Harriet Jacobs And Womanhood
...confession, and an unrefined expose of society's once flawed system. Her work in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl certainly set the standard for a new type of slave narrativeone written by the female sex geared towards a female audience. Jacobs explores the myths and realities surrounding African American womanhood in bondage and its relationship to 19th century standards associated with the white-dominated so-called "Cult of Womanhood." In trying to reach free white women of the north, Jacobs explains, "I have not written my experiences in order to attract attention to myself [
] I do earnestly desire to arouse the women of the North to a realizing sense of the condition of two millions of women at the South, still in bondage, suffering what I suffered" (p 281). Jacobs even writes of her experiences under the false name of Linda Brent and masks important people and places, not wanting to take the readers' empathy and understanding for granted.
Jacobs was far ahead of her time in realizing that to achieve strides for abolition, the vital relationship between black and white women needed to be considered. In her autobiography, Jacobs establishes this relation and arouses empathy, connecting women on the topics of sexual victimization and maternal emotions, then directly addresses her white audience to prove that the experiences of the races are worlds apart. She goes on to express a bold truth, stating many times that in the Southern world of enslaved black women, the morality of free Northern white women has little ethical relevance or authority. Because female slaves undergo such mental and emotional torment, they absolutely cannot be judged by the moral or legal standards of the free world.
As the first female to write a slave narrative in the United States, Harriet Jacobs laid groundbreaking work by depicting the emotional...
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