Harriet Jacobs:  Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Audience

The most pertinent audience for Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl consisted of those Americans who still needed convincing that the slave system had to be eradicated. Shortly after the book’s publication, Jacobs and Lydia Maria Child began writing letters to newspaper editors, bookstore owners, and anyone else they could think of who would advertise and promote the book. Jacobs’s brother John, now living in London, published a condensed version of the book under the title A True Tale of Slavery, leaving out the sexual elements to make it more palatable to English readers. The book achieved some popularity with its British audience and fueled more intense opposition to slavery in England.

In particular, Jacobs and Child saw middle-class Christian white women as a primary audience for the book, hoping that the sexual harassment Jacobs endured would motivate Christian women to take up the cudgel against slavery after feeling its corrupting moral influence. In this regard, a passage from Child’s introduction provides insight into the writer’s intention:

I am well aware that many will accuse me of indecorum for presenting these pages to the public; for the experiences of this intelligent and much-injured woman belong to a class which some call delicate subjects, and others indelicate. This peculiar phase of Slavery has generally been kept veiled; but the public ought to be made acquainted with its monstrous features, and I willingly take the responsibility of presenting them with the veil withdrawn. I do this for the sake of my sisters in bondage, who are suffering wrongs so foul, that our ears are too delicate to listen to them. I do it with the hope of arousing conscientious and reflecting women at the North to a sense of their duty in the exertion of moral influence on the question of Slavery, on all possible occasions.

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl found a new audience in the twentieth century and beyond as feminists and literary critics began to discover the literary merit of slave narratives and thus directed attention to documents giving voice to the disenfranchised rather than works by prominent New England authors. During the Great Depression, the Works Projects Administration, one of the federal agencies created as part of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, put unemployed researchers and writers to work in the Federal Writers’ Project. One of the project’s major undertakings entailed writers’ interviewing surviving African Americans who had been slaves prior to the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery, and documenting their stories. From 1936 to 1938 the project’s writers recorded the stories of more than twenty-three hundred former slaves, to be presented in a series of volumes, with each volume focusing on the narratives of former slaves in particular states. Jacobs’s North Carolina was featured in the project’s 1939 volume These Are Our Lives. In the twenty-first century, Americans have learned more about Jacobs through a successful Broadway play by Lydia Diamond titled Harriet Jacobs.