Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Compare Jacobs’s narrative to one by a male author like Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, Jacob D. Green, or Solomon Northrup. How is Jacobs’s narrative, which is uniquely about the treatment of Black enslaved women, shaped by her gender?

Why does Jacobs distinguish between Mrs. Flint, an evil slaveholding woman, and good Christian slaveholding women? Is Jacobs truly subscribing to the moral relativism of her time, or are her categories of slave owners ironic? Why or why not?

The most obvious way enslaved people defied slavery was through escape. Which other, subtler, examples of defiance appear in the text? How were these methods key to building a tradition of resistance?

Analyze the text’s treatment of Black people who worked to serve the interests of slaveholders and slave traders—the servant Jenny, Dr. Flint’s Black woman acquaintance in New York, and a free Black man who tried to pass as White. Does Jacobs condemn each one equally? Why or why not?

The theme of trans-Atlanticism—that is, the relationship and cultural differences between the US and Europe—is recurrent in slave narratives. Like Frederick Douglass, Jacobs contrasts her experiences in England with her life in the US. How is her account of England complicated by the country’s own history of colonization and its dependence on Southern cotton to supply its textile mills? Does Jacobs idealize England? Why or why not?

Though very few Southerners held large numbers of slaves, Jacobs illustrates how many White people in the North and South were complicit in a system that permanently relegated Black people to an underclass. How do these anecdotes complicate our understanding about slavery and the role of the North in perpetuating both this system and, later, Jim Crow?

Why did Jacobs decide to remain in the Bruce family, working for the second Mrs. Bruce?

Jacobs includes personal letters from notable anti-slavery activists, most of them White. These kinds of testimonials were often included to validate a former slave’s narrative. How might this well-intentioned practice have reasserted some aspects of White supremacy? How might a former slave’s narrative have been impacted by the necessity to present themselves and their travails to this audience?