Harriet Jacobs

The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead (Power 1), Aristotle knew the importance of education especially literacy. Literacy is what stood between the break ones backs and the hard workers owners. However, some of the enslaved were favorable enough to possess much intelligence than their owners knew. Harriet Jacobs is one of the few that shared the knowledge of literacy and she knew the power that this held. She employ this as her driving force to push through all of the hardships a slave had to endure on a daily basis. Jacobs account in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl truly depict the power of literacy.As a young girl Jacobs learns of her fate to come. When I was six years old, my arrest died and then, for the first time, I learned, by the talk around me, that I was a slave (Jacobs 10). Jacobs blesses her first mistress, Margaret Horniblow, for pedagogics her to read and spell. From this early age Jacobs begins to see that language an d reality are intertwined. Through this interconnected thinking Jacobs discovers how to decode both the word and the world. This causes bitterness towards her mistress Margaret, when she teaches her the bible. My mistress had taught me the percepts of Gods word gramme shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so unto them. nevertheless I was her slave, and I suppose she did not recognize me as her neighbor (Jacobs). Jacobs realizes that her mistress does not compute her as her neighbor and in turn doesnt view her as a human being. The falsehood shown to her through the bible infuriates Jacobs. This leads Jacobs to question literacy as a possible path vogue to freedom, however, Jacobs ability to read and print never sets her free. command makes people easy to lead, but difficult to drive easy to govern, but unrealistic to enslave (Power 1).Henry Peter, Lord Brougham explain this in The Present State of the Law this statem ent holds true to the way slave owners held their power over the Slaves. Unlike the biblical reading Jacobs reads with her mistress, the slave owners would warp Christs word to make slaves believe that their enslavement was warranted by God. These twisted passages would be read orally by the slave owners. Jacobs now notices how language can be abused and used against her fellow slaves. As a testament to Jacobs eye opening lie withs, Harryette Mullen uncovers the oral abuse slaves endured.This was necessary through the slave owners look because they were afraid of rioting and runaway slaves. There plantations depended on the slaves labour, so they needed to make it very overhear tot their slaves that etiolates were of a higher society. If institutionalized illiteracy was intended to exempt African Americans from access to or participation in the discursive formations of conservative society, then to the extent that it succeed, it also left them outside stuffy ideological constr uctions that played a part in determining white identities (Mullen 256)Along with these biblical reading slave owners also payed special attention to their women slaves. Most of the time female slaves were inner harassed and raped. Jacobs was a victim of harassment when she lived in Dr. Flints household. Illiterate slave women operated within a tradition of resistive orality, or verbal self defense, which included speech acts variously labeled sassy or saucy, impudent, impertinent, or insulant the speech of slaves who refused to know their place, who contested their assigned social and legal inferiority as slaved and as black women (Mullen 255).Jacobs was put into dozens of inappropriate situations and these became worse when Dr. Flint discovered Jacobs literacy. Dr. Flint send her sexual letters which Jacobs tells him that she cannot read. While Harriet Jacobs literacy was a tremendous source of empowerment, it also exposed her to an even more concentrated dose of the ideology o f domesticity than the training she received while living and working in the homes of white women and observing their behavior (Mullen 260) Quotes I want to use but Im not sure as shooting how. - Their texts, by focusing on a continuum of resistance to oppression available to the illiterate as easy as the literate, tend to stress orality as a presence over illiteracy as an absence (Mullen 255). Harriet Jacobs narrative, which may be seen as ascribing gender to the generic (male) narrative genre, demonstrates that it is possible to appropriate bourgeois ideology to affirm the humanity of slaves and illiterates-without Douglasss rhetorical conflation of literacy, freedom, and manhood, which reinforces rather than challenges the symbolic emasculation of the male slave and the silencing of the female slave.Because she associates the slaves humanity with defiant or subversive speech, resistant behavior, and the ethics of bilateral relationships, as well as with writing and individual autonomy, Jacobs affirms the humanity of the collectivity of slaves as well as the prosperous fugitive and literate narrator (Mullen 261) For Jacobs, literacy serves to record for a reading audience a continuity of experience already constructed and preserved within her family through oral accounts (Mullen 261). Only the educated are free Epictetus (Power 1) Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army Edward Everett (Power 1)