Emotion in Jacobs narrative

    There are some interesting similarities, and one striking contrast, between Harriet Jacobs’s narrative “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” and Frederick Douglass’s “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.” In particular, Douglass and Jacobs use emotion, but in different ways and both paint similar pictures of slavery.
    Douglass’s narrative was an intellectual exercise that demonstrated his right to be accorded the rights and responsibilities of a man. Jacobs’s narrative is the emotional appeal of a woman to other women to end slavery.
    The focus of the narrative is women’s issues: domesticity, children and family, marriage, infidelity, and rape. If Jacobs is appealing to women it makes perfect sense to appeal to them as wives and mothers. Thus, like Douglass, her intellect and reasoning powers are evident in this emotional appeal.
    Also, like Douglass, she presents the incidents of her story extremely factual-like, almost journalistic before breaking into a passionate apostrophe, trying to emotionally connect to others who have known the pain of childbirth, who have experienced the grief of losing a child, and suffered the pangs of marital betrayal.
    And like Douglass Jacobs also sees slavery as degrading to humans, but emphasizes a slave’s humanity: “She may be an ignorant creature, degraded by the system that has brutalized her from childhood; but she has a mother’s instincts, and is capable of feeling a mother’s agonies” (Ch. 3).
    Jacobs also points out the hypocrisy of the system she and Douglass lived under — the ambiguous morality and the blending of right and wrong into something else, some other breed of judgment. “There may be sophistry in all this; but the condition of a slave confuses all principles of morality, and, in fact, renders the practice of them impossible,” Jacobs wrote in chapter 10 of her narrative. Like Douglass she too sees how the term “good master” is an oxymoron and how under slavery none are virtuous.
    Early in the narrative, during her sheltered and peaceful years, Jacobs presents the bright side of slavery (if there is one) — noble people who do what is right even when they hold all the power and don’t have to. A good example is the sister of her grandmother’s mistress who bought the betrayed woman and set her free. It is interesting that Jacobs opted to first present her readers with the better side of slavery, pointing out the few semi-upstanding citizens and the system’s “moral code” and methods of impinging its will upon “code breakers” before revealing slavery’s seedy underbelly. She shows us the meager bright side before shining a spotlight on the rapes and murders, destruction of families, spoiling of the innocent, and the betrayals committed by even the most upstanding of slave owners.