As a result, their autobiographies challenge the traditional mode and content of American autobiography. Incidents in the Life of Harriet Jacobs, a Slave Girl & Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, a Slave Man - Written by Them Douglass, Frederick. Finally, Douglass and Jacobs achieve and assert their newly created personal identities through the creation of rhetorical devices and creative survival strategies. Second, gender complicates racial identities through the reduction of black manhood and womanhood as human chattel. First, race complicates gender identities through the suppression of the enslaved person's humanity. From this study, this thesis derives three main conclusions. As a methodology, this thesis uses an intersectional paradigm of race, gender, class and sexuality to reveal the close connection between gender and identity that underscores the development of a new and empowered selfhood. This study argues that through writing their autobiographies as freed persons, these two narrators navigate through and overcome racist and sexist constructions of their genders in order to create new and empowered identities. His Narrative emerged in a popular tradition of narratives and slavery fictions that includes Harriet Beecher Stowes Uncle Toms Cabin and Harriet Jacobss.

This study analyzes two widely known slave autobiographies of the nineteenth century: Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845) and Harriet Ann Jacobs's Incidents in the Life ofa Slave Girl. Dismantling slavery: gender and identity in the autobiographies of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, 2005Īfrican-American slave autobiographies, commonly known as slave narratives, reflect the soul and spirit of an oppressed people.

Frederick douglass and harriet jacobs