rning slavery, even forbidden topics that some people, mainly white people, would rather not bring up. For instance, the topic of sexual abuse of slave women is a topic that was not usually publicly discussed. Jacobs is troubled and ashamed of her sexual history, however, she talks about it in a way that politicizes it. She presents it as a public political concern; this was not usual in conventional nineteenth century polite discourse. She wants to cover all ground and issues concerning slavery.Jacobs tries to speak out to the women in the North by talking about motherhood and sexual behavior, things they can relate to. She talks about her children and the unfortunate death of one of them. Losing a child is one of the most horrible things that could happen to a mother. Jacobs talks about this painful occurrence to strike the hearts and mothering nature of white women. Why does she want to reach to the hearts of these women? Maybe it is because Jacobs says that no one could really understand the seriousness of slavery unless they have gone through it. So, in order to have people understand her she had to find people that could relate to her and that she could relate to so that her point could be better understood. So, she talks out to women because what happened to her with her child could possibly happen to them, and it strikes a special place in a mother's heart. Jacobs wanted the white women in the North to feel how horrible it must be for a mother to lose her child. She couldn't try to relate to the men because they don't go through the same experiences as women do. In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs does not use her real name. Instead she uses Linda Brent. By doing this Jacobs separates "life and narrative, a person and a person rendered on the page, between the experience of slavery and the conventional ways of telling the story of slavery" (497). This helps the story concentrate more on t...
