Harriet Jacobs

“The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead” (Power 1), Aristotle knew the importance of education; especially literacy. Literacy is what stood between the slaves and the slaves owners. However, some of the enslaved were fortunate enough to possess more intelligence than their owners knew. Harriet Jacobs is one of the few that shared the knowledge of literacy and she knew the power that this held. She used this as her driving force to push through all of the hardships a slave had to endure on a daily basis. Jacobs account in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl truly depict the power of literacy.

As a young girl Jacobs learns of her fate to come. “When I was six years old, my mother died; and then, for the first time, I learned, by the talk around me, that I was a slave” (Jacobs 10). Jacobs blesses her first mistress, Margaret Horniblow, for teaching her to read and spell. From this early age Jacobs begins to see that language and reality are intertwined. Through this interconnected thinking Jacobs discovers how to decode both the word and the world. This causes bitterness towards her mistress Margaret, when she teaches her the bible. “My mistress had taught me the percepts of God’s word: ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. ‘Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so unto them. ’ But I was her slave, and I suppose she did not recognize me as her neighbor” (Jacobs). Jacobs realizes that her mistress does not view her as her neighbor and in turn doesn’t view her as a human being. The hypocrisy shown to her through the bible infuriates Jacobs. This leads Jacobs to question literacy as a possible pathway to freedom, however, Jacobs ability to read and write never sets her free. “Education makes people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave” (Power 1).

Henry Peter, Lord Brougham explain this in “The Present State of the Law”; this statement holds true to the way slave owners held their power over the Slaves. Unlike the biblical reading Jacobs reads with her mistress, the slave owners would warp Christ’s word to make slaves believe that their enslavement was warranted by God. These twisted passages would be read orally by the slave owners. Jacob’s now notices how language can be abused and used against her fellow slaves. As a testament to Jacobs eye opening experiences, Harryette Mullen uncovers the oral abuse slaves endured.

This was necessary through the slave owners eyes because they were afraid of rioting and runaway slaves. There plantations depended on the slaves labour, so they needed to make it very clear tot their slaves that whites were of a higher society. “If institutionalized illiteracy was intended to exempt African Americans from access to or participation in the discursive formations of bourgeois society, then to the extent that it succeed, it also left them outside conventional ideological constructions that played a part in determining white identities” (Mullen 256)

Along with these biblical reading slave owners also payed special attention to their women slaves. Most of the time female slaves were sexual harassed and raped. Jacobs was a victim of harassment when she lived in Dr. Flint’s household. “Illiterate slave women operated within a tradition of resistant orality, or verbal self defense, which included speech acts variously labeled sassy or saucy, impudent, impertinent, or insulant: the speech of slaves who refused to know their place, who contested their assigned social and legal inferiority as slaved and as black women” (Mullen 255).

Jacobs was put into dozens of inappropriate situations and these became worse when Dr. Flint discovered Jacobs literacy. Dr. Flint send her sexual letters which Jacobs tells him that she cannot read. “While Harriet Jacob’s literacy was a tremendous source of empowerment, it also exposed her to an even more concentrated dose of the ideology of domesticity than the training she received while living and working in the homes of white women and observing their behavior” (Mullen 260) Quotes I want to use but I’m not sure how. —- Their texts, by focusing on a continuum of resistance to oppression available to the illiterate as well as the literate, tend to stress orality as a presence over illiteracy as an absence” (Mullen 255). “Harriet Jacob’s narrative, which may be seen as ascribing gender to the generic (male) narrative genre, demonstrates that it is possible to appropriate bourgeois ideology to affirm the humanity of slaves and illiterates-without Douglass’s rhetorical conflation of literacy, freedom, and manhood, which reinforces rather than challenges the symbolic emasculation of the male slave and the silencing of the female slave.

Because she associates the slave’s humanity with defiant or subversive speech, resistant behavior, and the ethics of reciprocal relationships, as well as with writing and individual autonomy, Jacobs affirms the humanity of the collectivity of slaves as well as the successful fugitive and literate narrator” (Mullen 261) “For Jacobs, literacy serves to record for a reading audience a continuity of experience already constructed and preserved within her family through oral accounts” (Mullen 261). “Only the educated are free” Epictetus (Power 1) “Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army” Edward Everett (Power 1)