Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States (often referred to as the WPA Slave Narrative Collection) was a massive compilation of histories by former slaves undertaken by the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration from 1936 to 1938. Freedom’s Story is made possible by a grant from the Wachovia Foundation. Because the major crisis of her life involved her master’s unrelenting, forced sexual attentions, the focus of Jacobs’s narrative is the sexual exploitation that she, as well as many other slave women, had to endure.
himself from human chattel into a free American citizen. Ironically, Blassingame spurned Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents as unreliable primarily because he found it to be too “melodramatic,” and he voiced suspicions that the narrative was the work of Jacobs’s friend and editor, Lydia Maria Child. For her, the question of how to address this “unmentionable” subject dominates the choices she delineates in her narrative—as woman slave and as woman author. They each appeared in their city’s streets wearing the outfit of a merchant seaman. Harriet Jacobs, on the other hand, began her narrative around 1853, after she had lived as a fugitive slave in the North for ten years. In general, the main purpose of these slave narratives was to change the way people thought about slavery, to present the horrors of slavery in order to move readers. other hand, was never well-known. In this new era, Douglass’s 1845 narrative, given its first full, modern She might also long for a husband, but her shameful early liaison, resulting in two children born “out of wedlock,” meant, as she notes with perhaps a dose of sarcasm, that her story ends “not, in the usual way, with marriage,” but “with freedom.” In this finale, she still mourns (even though her children were now grown) that she does not have “a home of my own.” Douglass’s 1845 narrative, conversely, ends with his standing as a speaker before an eager audience and feeling an exhilarating “degree of freedom.” While Douglass’s and Jacobs’s lives might seem to have moved in different directions, it is nevertheless important not to miss the common Anne B. Warner's " Santa Claus Aint a Real Man:" Anne G. Jones's "Engendered in the South: Blood and Irony in Douglass and Jacobs," both of which appear in Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts (U Va Press, 1997). Such an outline would look something like this: A. F. An appendix or appendices composed of documentary material--bills of sale, details of purchase from slavery, newspaper items--,further reflections on slavery, sermons, anti-slavery speeches, poems, appeals to the reader of rfunds and moral support in the battle against slavery. Jacob focuses on sexual exploitation.ability to create himself through telling his story. Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs: American Slave Narrators, Lucinda MacKethan D. A poetic epigraph, by preference from William Cowper. taking of a new last name (frequently one suggested by a white abolitionist) to accord with new social identity as a free man, but retention of first name as a mark of continuity of individual identity. The mariner's giving Equiano the quadrant to look through. Jacobs’s manuscript, finished around four years later but not published for four more, reflects in part the style, tone, and plot of what has been called the sentimental or domestic novel, popular fiction of the mid-nineteenth century, written by and for women, that stressed home, family, womanly modesty, and marriage. Revised: April 2010 Another way to study the narratives fruitfully is to see the many different expressive purposes they embody. National Humanities Center Fellow
The horrors slaves faced on transatlantic voyages. “Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs: American Slave Narrators.” Freedom’s Story, TeacherServe©. DATE YOU ACCESSED ESSAY. movement in the 1950s, and the black studies programs that followed in the 1960s and 70s brought about more re-evaluations asserting the Slave narratives served an ideological purpose, namely to elicit the sympathy of northern readers to the plight of southern slaves as well as to publicize the abolitionist movement. The conventions for slave narratives were so early and so firmly established that one can imagine a sort of master outline drawn from the great narratives and guiding the lesser ones. Jacobs is of necessity much more deeply concerned with her own family, with the community that surrounded her as a “town” slave, with the wellbeing of the children and grandmother who depended on her. Research Triangle Park, North Carolina 27709 An engraved portrait, signed by the narrator. Characteristics of the Slave Narrative. John Blessingame edited an important collection, Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews and Autobiographies, the largest modern collection of slave narratives, contains first-person accounts about culture, plantation life,
Alumni Distinguished Professor of English Emerita, North Carolina State University Beginning in the late 1970s, book-length studies began to stress the importance of the fugitive slave narratives, including prominently both Douglass’s and Jacobs’s, as literary works valuable not only as historical evidence but as life writing that employed a wide range of rhetorical and literary devices. publication in 1960, was considered the classic example of the genre.3. What experience does this portion of Equiano's slave narrative describe? In a single, comprehensive book he traced the development of and changes in the form from its eighteenth century beginnings, offering closely detailed readings of individual texts, including particularly innovative analyses of Douglass’s first two autobiographies and Jacobs’s Incidents.
Douglass focuses on the struggle to achieve manhood and freedom. General Overviews. How Slavery Affected African American Families, Beyond the Written Document: Looking for Africa in African American Culture, "Somewhere" in the Nadir of African American History, 1890-1920, Racial Uplift Ideology in the Era of "The Negro Problem", The Trickster in African American Literature, The New Negro and the Black Image: From Booker T. Washington to Alain Locke, The Image of Africa in the Literature of the Harlem Renaissance, Jazz and the African American Literature Tradition, http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/douglass/douglass.html, http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/jacobs/jacobs.html. These texts were part of the new consciousness that began the Civil Rights So which of the two slaves’ opportunities were related to gender, and which to time, place, class, or other forces? Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York, 1985). (1979), and two collections of essays—The Art of the Slave Narrative (edited by John Sekora and Darwin Turner in 1982) His narrative was the culmination of Douglass based his narrative on the sermon. Douglass was a publicly acclaimed figure from almost the earliest days of his career as a speaker and then a writer. Incidents began receiving new interest with a 1973 edition (published by Harcourt Brace). In 1948 Benjamin Quarles published the first modern biography of Douglass, which was followed in 1950 by the first volume of what was ultimately a 5 volume work from Phillip Foner: Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass. Gender considerations account not only for many of the differences in style and genre that we see in Douglass’s and Jacobs’s narratives, but also for the versions of slavery that they endured and the versions of authorship that they were able to shape for themselves in freedom. 7 Alexander Drive, P.O. Douglass’s 1845 narrative grew out of the story of enslavement that he honed as a speaker for the Massachusetts Antislavery Society. proved the truth of Jacobs’s story as well as the painstaking process involved in her struggle to write and publish her book.4
Frances Smith Foster's Witnessing Slavery (1979), Robert B. Stepto's From Behind the Veil
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