Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is probably the most representative slave narrative written by a woman. Critics who have studied this work find it to be a very valuable text in the tradition of African American literature. For example, Hazel V. Carby considers it "the most sophisticated, sustained narrative dissection of the conventions of true womanhood by a black author before emancipation" (65), and Joanne M. Braxton thinks it is "exemplary of the autobiographical writing of slave women even as it might be seen as atypical of the narration of male slaves" (19). However important these remarks are, it is Jean Fagan Yellin who sees Incidents's full import in American (and especially in black American) letters:

Like most male slave narratives, Jacobs's work is an autobiography, that is, a first-person narrative in which the protagonist, the author and the narrator are the same person. However, Jacobs's autobiography is more than an autobiography in that it resembles confessional narratives. Before moving on to the main topic of this essay - the relationship of the sentimental novel, the picaresque and African folktales to Incidents - I would like to comment briefly on the features that relate Jacobs's work to confessional narrative. I want to do this because this genre also influenced the way Incidents was written - though not as much as the above-mentioned genres - and because it has something in common with the other genres, as I will explain later.

According to Yellin, Incidents' "confessional aspects - the account of sexual error, guilt, rejection and at least partial acceptance - are. . . unique" (271). They are unique because these elements do not appear in other slave narratives, mainly because most of them were written by men. Jacobs's Incidents thus offers a new perspective in this type of narrative. For Braxton, the use of the confessional mode serves Jacobs as "a kind of expiation" of her sexual sin (33). She argues that through her "confessional narrative, she begins to expiate her guilt and to find a physical and spiritual community where her humanity and sensitivity will be valued and where she can rise above her painful past" (25). This process is a reminder of the stages of spiritual autobiography: sin, repentance, spiritual backsliding, and rebirth. In this sense, Jacobs's Incidents resemble male slave narratives. Melvin Dixon explains the use of the spiritual autobiography as a model by slave authors:

Jacobs's Incidents is special in this sense. Jacobs's sin is not only to be a slave, as was the case with other - usually male - authors. Her sin is also to have had sexual intercourse and borne two children of a man to whom she was not lawfully married. People at the time could easily accept that male slave owners had sex with or raped female slaves. White men could seemingly do whatever they wanted, unlike white women who had to be pure and chaste. Thus, it was surprising that female slaves chose who they had sexual intercourse with. Female slaves were, in this sense, considered women, not female slaves, and as such, they had to follow the moral code that was applied to white women, to remain pure and chaste and find a man to marry and have children. As Jacobs has sex without being married and the man she has sex with is not her owner, she is a sinner. She must then undergo an expiation process through which she spends seven years in a hiding-place. Here, she has time to think about her sin and repent. Once she has done so and the circumstances are favorable, she manages to escape; her children eventually follow her. She becomes free after a painful process. Freedom from earthly slavery is the culminating point of slave narratives as freedom from sin is the climax in spiritual autobiographies. At the end of her narrative, Jacobs obtains legal freedom when she is bought and emancipated by her new owner. This is both freedom from slavery and freedom from her sin, that is, her sexual error.

One of the most important literary influences on Jacobs’s narrative, and the genre that had the strongest influence on her work, is that of the sentimental novel. The first element that Incidents and the sentimental novel have in common is the setting; both Incidents and the sentimental novel use a domestic setting. Houston A. Baker describes this domestic background in Jacobs’s narrative in the following terms: “A world of mistresses and slaves-in-waiting emerges from the first chapters . . . as an essentially domestic arena in which the female slave will confront her destiny” (50). This domestic setting, however, is different from its symbolism in the sentimental novel. The domesticity of Incidents is not representative of an easy life, but full of instances of cruelty and abuse. The action developed in the sentimental novel is slow and non-violent, and therefore unsuitable for a slave narrative like Incidents. Thus, even though in both types of narrative the domestic setting plays an important role, the way and tone in which the narratives develop from that starting point is different.

