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Authors
Harriet Jacobs (c. 1813-1897)
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Jean Fagin Yellin’s pioneering edition of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1987), with biography, interpretation, and annotation, has been reissued with Harriet’s brother John J. Jacobs’s narrative (2000). Frances Smith Foster and Nellie Y. McKay edited a Norton Critical Edition of Incidents (2001). Yellin’s Harriet Jacobs: A Life (2004) should remain the standard biography for some time to come. For critical discussion, see Rafia Zafar and Deborah M. Garfield’s excellent edited collection, Harriet Jacobs and “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl”: New Critical Essays (1996). Additional commentary may be found in Valerie Smith’s Self- Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative (1987), Karen Sánchez-Eppler’s Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body (1993), Frances Smith Foster’s Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746–1892 (1993), Jennifer Fleischner’s Mastering Slavery: Memory, Family, and Identity in Women’s Slave Narratives (1996), and Carla Kaplan’s The Erotics of Talk: Women’s Writing and Feminist Paradigms (1996). On Lydia Maria Child’s editing of Incidents, see Carolyn Karcher’s Lydia Maria Child: A Cultural Biography (1994) and Bruce Mills’s Cultural Reformations: Lydia Maria Child and the Literature of Reform (1994).
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.
Questions for Discussion and Writing
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."
