Feminism In Slave Narratives

Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Literature, Works, grade: 1,7, University of Cologne (Englisches Seminar), course: African American Literature, language: English, abstract: The content of this paper deals with the experiences of American slaves out of a male and a female perspective to outline the relevance of feminism in anti-slavery literature. The first chapter gives an insight into the characteristics of slave narratives such as style, structure, themes and aims. Slave narratives are a product of abolitionism, but the aim of this paper is to show feministic influences as well, as the second chapter illustrates. By comparing the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass an American Slave, written by himself with Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl I want to show that the motifs for escape out of slavery are connected to very different factors for a slave woman compared to those of a slave man. Both Douglass and Jacobs suffer from the prevailing system of slavery, but Jacobs’ female point-of-view adds the suffrage from patriarchy as well. Finally I am going to follow the question why Douglass’ narrative gained more success in the 19th century than Jacobs’ narrative, although both stories deal with antislavery, oppression and the struggle for freedom.

Authentic recollections of hardship, frustration, and hope — from Mary Prince's groundbreaking account of a lone woman's tribulations and courage, to Annie Burton's eulogy of black motherhood.

Six narrations by slave women about their lives during and after their years in bondage, honoring the nobility and strength of African-American women of that era.

Academic Paper from the year 2015 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1.0, University of Constance, language: English, abstract: “You have seen a man made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.” (Douglass, Jacobs, 2004) The experiences of Frederick Douglass, one of the former slaves who escaped the horrors of slavery, became one of the most widely read slave narratives and the most influential African- American text of the antebellum era. Authors like Douglass wanted not only to expose the inhumanity of the slave system, but they also gave incontestable evidence to the humanity of the African American. The question that arises is, how representative Douglass ́s narrative is – does he speak of “man” as a representative for people in general, or is he specifically speaking for the male slave? For the last years scholars have begun to pay more attention to issues of gender in their study of slavery and claim that female slaves faced additional burdens and even more challenges than some of the male slaves. Based on the first female slave narrative, Harriet Jacobs ́s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, this paper will investigate how gender influences the way in which bondage can be experienced differently: what specific forms of oppression do women face in slavery, or what forms of oppression do they encounter to a larger extent than men? Claiming that this gender specific oppression results in gender specific forms of resistance, I will furthermore focus on the ways of how female slaves made a stand against this oppression. Again, Jacobs ́s narrative will be the basis for this investigation. Incidents is the first-person account of Jacobs ́s pseudonymous narrator “Linda Brent” and presents an accurate, although selective, story of her life. This paper will not discuss the relationship between Jacobs and her narrator Brent, but will consider Brent ́s account as autobiographical for Jacobs. For over a century, the authenticity of Jacobs ́s experiences was questioned until Jean Fagan Yellin ́ s ground breaking work proved her authorship. The basis for the following investigation will be a brief introduction of the various ways of approaching Incidents. The second part of the paper will then consider two gender specific forms of oppression: patriarchal sexual oppression, and the deprival of identity by neglecting female slaves to live out the “virtues of womanhood”. With Incidents, Jacobs breaks taboos in order to present Brent ́s sexual history in slavery and to emphasize the power of self-determination, motherhood and family relationships as powerful weapons of resistance.

This volume approaches the history of slave testimony in three ways: by prioritising the broad tradition over individual authors; by representing inter-disciplinary approaches to slave narratives; and by highlighting emerging scholarship on slave narratives, concerning both established debates over concerns of authorship and agency, for example, and developing concerns like eco-critical readings of slave narratives.

In Mastering Slavery, Fleischner draws upon a range of disciplines, including psychoanalysis, African-American studies, literary theory, social history, and gender studies, to analyze how the slave narratives--in their engagement with one another and with white women's antislavery fiction--yield a far more amplified and complicated notion of familial dynamics and identity than they have generally been thought to reveal. Her study exposes the impact of the entangled relations among master, mistress, slave adults and slave children on the sense of identity of individual slave narrators. She explores the ways in which our of the social, psychological, biological--and literary--crossings and disruptions slavery engendered, these autobiographers created mixed, dynamic narrative selves.

