Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

"Your question emphasizes the crucial point that Jacobs’s text isn’t a novel; it’s an autobiographical slave narrative. But I’ve included it due to the slave narrative’s defining role in nineteenth-century writing, its reliance on novelistic devices, and its influence on the novel as a genre. The most famous line from Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is probably Harriet Jacobs’s assertion that “slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women,” which already poses a problem of narrative and genre—that is, how to address and change readers’ expectations. To see how Jacobs redefines the slave narrative, it helps to think about the earlier Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) , which tells the story of “how man was made a slave” and how a “slave was made a man.” Douglass uses this chiastic structure to draw on but also to revise classic autobiographies like that of Benjamin Franklin and the bildungsroman, a popular subgenre of the novel concerned with development . Douglass is brutally dehumanized by slavery but manages to reassert his humanity and masculinity through physical resistance, escape, the nominal freedom of gaining a wage for his labor, and ultimately literacy and narrating his own story. He becomes a version of “the self-made man.” As a Black woman whose body and children were considered legally the property of her white enslaver, whose escape from slavery initially took the form not of mobility but of confinement and concealment in a suffocating garret, and whose life involved the constant threat of sexual violence, Jacobs needed to reshape the genre and reorient her readers to make her suffering—and her extraordinary survival—legible. This is why two other important lines from the text provide such a profound meditation on genre and how prose-fiction conventions might shape an audience’s—especially a white audience’s—reception of Jacobs’s true story. First, when Jacobs recounts avoiding her master’s sexual advances by beginning a relationship with an unmarried white man, she writes, “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.” Jacobs directs readers’ attention to the agency of an enslaved woman but also to the risk of misrecognizing or distorting it. She helps readers see her acts of survival as heroic without losing sight of her place in a system that denied her freedom and made any “consent” she could offer qualified, at best. And she is keenly aware of the social conventions shaping readers’ responses to her story—e.g., the “cult of true womanhood,” which demanded that women be pious, pure, submissive keepers of domestic tranquility, an impossible standard for an enslaved woman that nonetheless informs Jacobs cautious intro to this section of her narrative. And this brings us to the narrative’s conclusion, where Jacobs famously writes, “reader, my story ends with freedom; not in the usual way with marriage.” This echoes the opening line from the concluding chapter of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre : “Reader, I married him.” That bildungsroman culminates with Jane making a choice, whereas Jacobs helps us think about how genre shapes our understanding of a different kind of agency—something “akin to freedom.” There is much more to say here, and I highly recommend Broadview Press’s new edition of Jacobs’s Incidents , edited and with an introduction by Professor Koritha Mitchell, which emphasizes Jacobs’s literary creativity and extensively explores her innovative engagement with various genres, including novel subgenres."