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Biography
Jacobs was born a slave in Edenton, North Carolina. Though
she led a happy childhood, living with both her mother and
her father, she was sold to Doctor and Mrs. James Norcom
in 1825. The doctor sexually assaulted her and his wife abused
her; in defense Jacobs began an affair with a white lawyer,
with whom she had two children. In 1835 she managed to escape
from Norcom's country plantation and hid for seven years
in the house of her maternal grandmother, a free woman. Jacobs
escaped to the North in 1842 and was emancipated by her employer,
Cornelia Willis, in 1853. After working in Rochester, New
York, in the Anti-Slavery Office run by her brother, Jacobs
realized that her story would be a powerful contribution
to the antislavery literature circulated by abolitionists.
She wanted to share the painful reality of her life with
the women of the North, hoping to convince them that slavery
denied black women the chance to devote their lives to their
children and families. With the help of Lydia Maria Child,
a well-known writer and abolitionist, Jacobs published Incidents
in the Life of a Slave Girl in 1861 under the pseudonym
Linda Brent.
Explorations
When Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was published
in 1861, it reached its public in the wake of many other
slave narratives, and in a literary period which was awkward,
to say the least, for the telling of true stories of a young
woman suffering the genuine perils of slavery. This was a
heyday for melodrama, for romantic fiction, for breathless
tales of "harassed females." A large reading public was used
to, and in some ways inured to, the hyperbolic prose of such
accounts. Jacobs faced a challenge, therefore, in telling
her truth in a time of make-believe ordeals and in finding
or re-claiming the language appropriate to her experience.
1. Describe the style in which Incidents is written.
Remember that it was published almost ten years after Stowe's Uncle
Tom's Cabin. If you have read narratives by Hawthorne, Poe,
and others who present fictional characters and situations,
comment on the rhetorical problems facing Jacobs in telling
an American public about actual events.
2. By the time that Incidents reached the public
in the American North, slave narratives were commonplace
and the Civil War was beginning. What would you say are
the distinguishing qualities of this account? How would
you compare it to Douglass's Narrative as
an account of slave experiences and their effects on the
self?
3. Comment on Dr. Flint's promise to Linda that if she
moves into the house he has built for her, he will "make
her a lady."
Other sites to consult:
Incidents
in the Life of a Slave Girl. An excellent
site. Includes a complete, fully searchable online
text, images from the book and of slave life during
Jacobs's time; an overview of Jacobs's life with
suggestions for how to read Incidents; a
timeline; a glossary; and links to other Jacobs-related
sites.
Harriet
Jacobs page. A bibliography and study questions
from the PAL: Perspectives in American Literature site
maintained by Paul P. Reuben (California State University,
Stanislaus).
Harriet
Jacobs and the Sexual Violence of Slavery.
An assignment on Charles Hannon's Multimedia Assignment
Bank for the Norton Anthologies of African American
and American Literature.
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/JACOBS/hjhome.htm:
A University of Virginia site about Incidents, its author,
and her life and times.
http://www.drizzle.com/~tmercer/Jacobs/: A Harriet
Jacobs site with a preponderance of links to other Jacobs
materials
online.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p2923.html: A PBS Harriet
Jacobs site, including many primary interesting primary
documents.
http://www.ncwriters.org/hjacobs.htm: A biography and bibliography.
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