On the other hand, Jacobs uses the techniques and conventions of the sentimental novel in several ways. Valerie Smith argues that she uses the sentimental novel to express her sexual vulnerability because the slave narrative could not adequately represent this situation. In the sentimental novel, the heroine aspired to chastity and hoped for marriage and family, whereas Jacobs was in a situation in which neither chastity nor family or marriage could be achieved because she was a slave (Smith, 1988, xxxi). Being a female slave meant being subject to sexual abuse. In fact, the oppression undergone by female slaves in general is expressed in several chapters of Incidents , as Braxton points out: “Five chapters of the autobiography deal explicitly with the sexual oppression encountered by slave women: ‘The Trials of Girlhood,’ ‘The Jealous Mistress,’ ‘The Lover,’ ‘A Perilous Passage in a Slave Girl’s Life,’ and ‘A New Tie to Life’” (29). The abuses female slaves suffered were manifold and in these chapters Jacobs presents them in a powerful way. She introduces herself as a victim so that her readers can identify her as such, and feel sympathy for her. She is the victim of Mr. Flint (her master, who wants to abuse her sexually), of Mr. Sands (her lover, who promises her freedom but cannot keep his promise), and of slavery.[2] Thus, Jacobs places herself in a weak position in society so that her intended audience—“the women of the North” (6)—could sympathize with her situation, if not as a slave, at least as a woman, weak and vulnerable like the heroines of sentimental novels. Jacobs is a black woman who writes a book addressed to white women in the North. As Smith observes:

Despite the limitations, Jacobs is able to adapt the plot of the sentimental novel in Incidents . Smith explores the relationship between Incidents and the plots of other sentimental novels, such as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela by suggesting that:

The sentimental novel provided Jacobs not only with a setting, a plot, and a series of topics. It also provided her with a set of formal and rhetorical characteristics. Two of these characteristics are the florid asides and the melodrama that envelop the narration. Both features are frequent in Incidents . Jacobs’s discourse is constructed through exclamations, rhetorical questions, addresses to the reader, and subjective adjectives, which create a melodramatic tone. The following extract is a good example of Jacobs’s use of melodrama:

Apart from the fact that this is not a fictional work, there are other reasons why Jacobs's Incidents cannot be considered a real sentimental novel. The most important one is perhaps, that Jacobs narrates her loss of virginity, something that would have been unthinkable in sentimental novels. Jacobs introduces her loss of virtue in the context of her struggle to escape from Mr. Flint's sexual harassment. According to Manuela Matas Llorente, she is an innocent woman since she did not want that relationship, and cannot therefore be accused of experiencing illicit desires (32). Jacobs proves that it was slavery itself that forced her to act in that way, and that slavery is therefore responsible for her loss of innocence. She was forced to lose her virginity in order to survive in a society where slavery was legal. Nevertheless, Jacobs knows that she has done something against the morality of the virtuous women of the North to whom the book is addressed, and states:

Another moment in which Incidents abandons the discourse of the sentimental novel is with Jacobs's second pregnancy. Her loss of virginity and first pregnancy had been a means of resistance to Mr. Flint, but she says nothing about her second pregnancy. In fact, she does not talk about her relationship with Mr. Sands in the two chapters that follow the birth of her son, and when she does, she simply tells Mr. Flint that she is pregnant again: "When Dr. Flint learned that I was again to be a mother, he was exasperated beyond measure" (118). This suggests, once again, that the sentimental novel was not an appropriate literary model for Jacobs's narrative. Jacobs deviates from her major generic influence, maybe not so much in her narrative, as in her own life. However, as she stated before, she should not be judged by the same standards as (white) free women.

