own story, Jacobs avoided that kind of editorial control and was able to produce a much more thoughtful and balanced view of the physical and psychological aspects of the experiences that she shared with so many other enslaved women.

Jacobs knew from the beginning that the sexual aspects of her narrative, which she had previously only dared to confide to her friend Amy Post, could potentially cause female readers to shun her book as too improper for public consumption. In order to combat that kind of reception, Jacobs carefully adopted some language and conventions from the sentimental novels of seduction and resistance that were popular female reading at the time. Nevertheless, as Frances Smith Foster points out, "Hers was not a tale of a naïve or headstrong maiden who falls victim to the wiles of an unscrupulous man, then dies" (103). Instead, Jacobs carefully portrays her unwilling initiation into "the evil ways of the world" and her spirited attempts to retain her purity in the face of Norcom's harassment (54).

Rather than being the melodramatic story of a sexual victim, Jacobs's account of her affair with Sawyer is filled with images of reasoned intelligence and self-control. Feeling herself to be out of other options, Jacobs began the affair with the younger, kinder, and, she hoped, more impressionable man after making a "deliberate calculation" about its possible consequences for her and any children she might have. Her pragmatic approach to the affair is paired with a sense of limited spiritual liberation. She claims, "There is something akin to freedom in having a lover who has no control over you, except that which he gains by kindness and attachment" (54–55). Although at the time she felt a sense of humiliation and shame at the path that she chose, Jacobs refuses to reject her decision or acknowledge it as a permanent fall. Instead, she presents it to the reader as a successful evasive action taken by a desperate woman, redirecting the guilt to the institution of slavery, which condones the sexual exploitation of African-American women.

By doing so, Jacobs redefines purity as something that is dependent on social circumstances, not solely on a woman's character. White women, she explains, can rely on family, community, and the law to help them resist attacks on their chastity (54). As her master, Norcom is given the legal right to isolate Jacobs and remove or negate all of these potential external sources of strength. After describing all of these circumstances, Jacobs feels justified in stating, "I feel that the slave woman ought not to be judged by the same standards as others" (56). This statement, made during a period when African-American women were almost always portrayed as somewhat falling short of a universal moral standard, stakes out a new territory for them to occupy. Jacobs backs up her claims for her own respectability and that of other women in her situation by repeatedly portraying women like her grandmother, who were "neither ladies nor broken blossoms" (Yellin 25). Rather than fall into the binary either/or depiction of women so popular at that time, Jacobs carves out a third space for herself and other African-American women who were denied the protection of law and custom in America.

Motherhood as Activism. When Jacobs describes her sexual experiences, she highlights the color line: White women are afforded protection that women of color are not. However, when she describes her experiences as a mother, she builds a bridge across the color divide. She intends her narrative to be a special plea for "the thousands . . . of Slave Mothers that are still in bondage . . . [and] their helpless Children" ("Harriet Jacobs to Amy Post" 264). It is her role as a mother that she stresses throughout most of her narrative, and as she describes incidents involving her children, she often invites the mothers who might be reading her story to imagine themselves in her shoes.

Even though she is much more conventional in her representations of motherhood than of womanhood, Jacobs does not accept the passivity that is often linked to the character of the "good mother" or the "true woman." Her grandmother, Molly, a single mother of five and caretaker of her grand- and great-grandchildren, is an important symbol of womanhood and motherhood in the text. However, her brand of maternal devotion is not the one finally embraced by Jacobs. When Jacobs talks of running away from Norcom, Molly states her opinion that temporary abandonment of one's children, even if it is for their own later good, is an unforgivable breach of motherly responsibilities (Foreman 88).

Nevertheless, when Jacobs decides to run away, she characterizes that decision as an extreme act of mothering, since it is meant to distract Norcom from his plans for her children and focus his attention on finding her. She tells her readers that "it was more for my helpless children than for myself that I longed for freedom" (89). This active, rather than passive, construction of motherhood allows Jacobs to fulfill her own goals as well as her goals for her children. It also links her with the northern women she had met, like Amy Post, who were both activists and mothers.

Race, Freedom, and the American Dream. Although Jacobs clearly makes an effort to bridge the color line in her narrative, she does so in a way that resists the objectification or marginalization of African-American people, and especially African-American women. Their self-respect, she insists, is just as important to them as their physical freedom. As Frederick Douglass in his Narrative or Harriet Wilson in Our Nig does, Jacobs argues that racism in the North is as much a problem as slavery in the South.

The ending of her narrative reflects her unease with northern race relations by breaking the behavioral patterns her readers would have been expected to follow. She stresses her departure from the sentimental novel by stating, "Reader, my story ends with freedom; not in the usual way, with marriage." However, she insists that for a former slave, even freedom is a qualified blessing in a state overshadowed by the Fugitive Slave Law. She is also not willing to pretend that simple physical freedom is her ultimate goal. She wants "a home of [her] own" around which to gather her scattered children (201).

The domestic nature of this wish fits with the motherly character she has given herself throughout the book. However, it signifies more than just her own personal desire. By drawing attention to her unfulfilled version of the American dream, she gestures to the broader economic and social barriers that stood between all free African Americans and their ultimate goals.

For Discussion or Writing.
1.Discuss the traditional roles women were expected to fill in 19th-century America. How does Jacobs seem to accept or resist these roles? What different kinds of female behavior does Jacobs model in her narrative? According to Jacobs, what is the definition of "true womanhood?"

2. White women played an important part in the abolitionist movement. What role do they play in Jacobs's narrative? How does she portray the relationships between white and African-American women?

3. Examine the ways male and female characters are depicted in the narrative. Construct an argument in which you make the case that Jacobs gives priority to females over males because she is appealing primarily to a female audience. Then decide whether or not you think she is justified in doing so.

4. What kinds of appeals does Jacobs use to construct her argument against slavery? Why did she choose them?

5. Look at the way Eliza Harris's story concludes in the final pages Uncle Tom's Cabin and contrast it with the way Linda Brent's story ends in Incidents. How do the differences in these endings serve differing authorial purposes?