The Slave Narrative
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The Slave Narrative, a peculiar genre of American literature produced by the ôpeculiarö institution of slavery, is usually an autobiographical account by a former slave, recounting the horrors and indignities of chattel slavery in the United States. The most famous of the Slave Narratives, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845; rev. 1882) drew champions from the Abolitionists in the North, years before the outbreak of the Civil War, because it was masculine, militant, and political. Douglass addressed a national audience on the crucial issue at a historic tide in American history. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs enjoyed no such political support, and for a long time languished under the shadow of Frederick Douglass and the enormously popular anti-slavery novel, Uncle TomÆs Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1952). The problem: why is Harriet JacobsÆ memoir especially compelling and significant? Critical analysis shows that the strength of JacobsÆ work lies in its depiction of slavery from a slave girlÆs point of view, an emotional retelling of sexual exploitation and family fragmentation that appealed directly to Northern women and jostled their consciences as few other memoirs could. The central themes combine the utter vulnerability of a slave girl about the time of the Underground Railroad and the Fugitive Slave Act. As a number of critics have underscored, Northern women were the prime consumers of fiction throughout m
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Approximate Word count = 805
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page)
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