Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Frontispiece of the first edition

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is a book that was published in 1861 by Harriet Jacobs, using the pen name "Linda Brent". While on one level it chronicles the experiences of Harriet Jacobs as a slave, and the various humiliations she had to endure in that unhappy state, it also deals with the particular tortures visited on women at her station. Often in the book, she will point to a particular punishment that a male slave will endure at the hands of slave holders, and comment that, although she finds the punishment brutal in the extreme, it cannot compare to the abuse that a young woman must face while still on the cusp of girlhood.

Incidents in the Life of Slave Girl is considered a slave narrative. Portions of it were first published in serial form before being published as a complete work in 1861, after some difficulty finding a publisher. It is also considered an example of feminist literature.

Historical Context

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was published in 1861, the start of the Civil War. At this time, the federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 had been in effect for 10 years. This act required the states to observe Act. IV Sec. 2 of the Constitution of the United States and return any escaped slaves to their masters. The Underground Railroad was organized as a system of houses of abolitionists that helped slaves on their way to the North in defiance of the Constitution and of the Fugitive Slave Acts. At this time, it was very dangerous for slaves to try to escape. In 1857 The Dred Scott Decision stated that people of African descent imported into the United States and held as slaves (or their descendants, whether or not they were slaves) were not protected by the Constitution and could never be U.S. citizens.

Another book of dealing with similar themes is Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. This novel, published in 1852, was claimed to have "laid the groundwork for the civil war."

Women's rights at the time of the release of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl were progressively moving forward. The Seneca Falls Convention had occurred in 1848, and white women were working toward their right to vote. However, the Anti-Slavery movement was split over the question of womens rights. The start of the Women's Rights Movement was born from the Abolitionist movement in that women were allowed to be involved. This gave women some power and inspiration to extend the movement to women, though not all abolitionists agreed. It became a "race" of sorts to see which party got the right to vote first: African Americans or women. Ultimately, African American males received the power to vote before women.

Plot Summary

Born into slavery, Linda spends her early years in a happy home with her mother and father, who are relatively well-off slaves. When her mother dies, six-year-old Linda is sent to live with her mother’s mistress, who treats her well and teaches her to read. After a few years, this mistress dies and bequeaths Linda to a relative. Her new masters are cruel and neglectful, and Dr. Flint, the father, soon begins pressuring Linda to have a sexual relationship with him. Linda struggles against Flint’s overtures for several years. He pressures and threatens her, and she defies and outwits him. Knowing that Flint will eventually get his way, Linda consents to a love affair with a white neighbor, Mr. Sands, saying that she is ashamed of this illicit relationship but finds it preferable to being raped by the loathsome Dr. Flint. With Mr. Sands, she has two children, Benny and Ellen. Linda argues that a powerless slave girl cannot be held to the same standards of morality as a free woman. She also has practical reasons for agreeing to the affair: she hopes that when Flint finds out about it, he will sell her to Sands in disgust. Instead, the vengeful Flint sends Linda to his plantation to be broken in as a field hand.

When she discovers that Benny and Ellen are to receive similar treatment, Linda hatches a desperate plan. Escaping to the North with two small children would be impossible. Unwilling to submit to Dr. Flint’s abuse, but equally unwilling to abandon her family, she hides in the attic crawl space in the house of her grandmother, Aunt Martha. She hopes that Dr. Flint, under the false impression that she has gone North, will sell her children rather than risk having them disappear as well. Linda is overjoyed when Dr. Flint sells Benny and Ellen to a slave trader who is secretly representing Mr. Sands. Mr. Sands promises to free the children one day and sends them to live with Aunt Martha. But Linda’s triumph comes at a high price. The longer she stays in her tiny garret, where she can neither sit nor stand, the more physically debilitated she becomes. Her only pleasure is to watch her children through a tiny peephole, as she cannot risk letting them know where she is. Mr. Sands marries and becomes a congressman. He brings Ellen to Washington, D.C., to look after his newborn daughter, and Linda realizes that Mr. Sands may never free her children. Worried that he will eventually sell them to slave traders, she determines that she must somehow flee with them to the North. However, Dr. Flint continues to hunt for her, and escape remains too risky.

