preview

The Life Of A Slave Girl By Harriet Jacobs

Good Essays

In her autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs portrays her detailed life events on such an intense level. Jacobs was born in 1813 in North Carolina. She had a rough life starting at the age of six when her mother died, and soon after that everything started to go downhill, which she explains in her autobiography. Her novel was originally published in 1861, but was later reprinted in 1973 and 1987. Harriet Jacobs presents her story using numerous detailed descriptions of the events and obstacles that she eventually overcame. Jacobs is able to interact with the reader effectively by describing her life struggles as a slave through the use of diction and pathos. Harriet Jacobs wanted to tell her story so that readers would know how slave girls were treated. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to be so public while writing her novel, but she decided that since she wanted others to learn and know about what happens in a slaves shoes, she decided to be completely open and write using her name and experiences. Jacobs’s uses emotion and diction throughout the entire essay to emphasize the struggles that her and many other slave women and men go through. Throughout Harriet Jacobs story, she uses many different rhetorical strategies. One that stuck out the most was pathos. At one point in her life, she was having trouble deciding how to tell her grandmother that she was pregnant. In the process of determining how to go about it, Jacobs admits that, “The

Get Access