Nevertheless, no matter how relevant the differences between the sentimental novel and Incidents are, they do not obviate the similarities between them, and thus, Jacobs’s reasons for using this genre as a literary model must be assessed. As previously stated, Jacobs’s plot resembles the plots of the sentimental novel in order that the women of the North could sympathize with her situation. Moreover, Jacobs wanted them to feel compassion for her as a slave mother. Compassion was something the authors of sentimental novels wanted to arouse in their readers and, in order to do so, they introduced instances of suffering. However, Jacobs does not include many instances of physical cruelty toward slaves, as other slave authors do in their works. Her suffering is linked to her condition as a slave woman and mother who can be forcibly separated from her children at any time. And finally, it must be remembered that Jacobs herself states the purpose of her narrative in her “Introduction”: “I do earnestly desire to arouse the women of the North to a realizing sense of the condition of two million of women at the South, still in bondage, suffering what I suffered, and most of them far worse” (6). If Jacobs managed to arouse sympathy and compassion in the women of the North and make them aware of the real situation of slave women, they then would be morally obliged to do something for the abolitionist cause.

Another literary genre that has been associated with slave narratives is that of the picaresque novel. This genre was inaugurated with the publication of the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes in Spain, 1554. Although the picaresque is a fictional genre, it has some features that can be applied to the narratives of former slaves. The picaresque novel is defined as “the episodic narrative describing the progress of the pícaro” (Ousby 777). The term pícaro has been translated into English as rogue or knave, but the term pícaro has connotations that are not included in those English words. A pícaro is a character from a low social status who has to survive in a hostile society. The slave fits in this definition since she/he is definitely in a hostile society that denies his or her humanity and turns him or her into mere property. The pícaro is also defined as “the product of poverty and of a social value system which prohibits him from being anything else” (Sieber 23). The slave is not really the product of poverty —she/he does not choose to become a slave because she/he has no other means to survive— but the slave lives, like the pícaro, in a social system which does not allow him or her to be anything else. Finally, according to Frederick Monteser, the pícaro is often ignorant of her/his own parents (3). In the same way, most slaves born in America do not know who their parents are. Many slave authors assert this at the beginning of their narratives.[5]

Though the pícaro has a few similarities with the male slave, the female pícaro, that is, the pícara, has special features that separate her from the female slave. Unlike her male counterpart who was a rogue, a knave, a poor young man who survived in sixteenth-century Spain by means of trickery, the Spanish pícara was a prostitute who rejoiced in her sexual encounters. Both the pícaro and the pícara tried to survive in sixteenth-century Spanish society. However, the difference between them is the means they used to survive: the pícaro deceived and stole, and the pícara used her sex. She chose to do so, though she might have found other means to survive. The female slave, however, had no choice: if she did not submit to her master’s will, she would either be punished, killed or, even worse, her children and husband could be taken away from her. Jacobs, however, managed not to submit to her master’s will and survive. She describes her master’s desire for her and how he addressed her - “My master began to whisper foul words in my ear. . . . He tried his utmost to corrupt the pure principles my grandmother had instilled. He peopled my young mind with unclean images, such as only a vile monster could think of” (44) - how he harassed her, and how she struggled and finally managed to remain pure. She fell in love with a free black man and decided to give herself to the man she loved rather than to her master. The fact that she got pregnant made Mr. Flint furious, since he realized that she had defeated him. She had chosen the man for her. Even though she bore two children of a man she was not legally married to, she does not express any pleasure in sex, like a pícara would. Unlike the pícara, Jacobs does not prostitute herself: in the first place, she submits to the man she loves, not to any man; secondly, she does not get an immediate reward for having had sex with a man.

One of the features of the picaresque novel that has been studied in relationship with slave narratives is the pícaro's use of strategies, tactics and tricks to survive -and especially to steal food. These situations are narrated in a comic tone in both the picaresque and slave narratives. For example, Henry Bibb, an ex-slave, justifies slaves stealing food in his Narrative in the following terms: "The master exclaims angrily: 'You scoundrel, you ate my turkey.' The slave replies, 'yes, sir, Massa, you got less turkey but you sho' got mo' nigger'" (122). Jacobs also used picaresque means or tricks to defeat Mr. Flint,[6] even though she cannot be completely a pícara. Jacobs uses tricks to survive, but these tricks are more closely related to African folktales than to Spanish picaresque novels.

