A Portrayal of Suffering to a White Audience
The prompt I chose for this blog post was to compare and contrast an element of Black autobiography between Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Washington's Up from Slavery . The specific element I decided I wanted to focus on was their respective portrayals of their suffering during slavery, and how they interact with that topic to their audience. To start with, while they endured similar struggles while enslaved, the extent of the details are different between the two autobiographies. Even the way Jacobs and Washington were freed from slavery differ. While she doesn’t disclose every single thing about all that she went through, Jacobs sheds a lot of light on the suffering she experienced while enslaved. While she was born under the control of a master who was at least kinder to her than most, that small sense of security she was able to feel was stripped away from her as soon as her new masters, Dr and Mrs Flint, took over. Jacobs described the extent of the m...