Harriet Ann Jacobs Essay Example for Free

Harriet Ann Jacobs EssayIn the autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, it tells the account of a pistillate slave named Harriet Ann Jacobs. Losing her mother and father at such a young age, she see firsthand the account of a slave emotional state. She deliberates in great detail the humiliation, sacrifice, and struggle specific to female slaves of the late nineteenth century. Though she understood the risks involved in publishing an account of her life, she moved forwards with the idea and published her story under the pseudonym Linda Brent. Harriet Jacobs was born into slavery in 1813 in Edenton, due north Carolina to Delilah and Elijah. While growing up she enjoyed a relatively cheerful life until she was six long time old when her parents died. After the death of her parents, Harriet and her younger brother John were left to be raised by their grandmother, Molly Horniblow. Molly was an older woman who was headspring respected in the slave community, as we ll as by the slave owners. She was never mistreated, and she frequently baked goods for the people in her community.Harriet Jacobs gained the knowledge for every last(predicate) of her educational essentials from her first mistress, Margaret Horniblow. She taught Harriet how to read, write, and sew which gave her advantage over the rest of the slaves. It also would attract some unwanted attention. Margaret would later on will Harriet to her twelve year old niece whose father would subject Harriet to aggressive and hard sexual harassment. Dr. Flint sexually harassed and physically ab engagementd the teenaged Harriet for as long as she was a servant in his household.Afraid that one day Dr. Flint would make his antics reality, she began to encounter an role with a prominent blank lawyer named Samuel Tredwell, whom she later on beared two children for. Instead of discouraging Flint, she savage him. He then sent Harriet away to a life of hard labor on a plantation he owned, threat ening to break in her young children as field hands, seeing that they legitimately belonged to him. She soon ran away from the plantation and spent seven years hiding in a small attic crawl space in her grandmothers house.During those seven years she put to use the skills that her first mistress had taught her, and watched over her children through a small chink in the roof. Being cramp in the attic for so long, left her permanently physically disabled. In 1842, Harriet was finally able to dismount to the north, and put work as a nanny in the household of a prominent abolitionist writer, Nathaniel Parker Willis. She later on is reunited with her children in New York, and farther down the line her employer purchases her license from Dr. Flint.While version this autobiography you acquire a feeling that is very unusual. Most slaves that you hear about usually have harsh lives and are extremely unhappy, but in this particular case it was the complete opposite. Harriets life wasnt hard not one bit. She was never mistreated because her fathers mistress found her to be very appealing, and she didnt have to do any hard labor. But, she also wasnt allowed her freedom which is what she anxiously longed for. That particular entity is what places everything into perspective.At the end of the day whether she liked it or not, she was still a slave. She could not walk away from her situation, she could not undertake everything that she wanted to do, and she definitely could not enjoy her life to the fullest because she belonged to soulfulness, and that someone was a jealous, aggressive man named Dr. Flint. Harriet Jacobs insisted on telling her story honestly and completely, determined to make white Americans aware of the sexual victimization that slave women commonly faced and to dramatize the fact that they often had no choice but to surrender their virtue.Jacobs knew that her contemporaries would see her not as a virtuous woman but as a fallen one, yet she published the story anyway. She wanted to bring easy to a situation that slave women faced every day. She was an incredibly strong woman for doing so, and by now confronting the cruel realities that plagued African American women in the late nineteenth century, Harriets work occupies a pregnant place in African American literary tradition.