Abolition vs. Assimilation: The Role of Audience in Up From Slavery and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Abolition vs. Assimilation The Role of Audience in Up From Slavery and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl In Mr. Leff’s U.S. History class we are taught to evaluate narrator bias through five lenses: Historical Context, Audience, Point of View, Purpose, and Significance (rather oddly abbreviated HAPPY, with the Y representing the homophonic “Why”). In this blog post, I will investigate comparatively the role of the second of these lenses, Audience, in shaping the autobiographical narratives and the representations of the Black experience found within Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery . According to the Preface by the Author in Jacobs’s Incidents , “I have not written my experiences in order to attract attention to myself… But I do earnestly desire to arouse the women of the North to a realizing sense of the condition of two millions of women in the South, still in bondage, suffering what I suffered” (5). Altho...