Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is a book that was published in 1861 by Harriet Jacobs, using the pen name

Pen name

A pen name, nom de plume, or literary double, is a pseudonym adopted by an author. A pen name may be used to make the author's name more distinctive, to disguise his or her gender, to distance an author from some or all of his or her works, to protect the author from retribution for his or her...

 "Linda Brent". While on one level it chronicles the experiences of Harriet Jacobs as a slave

Slavery

Slavery is a system under which people are treated as property to be bought and sold, and are forced to work. Slaves can be held against their will from the time of their capture, purchase or birth, and deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work, or to demand compensation...

, and the various humiliations she had to endure in that unhappy state, it also deals with the particular tortures visited on women at her station. Often in the book, she will point to a particular punishment that a male slave will endure at the hands of slave holders, and comment that, although she finds the punishment brutal in the extreme, it cannot compare to the abuse that a young woman must face while still on the cusp of girlhood.

Incidents in the Life of Slave Girl is considered a slave narrative

Slave narrative

The slave narrative is a literary form which grew out of the written accounts of enslaved Africans in Britain and its colonies, including the later United States, Canada and Caribbean nations...

. Portions of it were first published in serial form before being published as a complete work in 1861, after some difficulty finding a publisher. It is also considered an example of feminist

Feminism

Feminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women. Its concepts overlap with those of women's rights...

 literature.

Historical Context

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was published in 1861, the start of the Civil War. At this time, the federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 had been in effect for 10 years. This act required the states to observe Art. IV Sec. 2 of the Constitution of the United States and return any escaped slaves to their masters. The Underground Railroad

Underground Railroad

The Underground Railroad was an informal network of secret routes and safe houses used by 19th-century black slaves in the United States to escape to free states and Canada with the aid of abolitionists and allies who were sympathetic to their cause. The term is also applied to the abolitionists,...

 was organized as a system of houses of abolitionists that helped slaves on their way to the North in defiance of the Constitution and of the Fugitive Slave Acts. At this time, it was very dangerous for slaves to try to escape. In 1857 The Dred Scott Decision

Dred Scott v. Sandford

Dred Scott v. Sandford, , also known as the Dred Scott Decision, was a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court that people of African descent brought into the United States and held as slaves were not protected by the Constitution and could never be U.S...

 stated that people of African descent imported into the United States and held as slaves (or their descendants, whether or not they were slaves) were not protected by the Constitution and could never be U.S. citizens.

Another book of dealing with similar themes is Uncle Tom's Cabin

Uncle Tom's Cabin

Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly is an anti-slavery novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Published in 1852, the novel "helped lay the groundwork for the Civil War", according to Will Kaufman....

by Harriet Beecher Stowe

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Harriet Beecher Stowe was an American abolitionist and author. Her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin was a depiction of life for African-Americans under slavery; it reached millions as a novel and play, and became influential in the United States and United Kingdom...

. This novel, published in 1852, was claimed to have "laid the groundwork for the civil war."

Women's rights at the time of the release of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl were progressively moving forward. The Seneca Falls Convention

Seneca Falls Convention

The Seneca Falls Convention was an early and influential women's rights convention held in Seneca Falls, New York, July 19–20, 1848. It was organized by local New York women upon the occasion of a visit by Boston-based Lucretia Mott, a Quaker famous for her speaking ability, a skill rarely...

 had occurred in 1848, and white women were working toward their right to vote. However, the Anti-Slavery movement was split over the question of womens rights. The start of the Women's Rights Movement was born from the Abolitionist movement in that women were allowed to be involved. This gave women some power and inspiration to extend the movement to women, though not all abolitionists agreed. It became a "race" of sorts to see which party got the right to vote first: African Americans or women. Ultimately, African American males received the power to vote before women.

Plot Summary

Born into slavery, Linda spends her early years in a happy home with her mother and father, who are relatively well-off slaves. When her mother dies, six-year-old Linda is sent to live with her mother’s mistress, who treats her well and teaches her to read. After a few years, this mistress dies and bequeaths Linda to a relative. Her new masters are cruel and neglectful, and Dr. Flint, the father, soon begins pressuring Linda to have a sexual relationship with him. Linda struggles against Flint’s overtures for several years. He pressures and threatens her, and she defies and outwits him. Knowing that Flint will eventually get his way, Linda consents to a love affair with a white neighbor, Mr. Sands, saying that she is ashamed of this illicit relationship but finds it preferable to being raped by the loathsome Dr. Flint. With Mr. Sands, she has two children, Benny and Ellen. Linda argues that a powerless slave girl cannot be held to the same standards of morality as a free woman. She also has practical reasons for agreeing to the affair: she hopes that when Flint finds out about it, he will sell her to Sands in disgust. Instead, the vengeful Flint sends Linda to his plantation to be broken in as a field hand.

