Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

I have read Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl before; we had to write a paper on it in my Women in American History class. It is interesting to think about the novel from a transcendental viewpoint. I was trying to decide whether or not it was meant to be transcendentalist. As we learned in the video today, Whitman was inspired to speak out against slavery, although he was not originally against it. This reminded me of this line from the American Transcendentalists book, which I think I also quoted in my nature journal: “The increased sense of impending crisis over slavery was also crucial in pushing Transcendentalists who had hitherto been standoffish about organized social activism, notably Emerson and Thoreau, into the public arena” (Buell xvii). So maybe, even if the book was not explicitly transcendentalist, it spoke to the movement, and to the people within that movement.

Religion is important to the slaves, as it was important to the Transcendentalists. Jacobs mentions religion when talking about a young slave who died after giving birth. The wife of the master, who knew that the baby was her husband’s, scoffs at the idea that either the girl or the baby will go to Heaven. But the girl still believes, and Jacobs writes the following: “Seven children called her [the mistress] mother. The poor black woman had but the one child, whose eyes she saw closing in death, while she thanked God for taking her away from the great bitterness of life” (15-16). This seems to be a very different type of relationship with religion than the Transcendentalists had. It is based in a grief that the Transcendentalists, being white and privileged, never felt. And when Benjamin is in jail, he says in part that “When man is hunted like a wild beast, he forgets there is a God […]” (22).

I think, though, that both Jacobs and the Transcendentalists describe a personal relationship with God. Jacobs talks about how her grandmother thought that God had put them in their situation for a reason, so “[…] we ought to pray for contentment” (18). God was personally responsible to them. And the Transcendentalists argued for that personal relationship, as we learned.