In the 19th century, the genre of slave narratives popularized itself as more than one hundred former slaves published their stories of captivity and their paths to freedom in order to move hearts across the nation. Two of the most famous narratives are the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, written by Frederick Douglass, an enslaved man who grew up on a plantation in the South before escaping to freedom, and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, by Harriet Jacobs under the pseudonym Linda Brent, an enslaved woman who grew up serving in the house of a slave owner before she escaped to freedom. The narratives have their similarities and differences based on the perspectives of the authors, the lives they lived, and their respective educational backgrounds, as well as other factors. While Douglass’s narrative holds a distinct absence of sexuality and instead focuses on the violent but nonsexual aspects of his life due to his perspective as a male, Jacobs’ narrative focuses on sexuality and its link to violence in her life due to her perspective as a woman.

A noteworthy part of Douglass’s narrative is that there is an absence of any sexuality even in acts that are inherently sexual in nature. Douglass gives the example of how before one of his slave owners “commenced whipping Aunt Hester, he took her into the kitchen and stripped her from neck to waist, leaving her neck, shoulders, and back, entirely naked” (Douglass 319). The act of stripping a woman from the waist up and leaving her half naked is inherently sexual in nature, but Douglass’s description omits any description of her chest and curves and instead focuses only on her “neck, shoulders, and back” to highlight that it was for ease of access to whip her. With another master, Douglass describes how “Master would keep [a] lacerated young woman tied up in this situation four or five hours at a time” (Douglass 354). While the idea of hanging a half-naked woman from one’s ceiling is sexual in idea, Douglass’s focus is instead on her punishment and laceration in a way that makes the entire scene seem non-sexual. His descriptions of the whipping of half-naked slave women are identical to how he describes his own beatings. When he incurs the wrath of his master on one occasion, his master “rushed at [him] with the fierceness of a tiger, tore off [his] clothes, and lashed [him] till he had worn out his switches” (Douglass 357). Similar to his descriptions of the other beatings, apart from a brief account of how their masters stripped them down, he omits that aspect entirely, focusing instead on the sheer brutality of the act. Thus, Douglass creates a narrative absence of sexuality in his autobiographical account of slavery, even in inherently sexual acts.

Contrastingly, Jacobs is incredibly specific in her narrative about the role and abuse of sexuality in her life. Starting from the beginning of her narrative, Jacobs is blunt about the ever-present threats of rape and abuse that she and other slave girls face. She describes how as a young girl, her “master began to whisper foul words in [her] ear” (Jacobs 436). Jacobs doesn’t just hint at what Dr. Flint, her master and a married man, threatened to do, but is explicit about the fact that he raped and objectified her, stating, “he told me I was his property; that I must be subject to his will in all things” (Jacobs 436). Even if Jacobs couldn’t explicitly state that she was raped, she heavily implies that this sexual act occurred and makes the implicit connection between sexuality and violence. Ultimately, Jacobs’ bluntness regarding sexuality truly exposes the brutality and unique horrors that women faced under the slave system.

While in Jacobs’ narrative, sexuality and violence are intrinsically linked, no such link existed in Douglass’s life due to being male and he instead focuses solely on the violence in his life. He gives the example of multiple overseers whose sheer violence in punishments made them noteworthy. For example, one overseer “used to stand by the door of the quarter, armed with a large hickory stick and heavy cowskin, ready to whip anyone” (Douglass 322). Douglass’s life experiences were different from Jacobs in that he worked in the fields on the plantation rather than in the house, and so faced a different type of violence—one found at the end of a whip or switch. He gives the second example of how another overseer “Took [his] little brother by the throat, threw him on the ground, and with the heel of his boot stamped upon his head till the blood gushed from his nose and ears” (Douglass 347). Thus, Douglass omits any mention of sexual acts and or threats due to never facing them in his own life and instead, focuses on the violence and gore that those who worked in the fields faced daily.

Unlike Douglass, sexuality and violence were key parts of Jacobs’ life as a female, and she writes about the link between the two and how it affected her and other enslaved women. She first talks about the link between enslaved women and violence, describing how “the lash and the foul talk of her master and his sons are her teachers,” and that if they are unable to get what they want from her nicely, “she is whipped or starved into submission to their will” (Jacobs 461). Jacobs establishes a clear link between sexuality and violence for women and how slave owners would use cruelty and violence to get their way with a woman’s body, one way or another. She also talks about how this cruel system even affects the husbands of enslaved women, stating how “Some poor creatures have been so brutalized by the lash that they will sneak out of the way to give their masters free access to their wives and daughters” (Jacobs 453). In this way, Jacobs establishes that the system of violence and rape did not just affect enslaved black women, but male slaves and their children too due to the fear it established among them. Furthermore, it was not just white men imposing their will on the slaves, but white women too, as Jacobs gives the example of how the white daughter of a slave owner “did not make her advances to her equals” among the slaves, but “selected the most brutalized, over whom her authority could be exercised with less fear of exposure” (Jacobs 462). She thus further establishes how no slave was free of the sexual authority that white slave owners imposed upon the slaves with the brutality of the whip and what a prominent part of her life it was. Through the different examples of how slave owners used violence to intimidate and rape slaves, Jacobs establishes a link between sexuality and violence that Douglass does not discuss since he was catering to the broader audience of white abolitionists, and as such had to make his narrative more palatable, while Jacobs was specifically targeting white women, and as such could discuss sexuality more easily.

Similar to one another, both Jacobs and Douglass fight back against their masters by taking control of their sexuality and physicality respectively, highlighting the prominent roles that the two played in the slave’s lives. Jacobs talks about how she took control of her sexuality and had a child with a white man who lived in town. She states how “There is something akin to freedom in having a lover who has no control over you, except that which he gains by kindness and attachment” (Jacobs 465). Not only does it show that Jacobs was slowly attempting to take control of her own life, but it shows that even though she was raised a slave and brutalized by her master, she was able to empower herself to take control of at least one aspect of her life and make her own decisions on whom she had sex with—taking back control over her sexuality which had been used against her for so long. Her children and her sexuality are a large part of her narrative, unlike Douglass, who does not bring up his wife until the end of the narrative, and even then only for a couple of lines. However, parallelling Jacobs’ resistance against her master by taking control of her own sexuality, Douglass similarly fights back against a violent overseer, Covey, who is beating him when “resolved to fight, and suiting [his] action to the resolution, [he] seized Covey hard by the throat” (Douglass 365). Through fighting back, Douglass asserts himself and takes control of his physicality in the same way Jacobs fought back and took control of her sexuality. 

Overall, Douglass’s perspective as a male leaves his slave narrative with a distinct lack of sexuality and a focus on violence, while Jacobs’ perspective as a female allows for a narrative focus on sexuality and its link to violence. This is first a striking commentary as to the different ways slaves of different genders were treated in the 19th century, and second, a comparison of different slave narratives that were written by people with different experiences. Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl are similar in many ways, the first and most obvious being that they are both slave narratives, but they also have many differences in the way they are written and what they are written about that make them unique. This is why the over one hundred slave narratives that have been written are all unique—each enslaved person had a different perspective and life that offers a different perspective of life as a slave. However, the one uniting factor in all of them no matter what was that the system that supported slavery was corrupt and cruel to all those in it, and it was physically violent, mentally violent, and many times, sexually violent.

Works Cited

Gates, Henry Louis. The Classic Slave Narratives. Signet Classics, 2016.

Renaker, Thalia. Personal Interview, 14 December 2020.

Willrich, Sarah. Personal Interview, 16 December 2020.