Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl"

            Slavery Imagery in the Retreat in Harriet Jacobs "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" By Harriet Jacobs (alias Linda Brent) is deemed one of the writers of a classic slave narrative depicting one of the most dehumanizing institutions in American history: slavery. Throughout her discourse, she uses metaphors and language filled with poignant words such as "darkness" and "stifling" to illuminate slavery in all of its evil masks and faces. She explains the effects of slavery on a people by using fierce prose in describing her own personal experiences so one can better see the crippling effects of slavery as a whole. At one particularly eerie point in her life, readers witness her as debilitated and shut away from air and light for a total of seven years in an effort to escape the slavery. It is in this incident where the reader can draw parallels between the seven-year retreat and the stifling institution of slavery because in describing both she uses similar metaphors, images, and descriptive words. The author, Harriet Jacobs, throughout her narrative describes the cruelties of slavery vividly. In slavery, a person is completely shut out from things normally given to humans. When Linda Brent retreats into the hole constructed by her uncle, she describes her experience as "stifling; the darkness total" (438). Many slaves were completely shut out from the world. In one story, Jacobs relates of a slave who had been beaten, "The back of his shirt was one clot of blood the master said he deserved a hundred more lashes" (378). Slave masters did not allow most slaves to learn how to read or write. Others limited the actions of the slaves. One man who tried to run away was, "put into the cotton gin, which was screwed down, only allowing him room to turn on his side when he could not lie on his back" (379). Rats ate him. In these conditions, slaves were continuously kept in bondage, a form of darkness because if slaves were allowed to have knowledge or freely move without the consent of their masters, the entire institution would be ruined economically.