When she discovers that Benny and Ellen are to receive similar treatment, Linda hatches a desperate plan. Escaping to the North with two small children would be impossible. Unwilling to submit to Dr. Flint’s abuse, but equally unwilling to abandon her family, she hides in the attic crawl space in the house of her grandmother, Aunt Martha. She hopes that Dr. Flint, under the false impression that she has gone North, will sell her children rather than risk having them disappear as well. Linda is overjoyed when Dr. Flint sells Benny and Ellen to a slave trader who is secretly representing Mr. Sands. Mr. Sands promises to free the children one day and sends them to live with Aunt Martha. But Linda’s triumph comes at a high price. The longer she stays in her tiny garret, where she can neither sit nor stand, the more physically debilitated she becomes. Her only pleasure is to watch her children through a tiny peephole, as she cannot risk letting them know where she is. Mr. Sands marries and becomes a congressman. He brings Ellen to Washington, D.C., to look after his newborn daughter, and Linda realizes that Mr. Sands may never free her children. Worried that he will eventually sell them to slave traders, she determines that she must somehow flee with them to the North. However, Dr. Flint continues to hunt for her, and escape remains too risky.

After seven years in the attic, Linda finally escapes to the North by boat. Benny remains with Aunt Martha, and Linda is reunited with Ellen, who is now nine years old and living in Brooklyn, New York. Linda is dismayed to find that her daughter is still held in virtual slavery by Mr. Sands’s cousin, Mrs. Hobbs. She fears that Mrs. Hobbs will take Ellen back to the South, putting her beyond Linda’s reach forever. She finds work as a nursemaid for a New York City family, the Bruces, who treat her very kindly. Dr. Flint continues to pursue Linda, and she flees to Boston. There, she is reunited with Benny. Dr. Flint now claims that the sale of Benny and Ellen was illegitimate, and Linda is terrified that he will re-enslave all of them. After a few years, Mrs. Bruce dies, and Linda spends some time living with her children in Boston. She spends a year in England caring for Mr. Bruce’s daughter, and for the first time in her life she enjoys freedom from racial prejudice. When Linda returns to Boston, Ellen goes to boarding school and Benny moves to California with Linda’s brother William. Mr. Bruce remarries, and Linda takes a position caring for their new baby. Dr. Flint dies, but his daughter, Emily, writes to Linda to claim ownership of her. The Fugitive Slave Act is passed by Congress, making Linda extremely vulnerable to kidnapping and re-enslavement.

Emily Flint and her husband, Mr. Dodge, arrive in New York to capture Linda. Linda goes into hiding, and the new Mrs. Bruce offers to purchase her freedom. Linda refuses, unwilling to be bought and sold yet again, and makes plans to follow Benny to California. Mrs. Bruce buys Linda anyway. Linda is devastated at being sold and furious with Emily Flint and the whole slave system. However, she says she remains grateful to Mrs. Bruce, who is still her employer when she writes the book. She notes that she still has not yet realized her dream of making a home for herself and her children to share. The book closes with two testimonials to its accuracy, one from Amy Post, a white abolitionist, and the other from George W. Lowther, a black antislavery writer.

Character Analysis

Linda Brent- The lead protagonist and a pseudonym for Harriet Jacobs. At the start of the story, Linda is unaware of her status as a slave due to her first kind masters, who taught her how to read and write. She faces betrayal and harassment by her subsequent masters, the Flints. Linda learns along the way how to defend herself against her masters. She uses psychological warfare and cunning to avoid the advances of Dr. Flint, which prove to be effective in the story. However, Jacobs reveals in the beginning of the book that there were aspects of her story that she could not bear to write down on paper. She is torn between her desire for personal freedom and her feeling of personal responsibility to her family, especially her children Benny and Ellen. Jacobs never feels that she quite understands freedom as a black slave, and consistently considers African Americans to be on a different level of morality than all others.

Dr. Flint- Linda's master, enemy and would be lover. He has the legal right to do anything he wants to Linda, but wishes to seduce her by tricking and threatening her rather than raping her. Throughout the book, Linda constantly rebels against him and refuses to do anything sexual with him. This enrages him and he soon obsesses over the idea of breaking her rebellious spirit. Dr. Flint never recognizes that Linda is a human being with feelings, desires or unamenable rights. Dr. Flint represents the oppressive male role in 19th century America in that he objectifies Linda for being a woman and consistently fights with his wife.