African folktales were brought to the New World by slaves and were adapted by African Americans in order that they could express their situation as slaves and help them survive in a hostile environment. In these tales, the character (person or animal) that is at a disadvantage defeats the powerful one using his or her wit, deception, double-meaning, irony and other (more or less comical) means, thus becoming a trickster figure. Slaves used double-meaning in order not to be understood by their overseers and masters. Instances of double-meaning or double-talk can be found in slave songs and in the language of slaves that was based on "signifying." Henry Louis Gates, Jr. defines signifying as "the figure of the double-voiced" (xxv). This word comes from the Signifying Monkey - the main character of the Signifying Monkey tales. Signifying involves a playful and conscious use of language in which words undergo a change of meaning. It was used by slaves to show their ability and wit using the English language, and to feel they had some power over their white superiors, the power of understanding the slaves' linguistic code, incomprehensible to whites.[7]

Jacobs proves to be a trickster figure who uses language and wit to defeat Mr. Flint. Braxton argues that she uses "sass" - "talking impudently or disrespectfully to an elder or a superior," or "talking back"[8] - "as a shield against Flint's physical sexual aggression" (31). For instance, Jacobs dares to answer her master back on many occasions. She outwits him, like in the following extract:

Jacobs's Incidents cleverly combines the conventions of very different literary styles: confessional literature, the sentimental novel, African folktales and the trickster figure, the picaresque novel and, obviously, the (male) slave narrative. There is an element that links these literary genres together: sex. If we considered Incidents a sort of confessional autobiography, sex would be the starting point in the sin-to-rebirth progress: her illicit sexual intercourse with a man she was not married to would be her sin, which she would have to purge to achieve spiritual - and physical - freedom. She purges her sin by spending seven years in a hiding-place in which she could hardly move and in which she felt very lonely, as she could not risk seeing many people.

Jacobs's confession that she had a sexual relationship with a man outside marriage would be outrageous in the context of the sentimental novel, especially if we take into account the fact that the readers of the sentimental novel were mostly women who had a very strong - and strict - sense of morality. However, Jacobs knows this and justifies herself stating that, for the female slave, white standards of morality are almost unattainable since the slave is in a submissive position and has to do what she is ordered to or bear the consequences.

Sex is also an important element in picaresque novels. As I stated above, the pícara used her sexuality to survive in sixteenth-century Spain. Jacobs uses her sexuality to defeat Mr. Flint, to make him understand that it is she who makes decisions about her own sexual life, and as a way - or that is what she hoped - to achieve freedom. Thus, it could be argued that Jacobs is a trickster in two different ways, having two means to defeat Mr. Flint: her sexuality and her wits. First, she uses sex to outwit him - she does not give herself to him, but to the man she chooses for herself. Second, she uses language to defeat Mr. Flint verbally. As in trickster tales, in which the weak figure uses his or her best qualities as weapons to defeat his or her rival, Jacobs uses the only things she can own physically, her sexuality and her brain, to defeat the strong character in her story: Mr. Flint.

Finally, it must be stated that sex is also present in male slave narratives, but mainly as a means to express the special sort of suffering slave women had to bear, and to present them as victims in a more or less sensational and melodramatic way. However, Jacobs does not present herself as a victim - she only does so at the beginning of Mr. Flint's sexual harassment to arouse sympathy in the white women of the North - but as a strong and determined woman who wants her own and her children's freedom and who would do whatever she has to do to achieve this goal. Here lies part of the originality of this work, in the portrayal of a slave woman by herself and from her own point of view. But the originality of Incidents lies also in the combination of very different genres with the element of sex in common. Her sexual relationship is the sin she has to purge in the context of confessional literature; it is also what separates this work from the sentimental novel; and finally, it is the trick Jacobs - as a trickster figure - uses to defeat her master. This originality of Incidents would have had at least two consequences: first, an identification between Jacobs and her readers - who would thus fight for the abolition of slavery - and second, a narrative model for future African American women authors.