Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl Essay

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What is one to feel when their looks, feelings, thoughts and almost every feature but the skin of their color are the same as the people who only classify them as property or a lesser being? Harriet Jacobs writes “Moreover, they thought he had spoiled his children, by teaching them to feel that they were human beings. This was blasphemous doctrine for a slave to teach; presumptuous in him, and dangerous to the masters” as if the thoughts of an African American to qualify himself as an human being were obscene. The autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs and the short stories Conjure Tales and Stories of the Color Line by Charles W. Chesnutt show the dismal and horrid lives African American people living in the times of 1861 for Jacobs and 1899 for Chesnutt had to live. While writing for a different audience, the characters of the stories were used to show the lives they lived at these times.
The Audience for the two authors may have been different but its main reason was to attract the attention of the white audience in the north. Jacobs used her autobiography to attract the attention of white audiences, mainly the middle-class northern women, in a way of showing the many evils slavery. Jacobs writes in first person a story of her life and occasionally breaks away and talks directly to the reader in ways such as “Pity me, and pardon me, O virtuous …show more content…
The autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs and the short stories Conjure Tales and Stories of the Color Line by Charles W. Chesnutt show the dismal and horrid lives African American people living in the times of 1861 for Jacobs and 1899 for Chesnutt had to live. It is intended for the reader to feel a certain way or have many opinions on how to writers made it feel when

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