Aunt Martha- Linda's grandmother on her mothers side and one of her closest friends. She is both religious and patient. She is saddened as she watches her children and grandchildren sold and being abused by their white masters. She grieves throughout the book when her loved ones escape their masters and find freedom because she will never see them again. Family to her must be preserved no matter what, even at the cost of their freedom and their happiness.
Aunt Martha is not afraid to stand up for herself or her family, and talks to the Flints with pride, dignity, and importance. Aunt Martha is the only slave Dr. Flint fears throughout the entire novel.

Mrs.Flint- is Linda's mistress and Dr. Flint's wife. She is suspicious of a sexual relationship between Linda and Dr. Flint and in turn is vicious towards Linda. Though she is a church woman, she is brutal and insensitive to her slaves. She demonstrates how the slave system has corrupted the moral character of southern women. Mrs. Flint and Dr. Flint consistently fight over his treatment of Linda, in which he protects Linda from any form of corporal punishment that Mrs. Flint considered dispensing. Mrs. Flint is ruled by her husband and is unable to break free of this constraint due to the lack of rights in women during the 19th century.

Mr. Sands- Linda's lover who is white and the father of her children, Benny and Ellen. Mr. Sands is a kinder natured man than Dr. Flint but he has no real loving affection towards his two racially mixed children. Mr. Sands acts as Linda's portal to partial freedom. Linda uses Sands in a similar way that he uses her. Linda needs someone to make her feel important or almost free. Similarly, Linda knew it would enrage her master, Dr. Flint, in which case he can not stop. He breaks his promises to Linda and he eventually doesn't talk to her anymore. He eventually has another child by his wife and treats that child with more affection than Benny and Ellen.

Fictionalized Characters

In the book, Harriet Jacobs uses fictionalized names to protect the identities of persons in the story. Note that not all of the characters in the book are listed here.

Linda Brent is Harriet Jacobs, The book’s protagonist and a pseudonym for the author.

William Brent is John Jacobs

John Jacobs

John Jacobs may refer to:*John Jacobs , PGA Tour and Champions Tour player*John Jacobs , SDS member and "weatherman"...

: Linda’s brother, to whom she is close. William’s escape from Mr. Sands, his relatively “kind” master, shows that even a privileged slave desires freedom above all else.

Ruth Nash is Margaret Horniblow,

Emily Flint is Mary Matilda Norcom,Dr. Flint’s daughter and Linda’s legal “owner.” Emily Flint serves mainly as Dr. Flint’s puppet, sometimes writing Linda letters in her name, trying to trick her into returning to Dr. Flint.

Dr. Flint is Dr. James Norcom; Although he is based on Harriet Jacobs’s real-life master, Dr. Flint often seems more like a melodramatic villain than a real man. He is morally bankrupt and lacks any redeeming qualities. He is thoroughly one-dimensional, totally corrupted by the power that the slave system grants him. He sees no reason not to use and abuse his slaves in any way he chooses, and he never shows any signs of sympathy for them or remorse for his crimes.

Aunt Martha is Molly Horniblow, Aunt Martha is one of the narrative’s most complex characters, embodying Jacobs’s ambivalence about motherhood and maternal love. She is a second mother to Linda, a positive force in her life, and a paragon of honesty and decency. She is loving and family-oriented, representing an ideal of domestic life and maternal love. She works tirelessly to buy her children’s and grandchildren’s freedom.

Mr. Sands is Samuel Tredwell Sawyer

Samuel Tredwell Sawyer

Samuel Tredwell Sawyer was a Congressional Representative from the U.S. state of North Carolina.Sawyer was born in Edenton, North Carolina, in 1800. He attended Edenton Academy and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Sawyer studied law, was admitted to the bar, and commenced practice...

, He is Linda’s white lover and the father of her children. Mr. Sands has a kindlier nature than Dr. Flint, but he feels no real love or responsibility for his mixed-race children. He repeatedly breaks his promises to Linda that he will free them.

Benny Sands is Joseph Sawyer, Ellen Sands is Louisa Sawyer, Mr. Bruce is Nathaniel Parker Willis

Nathaniel Parker Willis

Nathaniel Parker Willis , also known as N. P. Willis, was an American author, poet and editor who worked with several notable American writers including Edgar Allan Poe and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He became the highest-paid magazine writer of his day. For a time, he was the employer of former...

