Reading Race, Class and Gender in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Abstract

Abstract

Nineteenth-century African American women were faced with the formidable task of dismantling the negative connotations that the constructs of race, class, and gender placed on them. Harriet Jacobs in her narrative, Incidents in the Life of a slave girl, (1861) subverted these challenges and proceeded to re-shape the autobiographical form, thereby denying the power of race, class, and gender. Whatever may be the limitations of the form she chooses to represent her story, it is based on her experience of triple marginalization.