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In “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” by Harriet A. Jacobs, I noticed she went through a lot of instances that seemed to cause fear or she described fearful situations. At the beginning of the novel Linda (Harriet) describes how at an early age she unexpectedly lost her father, the loss of her mother at age 6 and how her grandmother was sold, but then granted freedom, which was one of the better things that happened. During the first few chapters it was more of an introduction to the earlier stages of Linda’s life and what happened in her earlier years. I believe a common theme that will be traced throughout the rest of the novel will be that of the sorrow’s women had to deal with rather than men often times. For example, in chapter 3 she describes a scene where a mother is dealing with all her children being taken from her and sold into the slave life, “She knew some of them would be taken from her; but they took all. The children were sold to a slave-trader and the mother was bought by a man in her own town.” To me this shows that this was a common problem that many slave women had to deal with, the constant fear of your children being stripped from you or having daughters where the same fate may occur to them and continue the dreadful cycle. Linda was using her own situation as an example of what young women had to go through in terms of how their masters often times viewed them as sexual objects or were pursuing them, but still treating them like they were less than them. In my opinion I feel as if the fact that Linda was able to pause her personal
narrative to address the conditions of slavery/ slaves and giving us insight on the reasons why they didn’t all try to escape or go against their masters because it was dangerous showed how much of a knowledgeable and self-less person she was. This information she provided about how slaveholders would lie to slaves about the free states or feed them false information because they knew most times the slaves were undereducated and couldn’t find it to be true or false. Basically, instilling fear in the slaves as a defense mechanism to keep them “trapped”/enslaved.

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