Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl

2 Pages 515 Words

Incidents

Knowing that most Americans today will never truly know what slavery meant to those slaves who were held in captivation under it during the nation’s past, Harriet Jacobs still manages to paint a disturbing portrait in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl of how it changed her, effectively granting readers a better understanding of the institution. However, her narrative falls short in that she purely focuses on all the bad elements that had taken place in her life, thus reducing what genuinely seems to be an exemplary argument against slavery to — at times — no more than a plea for attention or an enticement for pity, despite her direct addresses to the contrary. Given, Jacobs was a slave, and she makes it expressly clear that it was not an enjoyable experience, but her work gives the impression that either she really had a terrible life, or she’s omitted nicer parts for the sake of shock value. Either way, her argument comes across, loud and clear.
One of the more noticeable points of Jacobs’ writing is that she constantly addresses the reader, particularly people from the North and in several cases, women. This entreaty usually comes at the end of every other paragraph, and so the account is made to seem more like an address than a narrative. Dozens of phrases like “Oh, reader …” or “If you only knew …” are to be found in the text, and these almost make the story sound too melodramatic for it’s own good, if the goal of the author is to encourage the abolition of slavery. Where Jacobs fails to do much with her overly emphasized diction, however, she comes through with her accounts and stories about her and her life, which speak for themselves as ultimately championing freedom for all humanity.
One particular section of the text is more disturbing than the rest though, not for depicting an incident of excessive cruelty, but because of it’s revelations about Jacobs. When the author writes “Ta...