Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl Analysis

The novel, Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs, is a powerful story of a slave girl who would do anything for the freedom of herself and her two children. Jacobs wrote this novel to bring awareness of slavery to Northerner, especially to women. Jacobs used the pen name Linda Brent to compiled her lives to bring and show the reality of slavery; the cruelty, the physical violence, the separation of families, the sexual relationship between master and slave, the psychological abuse, the danger of escaping from bondage. Three important arguments Harriet Jacobs makes to convince her audience that they should oppose slavery were the corrupting power of slavery through immorality and dehumanization, the psychological abuse of slavery, and physical violence. The evidence Jacobs present to support those arguments were the uses of her personal experience as a slave, the lives of other slaves and the lives of slaveholders. Firstly, an important argument that Jacobs makes to convince her audience that they should oppose slavery were the corrupting power of slavery through immorality and dehumanization. Jacobs argues
Jacobs used the lives of slaves to show the cruelty reality of slavery. “After receiving hundred of lashes. . .whipped him to his satisfaction. . .the wretched creature as cut with the whip from his head to his feet, then washed with strong brine” (Jacobs, 75). Slave owners brutally whipped, tortured and punished their slaves as if they were not human beings.The extreme violence that Jacobs describes in the novel shows the inhumane of slaveholders and how horrible they are as human beings. By describing the situation in the exact full detail, Jacobs persuade her audience into having sympathy for the slaves in the South and opposed slavery from expanding to new