Motifs and Symbolism in "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl"

A motif is a recurrent thematic element in a literary work. Jacobs "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" is full of them.

In the slave narrative, there is an element included that is there to add excitement to the story. To drive home the plight of the slave, the story of the escape to the North is an important element. The trek to the North is fraught with hardships and narrow escapes. Clearly, Jacobs crosses mental and physical boundaries as she makes her escape from the plantation belonging to Nicholas Flint, the son of Dr. Flint. As Jacobs makes her escape to the North, she crosses many emotional and literal boundaries before her narrative ends.

Another recurring motif closely associated with the tale of escape is one of deception and disguise. When Jacobs pretends that she cannot read and does not understand Dr. Flint's notes, her pretended ignorance in its own way is an attempt to deceive. Later, Jacobs disguises herself as a sailor and then slips into the attic of her grandmother's shed. Eventually she makes her escape to the North. To do this, she once again uses a disguise and subterfuge to get away. Later, a white friend of Jacobs endangers her own child so that Jacobs can have the guise of being a slave caretaker of the child and is thus able to escape.

One of the most common motif's of a slave narrative is violence. Jacobs uses it when she recounts one of her earliest memories of Dr. Flint as he savagely beat one of his plantation slaves. She tells of seeing the blood and gore on the walls the next morning. She tells stories of slaves who were washed with brine after being beaten to torture them, and of slaves frozen, burned or whipped to death. These are just a few of the accounts of violence that Jacobs intersperses throughout her book.

Another recurring motif of the slave narrative is seen in "the exchange of money" that is threaded throughout the story. We can see it in the tale of Jacobs' grandmother as she loans her mistress $300 that she was saving to buy the freedom of her children. The money was never repaid. Jacobs' own freedom was bought by her close abolitionist friend. This was possible because of the greediness of Emily Flint's husband. The bottom line is this: Money was the big motivation for slavery. Large scale farming was the backbone of the economy of the South. A large, cheap work force was needed to produce this product. The Southern solution for years had been slavery. Without it there was a real fear of economic devastation.

Using that for comparison, how does the justification for the growing of coca and marijuana for the manufacture of Cocaine and other drugs in Columbia compare with the justification of southern plantation owners for the ownership of slaves? What is the bottom line? Is the motivation for both the same...money?

Symbolism is prolific throughout the slave narrative. Bloodhounds symbolize The Fugitive Slave Act and the hunters who carry it out. They are like bloodhounds, sniffing out the trails of the runaway slaves. Another strong symbol common in the slave narrative is the symbol of snakes. Snakes can stand for either life or death in the slave narrative. In Jacobs' "Incidents" snakes markedly appear on her escape to the North. As she sheds her old slave self, she is reborn....just like a snake sheds its skin. Still, the escape to freedom is fraught with danger and snakes are a reminder that death is never very far away.