, and Gertrude Bruce is Cornelia Grinnel Willis.

Composition and publication history

Jacobs began composing Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl while living and working at Idlewild, the Hudson River

Hudson River

The Hudson is a river that flows from north to south through eastern New York. The highest official source is at Lake Tear of the Clouds, on the slopes of Mount Marcy in the Adirondack Mountains. The river itself officially begins in Henderson Lake in Newcomb, New York...

 home of writer and publisher Nathaniel Parker Willis

Nathaniel Parker Willis

Nathaniel Parker Willis , also known as N. P. Willis, was an American author, poet and editor who worked with several notable American writers including Edgar Allan Poe and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He became the highest-paid magazine writer of his day. For a time, he was the employer of former...

, who was fictionalized in the book as Mr. Bruce. Portions of the book were published in serial form in the New York Tribune

New York Tribune

The New York Tribune was an American newspaper, first established by Horace Greeley in 1841, which was long considered one of the leading newspapers in the United States...

, owned and edited by Horace Greeley

Horace Greeley

Horace Greeley was an American newspaper editor, a founder of the Liberal Republican Party, a reformer, a politician, and an outspoken opponent of slavery...

. Her reports of sexual abuse

Sexual abuse

Sexual abuse, also referred to as molestation, is the forcing of undesired sexual behavior by one person upon another. When that force is immediate, of short duration, or infrequent, it is called sexual assault. The offender is referred to as a sexual abuser or molester...

 were considered too shocking to the average newspaper reader of the day, and publication ceased before the completion of the narrative.

Boston publishing house Phillips and Samson agreed to print the work in book-form — if Jacobs could convince Willis or Harriet Beecher Stowe

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Harriet Beecher Stowe was an American abolitionist and author. Her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin was a depiction of life for African-Americans under slavery; it reached millions as a novel and play, and became influential in the United States and United Kingdom...

 to provide a preface

Preface

A preface is an introduction to a book or other literary work written by the work's author. An introductory essay written by a different person is a foreword and precedes an author's preface...

. She refused to ask Willis for help and Stowe turned her down, though the Phillips and Samson company closed shop anyway. She eventually managed to sign an agreement with the Thayer and Eldridge publishing house and they requested a preface by Lydia Maria Child. Child also edited the book and the company introduced her to Jacobs. The two women would remain in contact for much of their remaining lives. Thayer and Eldridge, however, declared bankruptcy

Bankruptcy

Bankruptcy is a legal status of an insolvent person or an organisation, that is, one that cannot repay the debts owed to creditors. In most jurisdictions bankruptcy is imposed by a court order, often initiated by the debtor....

 before the narrative could be published. The narrative in its final form was published by a Boston, Massachusetts publisher in 1861.

Critical response

Contemporary responses generally accepted the book and its insight into slavery that can not be fictionalized. William Cooper Nell

William Cooper Nell

William Cooper Nell was an African-American abolitionist, journalist, author, and civil servant who worked for school integration in Boston. Writing for The Liberator and The North Star, he helped publicize the anti-slavery cause...

, John Greenleaf Whittier

John Greenleaf Whittier

John Greenleaf Whittier was an influential American Quaker poet and ardent advocate of the abolition of slavery in the United States. He is usually listed as one of the Fireside Poets...

 and others praised Jacobs on her work, and for her accomplishment in publishing this novel.

Abby Kelley

Abby Kelley

Abby Kelley Foster was an American abolitionist and radical social reformer active from the 1830s to 1870s. She became a fundraiser, lecturer and committee organizer for the influential American Anti-Slavery Society, where she worked closely with William Lloyd Garrison and other radicals...

 praised the book for its "simple and attractive style". She wrote: "You feel less as though you were reading a book, than talking with the woman herself". A critic for the London Anti-Slavery Associate, likely its editor Richard D. Webb, wrote: "This book shows as forcibly as any story we have ever read the moral pollution and perversion inevitable in a community where slavery is a recognized institution".

Critic Mary Vermillion compares this book to Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou is an American author and poet who has been called "America's most visible black female autobiographer" by scholar Joanne M. Braxton. She is best known for her series of six autobiographical volumes, which focus on her childhood and early adult experiences. The first and most highly...

's depiction of her rape in Angelou's 1969 autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is the 1969 autobiography about the early years of African-American writer and poet Maya Angelou. The first in a six-volume series, it is a coming-of-age story that illustrates how strength of character and a love of literature can help overcome racism and trauma...

.

External links

• Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl at Free Google eBook