Harriett Jacobs as a Gothic Fiction Writer

In the nineteenth century, American writers faced the daunting task of breaking away from European themes and values, in an effort to develop a unique style and voice.  Writing in America during this time began to differentiate itself from its European roots by the generation’s fascination with the individual.  The work produced dealt with human perception, experience, and psychology.  This American Romantic movement was able to distinguish itself from its European counterpart through unending innovation; possibly the most fascinating genre within the American Romantic movement was the disturbing and often macabre Gothic fiction.  While this genre’s most famously known through the work of Edgar Allan Poe, Gothic fiction encompasses much more than his personal style. It is not simply horror, rather, it is a fascination with darkness and oppression.  Every single work that we have read so far in this class contains elements of gothic fiction; therefore, while it is quite evident that Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, falls neatly into the category of a nineteenth century anti-slavery tract, the novel also must be counted amongst the time period’s gothic fiction. 
            Harriet Jacobs’s work was the first autobiography by a female slave, yet, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is vastly different from the other slave tracts of that time.  Jacobs ends her story as it is, with no positive uplift and no fighting back.  Her work is dark and vivid in its description of the horror she faced in her lifetime.  She was even known to have criticized Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin for romanticizing slavery too much.  In writing Incidents of the Life of a Slave Girl, she did not attempt to prove her triumph in escaping bondage and in gaining an education like so many other slave tracts.  On page 1, she writes “I have not written my experiences in order to attract attention to myself; on the contrary, it would have been more pleasant to...