After seven years in the attic, Linda finally escapes to the North by boat. Benny remains with Aunt Martha, and Linda is reunited with Ellen, who is now nine years old and living in Brooklyn, New York. Linda is dismayed to find that her daughter is still held in virtual slavery by Mr. Sands’s cousin, Mrs. Hobbs. She fears that Mrs. Hobbs will take Ellen back to the South, putting her beyond Linda’s reach forever. She finds work as a nursemaid for a New York City family, the Bruces, who treat her very kindly. Dr. Flint continues to pursue Linda, and she flees to Boston. There, she is reunited with Benny. Dr. Flint now claims that the sale of Benny and Ellen was illegitimate, and Linda is terrified that he will re-enslave all of them. After a few years, Mrs. Bruce dies, and Linda spends some time living with her children in Boston. She spends a year in England caring for Mr. Bruce’s daughter, and for the first time in her life she enjoys freedom from racial prejudice. When Linda returns to Boston, Ellen goes to boarding school and Benny moves to California with Linda’s brother William. Mr. Bruce remarries, and Linda takes a position caring for their new baby. Dr. Flint dies, but his daughter, Emily, writes to Linda to claim ownership of her. The Fugitive Slave Act is passed by Congress, making Linda extremely vulnerable to kidnapping and re-enslavement.

Emily Flint and her husband, Mr. Dodge, arrive in New York to capture Linda. Linda goes into hiding, and the new Mrs. Bruce offers to purchase her freedom. Linda refuses, unwilling to be bought and sold yet again, and makes plans to follow Benny to California. Mrs. Bruce buys Linda anyway. Linda is devastated at being sold and furious with Emily Flint and the whole slave system. However, she says she remains grateful to Mrs. Bruce, who is still her employer when she writes the book. She notes that she still has not yet realized her dream of making a home for herself and her children to share. The book closes with two testimonials to its accuracy, one from Amy Post, a white abolitionist, and the other from George W. Lowther, a black antislavery writer.

Character Analysis

Linda Brent - The lead protagonist and a pseudonym for Harriet Jacobs. At the start of the story, Linda is unaware of her status as a slave due to her first kind masters, who taught her how to read and write. She faces betrayal and harassment by her subsequent masters, the Flints. Linda learns along the way how to defend herself against her masters. She uses psychological warfare and cunning to avoid the advances of Dr. Flint, which prove to be effective in the story. However, Jacobs reveals in the beginning of the book that there were aspects of her story that she could not bear to write down on paper. She is torn between her desire for personal freedom and her feeling of personal responsibility to her family, especially her children Benny and Ellen. Jacobs never feels that she quite understands freedom as a black slave, and consistently considers African Americans to be on a different level of morality than all others.

Dr. Flint - Linda's master, enemy and would be lover. He has the legal right to do anything he wants to Linda, but wishes to seduce her by tricking and threatening her rather than raping her. Throughout the book, Linda constantly rebels against him and refuses to do anything sexual with him. This enrages him and he soon obsesses over the idea of breaking her rebellious spirit. Dr. Flint never recognizes that Linda is a human being with feelings, desires or unalienable rights. Dr. Flint represents the oppressive male role in 19th century America in that he objectifies Linda for being a woman and consistently fights with his wife.

Aunt Martha - Linda's grandmother on her mothers side and one of her closest friends. She is both religious and patient. She is saddened as she watches her children and grandchildren sold and being abused by their white masters. She grieves throughout the book when her loved ones escape their masters and find freedom because she will never see them again. Family to her must be preserved no matter what, even at the cost of their freedom and their happiness. Aunt Martha is not afraid to stand up for herself or her family, and talks to the Flints with pride, dignity, and importance. Aunt Martha is the only slave Dr. Flint fears throughout the entire novel.

Mrs. Flint - is Linda's mistress and Dr. Flint's wife. She is suspicious of a sexual relationship between Linda and Dr. Flint and in turn is vicious towards Linda. Though she is a church woman, she is brutal and insensitive to her slaves. She demonstrates how the slave system has corrupted the moral character of Southern women. Mrs. Flint and Dr. Flint consistently fight over his treatment of Linda, in which he protects Linda from any form of corporal punishment that Mrs. Flint considered dispensing. Mrs. Flint is ruled by her husband and is unable to break free of this constraint due to the lack of rights in women during the 19th century.

