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"incidents in the life of a slave girl" Harriet Jacobs wanted to tell her story, but knew she lacked the skills to write the story herself. She had learned to read
Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl - Feminism The feminist movement sought to gain rights for women. Many feminist during the early nineteenth century fought
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Slavery, in my eyes, is an institution that has always been ridiculed on behalf of the
Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl No one in today's society can even come close to experiencing the heartache, torment,
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Harriet Jacobs and The Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl From 1813 to 1879, lived a woman of great dignity, strong will,
Submitted by UandMe0525 on April 20, 2008
Category: Miscellaneous
Words: 704 | Pages: 3
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During the Victorian Period, women were "strongly encouraged to adopt attributes of purity, domesticity, and submissiveness" (Bland, Jr. 120). These values and ideals were projected into the writing of many different forms of female-directed literature. Harriet Jacobs' "Life of a Slave Girl" is an example of a slave narrative intended to evoke sympathy from readers while simultaneously keeping them at a comfortable distance from the brutalities described in the text. Another example of this dichotomy is found in Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own", a feminist essay that defies the conventional antifeminist sentiments prevalent during the Victorian Age. Despite their differences, Jacobs' and Woolf's works are both aimed at a white female audience. The predominant difference between their works is that Jacobs' writing conforms to the expectations of her readers by magnifying the attributes of purity, domesticity, and submissiveness, while Woolf breaks with convention and mocks these characteristics through the use of irony and sarcasm.
A close reading "Life of a Slave Girl" and "A Room of One's Own" reveals that both authors are targeting a predominantly female audience. This fact is almost startlingly obvious in Jacobs's narrative, which directly addresses a female reader: "But, O, ye happy women, whose purity has been sheltered from childhood" (Jacobs 54). This passage demonstrates that Jacobs is directing her narrative voice towards a female audience and, more specifically, that she hopes to target the "white, northern, female" (Fox-Genovese 7). The fact that she is trying to reach this group of people is exemplified by her writing style: she uses literary English and inserts quotation marks around gramatically "incorrect" slave dialogue. An interesting point to note is that when Jacobs herself is engaged in dialogue, she places quotation marks around her own words, but instead of using ungrammatical dialogue as she does when transcribing the...
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