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Bondage and Freedom The opposition of white and black culture remains pressing and finds it logical continuation in the troubling episode when Martha home is ransacked by white pa trollers (Jacobs H. Incidents in The Life of a Slave Girl, 65 - 66). Motivated and encouraged by their newly acquired status as pa trollers, white men exulted in such a chance to exercise a little brief authority, ransacking homes and inflicting harm on people (Jacobs, 65). Showing no compunction while tearing into precious heirlooms and store of preserves, pa trollers captain found a letter, and being surprised with Lindas ability to read, swore and raved, and tore the paper into bits. However, still white pa trollers captain remained unsatisfied, asking Who writes to you? Half free niggers?
Simultaneously, Lindas answer o, no; most of my letters are from white people. Some request me to burn them after they are read, and some I destroy without reading revealed the audience the contradictory ethics in the white mens treatment of slaves in general and slave women in particular. From practical point of view, slaves were not permitted to learn to read, however some white men insisted on individual slave women to do so, just in order to make their immoral selfish desires known to the slave women without being caught by others. Harriet Jacobs resumed the encounter with white pa trollers as an exclamation of surprise from some of the company put a stop to our conversation (Harriet, op cited, p. 66).
Although the initial intention and development of the slave narratives was to reveal and examine slavery and justify its subsequent abolition, they contain important personal facts and judgments as well as folklore that not only assist in description of the actual historical picture but frame readers personal reflections through emotions and self-positioning. In other words, on the individual level, the audience comprehends not only the system of slavery, but the personal life of the slave, attitudes, emotions and judgments. Addressing to this point, Blassingame affirms that in the autobiography, more clearly than in any other source, we learn what went on in the minds of black men. It gives us a window to the inside half of the slaves life which never appears in the commentaries of outsiders (Carry, 79). However, from the critical standpoint Jacobs story is not comprehended as autobiography, but novel, containing peculiar narrative, characters and conflict. The genre of autobiography was intentionally selected by Jacobs to emphasize the truthfulness of the story.
Throughout the story, Jacobs confirms the Creole family relationship of masters, mistresses, and slaves, only to suggest that the slaves are not so much their masters children as they are their unacknowledged foster parents. However, slaveholders (like her childrens own father, a member of Congress) hold their parental relations, Jacobs refuses to renounce these family ties or their implicit claims, and instead repeatedly calls upon the slaveholding American nation to acknowledge its much-abused relations. Jacobs provides an implicit response to famous repatriation of the Africans amongst us, when she asks, And then who are Africans? Who can measure the amount of Anglo-Saxon blood coursing in the veins of American slaves? (Jacobs, 44) By appealing to the Anglo-Saxon blood coursing through the veins of slaves, Jacobs appears to confirm the idea that only the sons of white fathers pose a challenge to the American nation by their biological-familial claims. Yet by announcing that this blood cannot be measured, Jacobs suggests that no Creole American slaves can rightly be termed African. To call them Africans conceals their biological and cultural relationships to the white Creoles.
Jacobs thus takes up Creole challenge when she dares to envision a future American home for the family consisting of her mulatto children and herself. Jacobs Brent refuses to be domesticated by the miracle of her freedom and instead challenges an evolutionary narrative that would negate her earlier attic stance. Defying psychological distance from her slave self, Jacobs keeps Brent in a threshold position between slavery and freedom throughout her account, just as her title turns its object (a slave girl) into the subject of her own story (written by herself). It is from this precarious position that Jacobs/Brent triumphs over the Flint family values, which she declares bankrupt in a joke at the end: The doctor had died in embarrassed circumstances, and had little to will to his heirs, except such property as he was unable to grasp (Jacobs, 196). This sentence indicates, first, that the doctor died in debt. His tendency to devour got the best of him; he wasted money chasing after Brent and paid the price.
But the particular phrase Jacobs selects to describe this fate also evokes a well-known euphemism for pregnancy. The doctor died in embarrassed circumstances like a woman bearing an illegitimate child. Because she refused to observe the laws of property that would have enabled the reproduction of his family, in fact, the property he was unable to grasp ensured the slaveholding family's dissolution. In narrative terms, Jacobs declares the slaveholders household insolvent and illegitimate; what remains is the fugitive property ensconced in her own authorial voice. Authorizing a new domestic ideal, the freed mother and her two (fatherless, mulatto) children end by anticipating the prospect of their own domestic inheritance, in a legitimate home of their own. Jacobs domestic orientation is thus more than a holdover from a feminine genre or an attempt to court white women as readers.
Despite her claims to the contrary, Jacobs story ends not with freedom, since she remains bound by duty and gratitude to her employer, but with the writing of her book. The production of the book itself lays claim, in writing, to the Jacobs own past and in so doing, serves as an heirloom chronicling the genealogy of her family. Bibliography Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in The Life of a Slave Girl. 1860 / 61. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987 Hazel V.
Carry, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman, Novelist, Boston Books, 1993
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Research essay sample on Life Of A Slave Girl Incidents In The Life
