Harriet Jacobs

Discussion Questions

Jacobs Only:

1.) Did the editors of the BAAL do a good job of selecting these chapters/excerpts from Harriet Jacobs’s complete narrative?  Do you get a good sense of the “overall” narrative?  Why or why not?

2.) Discuss Jacobs’s decision to involve herself with the white unmarried man. Does this change our opinion of her?

3.) Evaluate the effectiveness of Jacobs’s narrative for white female readers, her primary audience. For example, how would they have reacted to her decision (see #2)?  Is there any way Jacobs “redeemed herself” for them after this incident?

4.) As with many slave narratives, Jacobs’s story presents a continuing search for freedom, even after escape from the South.  Is there a balance she achieves among these three aspects?  Which of the three aspects seems to dominate?

• Her quest for personal freedom
• Her resistance to sexual abuse
• Her desire to free her children

5.) Jacobs’s heroine confronts black and white societies in ways unlike the heroines and heroes of other slave narratives.  Do these complexities reduce the impact of the narrative as a social document, as an antislavery tract?

• Her relatives are both slaves and free
• She is both respected and reviled by blacks and whites
• She moves in both black and white, slave and free societies with an independence unusual if not unique to other slave narratives
• She appears to take pleasure in reporting her beauty, talents, relatively elevated status, compared to other slaves

6.) Does Jacobs’s narrative follow the tradition of slave narratives by emphasizing traditional Christian ideas?  Does she share the ideals of any segment of the dominant white society she confronts in either the South or North?

Douglass and Jacobs:

7.) Consider Harriet Jacobs’s slavery narrative next to Frederick Douglass’s slavery narrative:

• Do they reflect the same viewpoints?
• Do they consider the same achievements as triumphal?
• Do they present equal information about the distinct experiences faced by both male and female slaves?
• Do they agree that slavery is worse for female slaves than for male slaves?
• Are their “pivotal moments” or “key passages” similar?
• Are they equally interesting?

8.) Slave narratives such as Douglass’s and Jacobs’s emphasize the absolute helplessness of the slave before the forces of the law and society.  Yet Jacobs and Douglass did resist those forces and did achieve freedom.

• Is that achievement of freedom essential to a successful slave narrative?
• Does the slave narrative, like the romantic novel, require a meaningful, confirming resolution, to achieve its full effect?

9.) Do you feel that it’s important that we continue to read these slavery narratives and novels today?  Why or why not?

10.) How does Jacobs’s narrative measure up to Douglass’s narrative -- and other American autobiographies -- in terms of literary quality and style?