Comparing Douglass And Harriet Jacobs

The best way to give someone the idea of an institution’s terrible enormity, is to give them depictions of people who have suffered under it. This is the principle idea of the slave narrative, where former slaves tell their experiences in slavery and how they escaped. As most were written when slavery was still legal, the true purpose of these published accounts is addressed in a myriad of different ways throughout, but sums up to this - to convince the reader, through depictions of abuse and dehumanization, that slavery should not be condoned, for the perpetual abuse and misery the slave must endure is not worth the product. Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs are two examples of slave narrative authors who utilize this emotional appeal
Jacobs tells how she must suffer sexual abuse from her obsessive master, Dr. Flint, the lengths that he will go to make her suffer, and the lengths that she will go to ensure the safety of herself and her children. Their stories are unique, and while the depictions of people treating others in ways thought repulsive, inhuman, and perhaps morally impossible, both authors decline to stop there, and will often go out of their way to directly address the reader as well, discussing their own freedom, the freedom of their fellow slaves, and their desire to put an end to slavery. Emotionally-evoking responses are used by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs in their slave narratives in order to persuade the reader of slavery’s
Douglass has a great advantage in appealing to his audience as majority of his readers may be less familiarized with the setting of a plantation, and more familiar with the setting of a city, which allows them to relate to his story more. However, Douglass has a good idea of what it means to have to relate and conform to a foreign life, as an escaped slave. He discusses his new life as a freedman in the narrative, and especially how the cuts of slavery still sting and run deep in his life. He feels as if he is unable to be at peace if so many he knows are still living lives of undecided servitude at the will of cruel masters, and that he will never be able to adapt to society this way. To represent his feelings to the reader, he occasionally writes of incidents where he felt out of place in his new society, and he occasionally vents to the reader of what it feels like to live in such a dramatically different way. Stating a long list of perilous situations he finds comfortably comparable to slavery, he writes, “Let him be a fugitive slave in a strange land--a land given up to be the hunting-ground for slaveholders--whose inhabitants are legalized kidnappers--where he is every moment subjected to the terrible liability of being seized upon by his