In Subjects of Slavery, Agents of Change Kari J. Winter compares the ways in which two marginalized genres of women's writing - female Gothic novels and slave narratives - represent the oppression of women and their resistance to oppression. Analyzing the historical contexts in which Gothic novels and slave narratives were written, Winter shows that both types of writing expose the sexual politics at the heart of patriarchal culture and both represent the terrifying aspects of life for women. Female Gothic novelists such as Emily and Charlotte Bronte, Ann Radcliffe, and Mary Shelley uncover the terror of the familiar - the routine brutality and injustice of the patriarchal family and of conventional religion, as well as the intersecting oppressions of gender and class. They represent the world as, in Mary Wollstonecraft's words, "a vast prison" in which women are "born slaves." Writing during the same period, Harriet Jacobs, Nancy Prince, and other former slaves in the United States expose the "all-pervading corruption" of southern slavery. Their narratives combine strident attacks on the patriarchal order with criticism of white women's own racism and classism. These texts challenge white women to repudiate their complicity in a racist culture and to join their black sisters in a war against the "peculiar institution." Winter explores as well the ways that Gothic heroines and slave women resisted subjugation. Moments of escape from the horrors of patriarchal domination provide the protagonists with essential periods of respite from pain. Because this escape is never more than temporary, however, both types of narrative conclude tensely. The novelists refuse to affirm either hope or despair, thereby calling into question conventional endings of marriage or death. And although slave narratives were typically framed by white-authored texts, containment of the black voice did not diminish the inherent revolutionary conclusion of antislavery writing. According to Winter, both Gothic novels and slave narratives suggest that although women are victims and mediators of the dominant order they also can become agents of historical change.

This Prestwick House Literary Touchstone Classic includes a glossary and reader's notes to help the modern reader appreciate Jacobs' perspectives and language.DRIVEN BY THE HORRORS of slavery and fear of a predatory master, Harriet Jacobs, a young black woman, makes the fateful, life-altering decision to escape. Long thought to be the work of a white writer, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is the captivating and terrifying story of Jacobs' daily life on a plantation in North Carolina, her seven years of hiding, and her ultimate triumph.Jacobs wrote her autobiography in 1861, under a pseudonym to protect the lives of the friends and family she left behind, and the work had been essentially lost until the mid-twentieth century. Now recognized as a classic, unflinching portrait of slave life, Incidents exposes slavery on a level comparable only to that of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.

In Speaking Power, DoVeanna S. Fulton explores and analyzes the use of oral traditions in African American women's autobiographical and fictional narratives of slavery. African American women have consistently employed oral traditions not only to relate the pain and degradation of slavery, but also to celebrate the subversions, struggles, and triumphs of Black experience. Fulton examines orality as a rhetorical strategy, its role in passing on family and personal history, and its ability to empower, subvert oppression, assert agency, and create representations for the past. In addition to taking an insightful look at obscure or little-studied slave narratives like Louisa Picquet, the Octoroon and the Narrative of Sojourner Truth, Fulton also brings a fresh perspective to more familiar works, such as Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Harriet Wilson's Our Nig, and highlights Black feminist orality in such works as Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and Gayl Jones's Corregidora.

"Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" is an autobiography by a young mother and fugitive slave Harriet Ann Jacobs. Jacobs contributed to the genre of slave narrative by using the techniques of sentimental novels "to address race and gender issues." She explores the struggles and sexual abuse that female slaves faced on plantations as well as their efforts to practice motherhood and protect their children when their children might be sold away. Harriet Ann Jacobs (1813 – 1897) was an African-American writer who escaped from slavery and was later freed. She became an abolitionist speaker and reformer.