Team Perceptions

Team Perceptions

     While doing extensive research on the group’s author Harriet Jacobs, we have come to many conclusions about her. While reading “Harriet Jacobs and the Sentimental Politics of Female Offspring,” the author Franny Nudelman goes into detail as to why Jacobs is writing to appeal to her audience for sympathy. Going into reading the work Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl, my group thought of Harriet Jacobs as a brave and intelligent person that was able to become one of the first American females to successfully write a slave narrative. Not in order to encourage her audience to feel sympathy for her, but to educate those who are ignorant or oblivious to the horrors of being a female slave.

     After looking over Nudelman’s observation of Jacobs work we still look at Jacobs as a brave trailblazer for sharing her experiences with slavery. However we agree that she comes out with a pathos approach to try to appeal to the audience’s emotional feelings. Nudelman makes clear her view on Jacobs appeal when she claims “that her choice was made with ‘deliberate calculation’ and cannot be understood let alone judged by the audience that knows nothing of the slave experience,” (939). That quote to me flips my thought that Jacobs’s main purpose in her narrative was to educate. She claims that we cannot know the pain she deals with because we were not enslaved and female ourselves.

     At first glance reading Harriet Jacobs’ work my group was turned off by her actions after running away from Dr. Flint with Mr. Sands. We were in agreement with the wise grandmother that Jacobs should demonstrate more self-worth instead of running off with Mr. Sands and engaging in sex out of wedlock. Now as I look back on that first glance I ask myself who am I to judge a girl like Jacobs who has endured rape, slavery, and having to go into hiding for 7 years. I have not lived in her shoes or gone through the trials that she has.

     Reading through Jocelyn K. Moody’s “Biography of an Autobiographer,” I now understand more of what Harriet Jacobs wanted to accomplish other than writing a slave narrative, which were rising in popularity as of then. Moody says that post-Emancipation Jacobs worked with the relief activism of Elizabeth Keckley during and after the war and was inspired by Keckley (5). I was surprised to see Jacobs doing something to assist others without the notoriety. Let’s face it, there are people all around the world writing books for personal gain, selling their souls for a couple sales. But hearing of this behind the scenes work changed my outlook.

     There is something else that we noticed in the article “Biography of an Autobiographer.” Throughout Jacobs’ narrative there were plenty of thoughts in my head that because of her lighter skin tone and her relationship with a white man of political stature, that Jacobs would consider herself of a higher class system than most blacks. Midway through Moody’s article she proves my group’s perception of Jacobs from a far to be correct. Moody writes “… across a social divide. Keckley, a former slave who had maintained her own sewing business both before and after serving as modiste in the Lincoln White House, belonged to Washington DC’s ‘colored society’. Jacobs, in contrast, was always a much humbler social servant,” (5). Seeing this makes the group believe that because of her stature that being part of a color society would be a stoop down from what she has done in terms of writing her personal narrative. Now maybe her decision not to be a part of the color society is an attempt to do her good works behind the scenes like she did with post-Emancipation relief efforts. But my group begs to differ. 

Click Here for a timeline of Harriet Jacobs' Life