Mr. Sands - Linda's lover who is white and the father of her children, Benny and Ellen. Mr. Sands is a kind-natured man compared to Dr. Flint but he has no real loving affection towards his two racially mixed children. Mr. Sands acts as Linda's portal to partial freedom. Linda uses Sands in a similar way that he uses her. Linda needs someone to make her feel important or almost free. Similarly, Linda knew it would enrage her master, Dr. Flint, in which case he can not stop. He breaks his promises to Linda and he eventually doesn't talk to her anymore. He eventually has another child by his wife and treats that child with more affection than Benny and Ellen.

Fictionalized Characters

In the book, Harriet Jacobs uses fictionalized names to protect the identities of persons in the story. Note that not all of the characters in the book are listed here.

Linda Brent is Harriet Jacobs, the book’s protagonist and a pseudonym for the author.

William Brent is John Jacobs: Linda’s brother, to whom she is close. William’s escape from Mr. Sands, his relatively “kind” master, shows that even a privileged slave desires freedom above all else.

Ruth Nash is Margaret Horniblow.

Emily Flint is Mary Matilda Norcom, Dr. Flint’s daughter and Linda’s legal “owner.” Emily Flint serves mainly as Dr. Flint’s puppet, sometimes writing Linda letters in her name, trying to trick her into returning to Dr. Flint.

Dr. Flint is Dr. James Norcom. Although he is based on Harriet Jacobs’s real-life master, Dr. Flint often seems more like a melodramatic villain than a real man. He is morally bankrupt and lacks any redeeming qualities. He is thoroughly one-dimensional, totally corrupted by the power that the slave system grants him. He sees no reason not to use and abuse his slaves in any way he chooses, and he never shows any signs of sympathy for them or remorse for his crimes.

Aunt Martha is Molly Horniblow, Aunt Martha is one of the narrative’s most complex characters, embodying Jacobs’s ambivalence about motherhood and maternal love. She is a second mother to Linda, a positive force in her life, and a paragon of honesty and decency. She is loving and family-oriented, representing an ideal of domestic life and maternal love. She works tirelessly to buy her children’s and grandchildren’s freedom.

Mr. Sands is Samuel Tredwell Sawyer; he is Linda’s white lover and the father of her children. Mr. Sands has a kindlier nature than Dr. Flint, but he feels no real love or responsibility for his mixed-race children. He repeatedly breaks his promises to Linda that he will free them.

Benny Sands is Joseph Sawyer, Ellen Sands is Louisa Sawyer, Mr. Bruce is Nathaniel Parker Willis, and Gertrude Bruce is Cornelia Grinnel Willis.

Composition and publication history

Jacobs began composing Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl while living and working at Idlewild, the Hudson River home of writer and publisher Nathaniel Parker Willis, who was fictionalized in the book as Mr. Bruce. Portions of the book were published in serial form in the New York Tribune, owned and edited by Horace Greeley. Her reports of sexual abuse were considered too shocking to the average newspaper reader of the day, and publication ceased before the completion of the narrative.

Boston publishing house Phillips and Samson agreed to print the work in book-form — if Jacobs could convince Willis or Harriet Beecher Stowe to provide a preface. She refused to ask Willis for help and Stowe turned her down, though the Phillips and Samson company closed shop anyway. She eventually managed to sign an agreement with the Thayer and Eldridge publishing house and they requested a preface by Lydia Maria Child. Child also edited the book and the company introduced her to Jacobs. The two women would remain in contact for much of their remaining lives. Thayer and Eldridge, however, declared bankruptcy before the narrative could be published. The narrative in its final form was published by a Boston, Massachusetts publisher in 1861.

Critical response

Contemporary responses generally accepted the book and its insight into slavery that can not be fictionalized. William Cooper Nell, John Greenleaf Whittier and others praised Jacobs on her work, and for her accomplishment in publishing this novel.

Abby Kelley praised the book for its "simple and attractive style". She wrote: "You feel less as though you were reading a book, than talking with the woman herself". A critic for the London Anti-Slavery Associate, likely its editor Richard D. Webb, wrote: "This book shows as forcibly as any story we have ever read the moral pollution and perversion inevitable in a community where slavery is a recognized institution".

Critic Mary Vermillion compares this book to Maya Angelou's depiction of her rape in Angelou's 1969 autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

External links

• Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl at Project Gutenberg
• Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl at Free Google eBook