Literary Influences on Harriet Jacobs's <i>Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Written by Herself</i>

Abstract

Harriet Jacobsââ¬â¢s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself (1861) is one of the few Slave Narratives written by women. It is also the best-known and the work that inspired the writings of other female slaves, as well as later female African American authors. This is the reason why I have chosen this narrative to analyze the literary influences on female slave narrators. Jacobs writes the story of her life from slavery to freedom under the pseudonym Linda Brent. Linda Brent is Mr. Flintââ¬â¢s daughterââ¬â¢s slave. When she is fifteen, Mr. Flint starts to harass her sexually. She resists and falls in love with a free black man. She is not allowed to marry him but they have two children. She hides from her master for several years and plans her childrenââ¬â¢s and her own escape. In the end, she manages to escape and live in the North free, with her children. This story of female struggle influenced other female writers, both in the subject and in the literary style of their works. In this article I will focus on mainly three literary traditions to analyze their influence on Jacobsââ¬â¢s work: the sentimental novel, the picaresque novel and the trickster tale. The mixture of all these different literary styles and the fact that the book was written by a woman ââ¬"and a woman who had been a slaveââ¬" from her own point of view make of Jacobsââ¬â¢s Incidents an original piece of writing.