The Life Of A Slave Girl By Harriet Jacob Essay - 1147 Words

The Impact of an Audience The introductory line of Harriet Jacob’s preface to Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, â€Å"Reader, be assured this narrative is no fiction†, is short yet serving (Jacobs 224). Although brief in its nature, this statement manages to encompass two major aspects that characterize African-American literature: audience and truth. In all writing, understanding the target audience and how to arrange an argument or essay to appeal to that specific crowd is paramount. However, it is especially important for African-American authors, who typically need to expose injustices or call for social change in their works. In particular, two African-American authors who understood their audience and how to manipulate that understanding were Charles W. Chesnutt and Marcus Garvey. Although they were born only twenty-nine years apart, Chesnutt and Garvey technically wrote for different time periods. While Chesnutt’s work is associated with â€Å"Liter ature of the Reconstruction†, Garvey was grouped with authors and activists from the Harlem Renaissance (Gates and Smith 580 ). The separation of their literary epochs drove Chesnutt and Garvey to write for contradistinctive audiences that demanded unique written techniques and rhetorical strategies, but that both asked for utmost honesty. For starters, although born in Ohio, Charles W. Chesnutt was raised in North Carolina. Consequently, this relocation provided him with a front-row seat to witness the Reconstruction thatShow MoreRelatedThe Life Of A Slave Girl By Harriet Jacobs858 Words   |  4 PagesThe way that Harriet Jacobs describes slavery in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was not a surprise to me. I believed that slaves were treated poorly and often times were hurt, the way that I thought of slavery is just like it is described in the book if not worse. I will discuss what I believed slavery was like before I read the book, how slavery was according to the bo ok using in text citations and examples and also explain my thoughts on why the treatment was not a surprise to me. FromRead MoreThe Life Of A Slave Girl By Harriet Jacobs1606 Words   |  7 PagesSlaves in the southern states of the United States were oppressed, beaten, and deprived of their natural human rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Which in turn caused many slaves to resist their ill fate that was decided by their masters. Through the story of â€Å"Incidents in the life of a slave girl† by Harriet Jacobs she wrote in her experience how she was resisting her masters and how many people helped her in her escape. And it wasn’t just black that resisted the slave systemRead MoreThe Life Of A Slave Girl By Harriet Jacobs1791 Words   |  8 PagesIn the slave narrative entitled Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs also known as Linda Brent, is faced with a number of decisions, brutal hardships, and internal conflicts that she must cope with as an enslaved black woman. She opens the narrative with a preface that states: â€Å"READER, be a ssured this narrative is no fiction. I am aware that some of my adventures may seem incredible; but they are, nevertheless, strictly true. I have not exaggerated the wrongs inflicted by Slavery†Read MoreThe Life Of A Slave Girl By Harriet Jacobs Essay1316 Words   |  6 PagesIncidents in the life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs, she talks about how her life changed while serving different and new masters and mistresses. I think that this narrative writing is an important text to help us understand the different perspectives of slavery in America. There are some slave owners that are kind and humane, and some slave owners that are cruel and abusive. Additionally, reading from a female slave’s perspectives teaches us that life on the plantations and life in the house isRead MoreThe Life Of A Slave Girl By Harriet Jacob Essay1049 Words   |  5 PagesIn the novel Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacob’s writes an autobiography about the personal s truggles her family, as well as women in bondage, commonly face while maturing in the Southern part of America. While young and enslaved, Harriet had learned how to read, write, sew, and taught how to perform other tasks associated with a ladies work from her first mistress. With the advantage of having a background in literacy, Harriet Jacobs later came to the realization that she wouldRead MoreThe Life Of A Slave Girl By Harriet Jacobs1198 Words   |  5 PagesIn her autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs portrays her detailed life events on such an intense level. Jacobs was born in 1813 in North Carolina. She had a rough life starting at the age of six when her mother died, and soon after that everything started to go downhill, which she explains in her autobiography. Her novel was originally published in 1861, but was later reprinted in 1973 and 1987. Harriet Jacobs presents her story using numerous detailed descriptionsRead MoreThe Life Of A Slave Girl By Harriet Jacobs1292 Words   |  6 Pagesslavery. I chose to focus on two texts: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. In the personal narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, author Harriet Jacobs depicts the various struggles she endured in the course of her life as a young female slave and, as she grew older, a runaway escaped to the â€Å"free† land of the North, referring to herself as Linda Brent. Throughout this story, Jacobs places a heavy emphasis on the ways in which Brent andRead MoreThe Life Of A Slave Girl By Harriet Jacobs928 Words   |  4 Pagesin the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs offers the audience to experience slavery through a feminist perspective. Unlike neo-slave narratives, Jacobs uses the pseudonym ‘Linda Brent’ to narrate her first-person account in order to keep her identity clandestine. Located in the Southern part of America, her incidents commence from her sheltered life as a child to her subordination to her mistress upon her mother’s death, and her continuing struggle to live a dignified and virtuous life despiteRead MoreThe Life Of A Slave Girl By Harriet Jacobs1335 Words   |  6 PagesHarriet Jacobs wrote Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Incidents) to plead with free white women in the north for the abolition of slavery. She focused on highlighting characteristics that the Cult of True Womanhood and other traditional protestant Christians idolized in women, mainly piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness. Yet, by representing how each of her characters loses the ability to maintain the prescribed values, she presents the strong moral framework of the African AmericanRead MoreThe Life Of A Slave Girl By Harriet Jacobs1575 Words   |  7 Pagesncidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Slavery, in my eyes, is an institution that has always been ridiculed on behalf of the physical demands of the practice, but few know the extreme mental hardships that all slaves faced. In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs writes autobiographically about her families and her personal struggles as a maturing mullatto child in the South. Throughout this engulfing memoir of Harriet Jacobs life, this brave woman tells of many trying times