Harriet Jacobs pen name Linda Brent

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Harriet Jacobs(pen name Linda Brent)

• Slavery is terrible for men but it is far more
  terrible for women.
• -- Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girls

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Timeline of Jacobs life

• Born 1813, Edenton, NC
• Parents both mulatto slaves father a skilled
  carpenter family lives together
• Mother dies in 1819 (age 6)
• Moves in with her mothers owner, Margaret
  Horniblow, who taught her to read, write and sew
• Horniblow dies in 1825 (age 12)
• She wills Harriet and her brother to her young
  niece they fell under the control of the nieces
  father, Dr. James Norcom
• Lives with the Norcums from 1825-35 (age 12 to
  22)
• Endures constant sexual harrasment

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Timeline, cont.

• Age at 15, forms a consensual relationship with
  Samuel Sawyer, a free white man
• By age 20, she has two children, Joseph and
  Louisa
• 1835 Harriet flees
• Lives for seven years in her grandmothers attic
• Sawyer purchases their children but does not free
  them eventually he remarries and sends Louisa to
  his cousins in NY
• 1842 escapes to North
• Retrieves daughter in Brooklyn settles with her
  children in Boston, works as a nanny for the
  family of Nathaniel Parker Willis
• 1849-50 spends 18 months in Rochester, NY
• Connects with important abolitionists

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Advertisement for the capture of Harriet Jacobs,
American Beacon (daily), Norfolk Virginia, July
4, 1835
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Timeline, cont.

• 1852 employers wife buys her freedom
• (Fugitive Slave Law had passed in 1850)
• 1853 begins to write first sends anonymous
  letters to the New York Tribune
• 1857 finishes narrative1860 publishes Incidents
• 1862-66 returns South to work with freed people
• Establishes a school with her daughter
• 1870 racist violence forces her and Louisa to
  leave the South they open a boarding house in
  Cambridge, MA
• In the mid-1880s, they move to DC
• Dies in 1897

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History of her narrative

• First published in 1860 in Boston 1861 in
  Britain
• First woman to author a fugitive slave narrative
• Edited by the abolitionist Lydia Maria Child
• Published under a pseudonym
• Reader, be assured this narrative is no
  fiction.
• Questions about texts authenticity
• Praised by anti-slavery press, but never
  reprinted in her lifetime
• Text rediscovered in the wake of the Civil Rights
  and feminist movements
• New issue appeared in 1973
• 1981 archival work by Jean Yellin Fagan laid to
  rest doubts about authorship

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(No Transcript)
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Lydia Maria Child in the 1860s
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Historian John Blassingame in 1972

• the work is not credible. In the first place,
  the book is too orderly to many of the major
  characters meet providentially after years of
  separation. Then, too, the story is too
  melodramatic miscegenation and cruelty, outraged
  virtue, unrequited love and planter
  licentiousness appear on practically every page.
  The virtuous Harriet sympathizes with her
  wretched mistress who has to look on all the
  mulattoes fathered by her by her husband, she
  refuses to bow to the lascivious demands of her
  master, bears two children for another white man
  and then runs away and hides in a garret in her
  grandmothers cabin for seven years until she is
  able to escape to New York. In the meantime, her
  white lover has acknowledged his paternity of her
  children, purchased their freedom and been
  elected to Congress. In the end, all live happily
  ever after.

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How Incidents differs

• Addressed to women
• But oh, ye happy women, whose purity has been
  sheltered from childhood, who have been free to
  choose the objects of your affection, whose homes
  are protected by law, do not judge the poor
  desolate slave girl too severely!
• Freedom is not equated with manhood, but with
  the freedom to mother
• Reader, my story ends with freedom not in the
  usual way, with marriage. I and my children are
  now free! .The dream of my life is not yet
  realized. I do not sit with my children in a home
  of my own.
• Sexual abuse at the center of the narrative
• Draws on two genres, slave narrative and the
  seduction novel

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Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of
(1845)

• I was somewhat unmanageable when I first went
  there, but a few months of this discipline tamed
  me. Mr. Covey succeeded in breaking me. I was
  broken in body, soul, and spirit. My natural
  elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished,
  the disposition to read departed, the cheery
  spark that lingered about my eye died the dark
  night of slavery closed in upon me and behold a
  man transformed into a brute!

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• After a two-hour physical battle with Covey
• This battle with Mr. Covey was the
  turning-point in my career as a slave. It
  rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom, and
  revived within me a sense of my own manhood. It
  recalled the departed self-confidence, and
  inspired me again with a determination to be
  free. He only can understand the deep
  satisfaction which I experienced, who has himself
  repelled by force the bloody arm of slavery. I
  felt as I never felt before. It was a glorious
  resurrection, from the tomb of slavery, to the
  heaven of freedom. My long-crushed spirit rose,
  cowardice departed, bold defiance took its place
  and I now resolved that, however long I might
  remain a slave in form, the day had passed
  forever when I could be a slave in fact.

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Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave
Girl (1861) written as Linda Brent

• But I now entered on my fifteenth yeara sad
  epoch in the life of a slave girl. My master
  began to whisper foul words in my ear. Young as I
  was, I could not remain ignorant of their import.
  I tried to treat them with indifference or
  contempt. He tried his utmost to corrupt the
  pure principles my grandmother had instilled. He
  peopled my young mind with unclean images, such
  as only a vile monster could think of. I turned
  from him with disgust and hatred. But he was my
  master. I was compelled to live under the same
  roof with himwhere I saw a man forty years my
  senior daily violating the most sacred
  commandments of nature. But where could I turn
  for protection? No matter whether the slave girl
  be as black as ebony or as fair as her mistress.
  In either case, there is no shadow of law to
  protect her from insult, from violence, or even
  from death.

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• After she meets one of her masters white
  neighbors, Mr. Sands
• I felt grateful for his sympathy, and
  encouraged by his kind words. It seemed to me a
  great thing to have such a friend. By degrees, a
  more tender feeling crept into my heart. Of
  course I saw whither all this was tending, I knew
  the impassable gulf between us but to be an
  object of interest to a man who is not married,
  and who is not her master, is agreeable to the
  pride and feelings of a slave, if her miserable
  situation has left her any pride or sentiment. It
  seems less degrading to give ones self, than to
  submit to compulsion. There is something akin to
  freedom in having a lover who has no control over
  you, except that which he gains by kindness and
  attachment.

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Linda Speaks to Her Readers

• But oh, ye happy women, whose purity has been
  sheltered from childhood, who have been free to
  choose the objects of your affection, whose homes
  are protected by law, do not judge the poor
  desolate slave girl too severely! I tried hard
  to preserve my self-respect but I was struggling
  alone in the powerful grasp of the demon Slavery,
  and the monster proved too strong for me.

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Main characters

• Linda Brent (Harriet Brent Jacobs)
• Dr. Flint (Dr. James Norcom)
• Mrs. Flint (Mrs. Norcum)
• Young Mr. Flint (Dr. James Norcom, Jr.)
• Aunt Martha (Molly Horniblow, grandmother)
• Mr. Sands (Samuel Tredwell Sawyer)
• Ellen (Louisa Matilda Jacobs, daughter)
• William Benny (Joseph Jacobs, son)

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Dr. James Norcum, Sr.