Harriet Jacobs
1) Without Incidents, and with only Douglass’s account, would we know much about the sexual harassment and abuse of enslaved women? Did other slave narratives engage with this topic? Feel free to research this but remember to cite your sources.
2) In Chapter XXI, Jacobs uses the intriguing metaphor of the loophole; what does this mean?
3) If escaping to the North would have better served her, and her children, why did she stay?
4) What does Linda have to say about Christianity and its relationship to slavery? How do her comments reflect the comments of others we’ve read this semester, such as Frederick Douglass?
5) Jacobs implies that she wants to remain near her children, even though for a long time they do not know she is there; does she remain a mother, except for the “loophole” that her children do not know where she is?
6) In Chapter XXV, Linda uses a copy of the New York Herald to trick Dr. Flint into believing that she has escaped to New York and is not hiding under his nose in her grandmother’s shed. Is there any rhetorical value to this episode? What does it tell us about Jacobs’s relation- ship to print culture? What does it say about an enslaved woman’s ability to transform an otherwise racist periodical (she calls the Herald a “paper that systematically abuses the colored people”) into a tool of her own liberation?
7) How does Linda react upon hearing that she is no longer legally considered a slave? Why does she react this way? What does her reaction say about her conception of freedom?