610 Jacobs, Harriet
masculinity. After Linda gives birth to her daughter,
she feels great pain because she believes that, though
slavery is terrible for men and women, it is worse for
women because they have their particular hardships
to undergo.
Today, Jacobs’s story is the most famous female-
authored slave narrative. Its attention to the ways in
which slavery corrupted gender roles and standards
in the antebellum South makes it key for under-
standing slavery’s effects on southern society.
Courtney D. Marshall
JuStice in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Where can a slave find justice? According to Harriet
Jacobs, not in the American legal system because
this system relies upon injustice and deception. In
“The Trials of Girlhood,” she asserts that women
of the North can advocate for slaves even though
they themselves do not live on southern soil. Laws
protect the free woman from insult, violence, and
even death. She writes that fiends “bear the shape
of men,” differentiating her imagined audience for
the callous male audience who would seek to keep
her enslaved. She imagines a loving female audience
that would see itself as diametrically opposite of
this group. In this passage, she positions herself as
a witness to slavery’s wrongs—and the female audi-
ence as a jury who must condemn slave practices.
As Jacobs well knew, various laws worked to
deny slaves legal justice. Though slave laws varied,
basic restrictions included the inability to vote,
run for office, or petition the government. Her
grandmother lent $300 to her mistress, but when
the mistress died and she came for repayment, the
mistress’s son-in-law, Dr. Flint, tells her that the
law forbids the recognition of a contract involving
a black person. Jacobs notes that the Flint family
did keep a candelabrum bought with the loaned
money and that she is sure that a fiction has already
been concocted as to its whereabouts. The beauty
of the candelabrum is juxtaposed with the ugliness
of the lie on which it was gained. The incident in
the book strengthens Jacobs’s argument about the
way that slaves are cheated. Dr. Flint also cheats
Jacobs’s grandmother when he decides to sell her
instead of granting her the freedom her mistress
had promised her.
There is also no justice when it comes to Dr.
Flint’s harassment and her eventual freedom. Jacobs
appeals to divine justice as a stand-in for that
of humans, while making repeated references to
American ideals of law. When Dr. Flint abuses her,
she says that slavery is like jail, but worse because,
unlike a jail sentence, it does not end. Though his
wife knows that he is abusing the narrator, the wife
does not help her. Jacobs repeatedly holds her own
experience out for judgment by her readers so that
abolition and justice will become a reality for all
enslaved people.
She juxtaposes herself with her white female
northern readers whose purity is protected by the
home and the law. For her, womanhood is linked
to questions of justice, and the differences between
white and black women derive less from nature than
from circumstances and legal status. Jacobs’s focus
on the law and justice helps her to motivate north-
ern women to see slavery as a national problem. By
staging a literary reaction to legal realities, Jacobs’s
text expands our understanding of the cultural and
historical moment.Sex in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs
deploys a slave girl’s testimony along with the stories
of several other women and men in order to generate
multiple pictures of slavery’s treatment of sexuality.
As an enslaved African-American woman, Linda
and other slaves were confronted with stereotypes
about their hypersexuality. At the time she lived,
white slaveholders invented the mythology of Jeze-
bel to rationalize the rampant rape and sexual abuse
of slave women. In addition, southern law did not
consider the rape of slave women a crime. Because
of her awareness of this stereotype, she is reluctant
to discuss her sexuality in the narrative.
When Linda is 15, her master Dr. Flint begins
to make sexual advances toward her. She uses bibli-
cal imagery and compares her awakening to sexual
matters to the serpent’s tempting of Eve. Jacobs
describes him as “[peopling her] mind with unclean
images, such as only a vile monster can think of.”
Because he is her master, he has power over all areas
of her life, including her sexual identity. Later in
the narrative, he refuses to let her marry a fellow