Linda Brent, in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, sheds light on the gender and racial discourses of her time. Her book is the story of how she, as a slave and later as a free woman, resists and redefines conventional notions of womanhood, motherhood, female sexuality, and family, all in the context of her struggle against the inhumanity of her own and her family's slavery. Her resistance to oppression is all the more remarkable because as a black woman she is at the very bottom of the social ladder in the eyes of the whites who define that ladder. At the same time, her account presents a realistic portrait of what could be done in the name of resistance by a female slave. She is an intelligent woman who knows when she can resist and when it is better for her and her loved ones to appear to appear to be in agreement with the system. This realistic quality keeps her story from romanticization and leads to the reader's deeper identification with her as a real woman and not a mythical figure of superwoman qualities.
Brent gives the reader the sense that she is operating not so much from a position of feminist theory but from an intuitive, spiritual center which informs her choices and actions and which allows her to accept and understand her own shortcomings as a woman and as a human being. Her story is consciously aimed at other women, calling on them to rise up together in strength of numbers and female dedication to right the wrongs of slavery and abolish that horrific institution:
I do earnestly desire to arouse the women of the North to a realizing sense of the condition of two millions of women at the South, still in bondage, suffering what I suffered, and most of them far worse (335).
Brent in no way fits the conventional mold of the female slave as a passive victim. She is certainly a victim of slavery, but within herself she always maintains a raging hatred of her oppressors and a determination to someday wreak...