At first glance, Harriet Jacobs and Fanny Fern don't seem to share much in common besides a love of writing and published work displaying the fruits of their individual abilities. Closer examination of their works, however, reveals that Jacobs and Fern hold something else in their grasp: an awareness of the unfairly reduced status of women in society. Though Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is, first and foremost, an abolitionist slave narrative, there's no denying the streak of lamentations raised in the name of feminine struggles present in the text. Indeed, Jacobs even states that "slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women," a declaration supported by her painfully detailed accounts of the torment she endured at the hands of slaveholders like Dr. Flint (933). It is likely because of this added burden that Jacobs so frequently invokes the idea of nonexistence as a more pleasant alternative to life as an enslaved woman.
Fanny Fern, on the other hand, employs bold humor to combat the strictures society places on her station. While it is no doubt commendable that Fern takes this stance / stand against her masculine overseers, both literal and abstract, it cannot be denied that her position as a white woman affords her the opportunity to respond in this manner. Her written fondness for Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" led me to wonder after how Harriet Jacobs (might have) reacted to this poem, with all of its transcendent talk of equality and interconnectedness. Would she have dismissed it as idealist babble, or would she have allowed herself to be swept away by Whitman's vision?
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