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Harriet Jacobs Sparknotes

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Equivocating the “Slave”
In order to properly understand the capacity of being able to live a life of constant stress and then articulate the life’s story in a fashion that grasps more than the intended audience, when it comes stories being told regarding chattel slavery, one needs to closely read to thoroughly examine the literature of the overall experience. Harriet Jacobs, also published as Linda Brandt, was a daughter, former chattel property/slave, permanent mother/granddaughter, and abolitionist turned profound author. In her autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), Jacobs pleaded with her targeted Northern colonized female audience in a chance to aide in the severe inhumane predicaments that occupied the Southern …show more content…

Through Jacobs ambiguous words, colonized women were also vaguely portrayed as a form possession, in a sense they also had to answer to the man in charge. Therefore white women never really held any real power, no matter if it was as grand as political or as small as domestic. In the life of Jacobs and her nameless benefactress, white women held all the power for her freedom for … “she was unlike the majority of the slaveholders’ wives” (152). Distinguishing these social and political dynamics, as Jacob orchestrates her literary pleas to the intended audience, she insinuates that the female colonizer was more of an ally to many slaves, rather than a vicious …show more content…

Aunt Martha was able to do more with her trade, she was able to establish a household name for herself and her family, thanks also to a white woman. Jacob states, “In consequence of numerous requests, she asked permission of her mistress to bake crackers at night after all the household work was done; and she obtained leave to do it, provided she would clothe herself and her children from the profits” (12). Expressing a separate economic trade, beyond the grasps of chattel slavery owners, was made possible only by the grace of the motivated reader. Jacobs tactically expressed this economy not for the sake of the historical context of a successful economy being established by the enslaved colonized property, but for her to display presumed acts of humanity within the southern

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