points to the indignities and horrors that enslaved women were forced to endure. Dr. Flint, her lascivious owner, is constantly attempting to sexually assault her. This, of course, is horrific, but the young girl is also forced to endure the sometimes violent scorn of Flint's jealous wife, who believes that the doctor has been successful in his attempts and holds Linda (Jacobs's name in the book) responsible despite, or perhaps because of, her helplessness. In this way, Jacobs not only relates her own experiences, but appeals to contemporary white middle-class notions of femininity. Her victimization was outrageous to both male and female readers, and she portrayed it as almost ubiquitous among slave societies. In one especially grim passage, she described a young enslaved girl, impregnated by her master, whose wife mocked her amid a fatal childbirth:

I once saw a young slave girl dying soon after the birth of a child nearly white. In her agony she cried out, "O Lord, come and take me!" Her mistress stood by, and mocked at her like an incarnate fiend. "You suffer, do you?" she exclaimed. "I am glad of it. You deserve it all, and more too."

In this way, Jacobs illustrates a layer of horror to slavery that Douglass alludes to but cannot know, as he is a man.

One of the most significant differences between these two narratives is the writer's approach to his or her audience, respectively.

Douglass, known as a strong orator and keen intellectual, uses logic and reason in his narrative to prove his points. The narrative is mostly void of emotional appeals or descriptive language; rather, Douglass relies on critical reasoning to expose the anti-Christian and dehumanizing horrors of slavery. His argument is political: he is appealing to abolitionists on an intellectual, rational level.

Jacobs, on the other hand, uses the tropes of the sentimental novel (which were written for female audiences) to appeal to her readers who are primarily women. She describes the anguish of being a mother separated from her children, the vulnerability of the female slave's body in relation to her master, and her primary values of family and motherhood. While she follows the familiar slave narrative story of bondage to escape to freedom, she infuses the male-dominated form with issues specific to her gender. Incredibly conscious of her Northern female white readers, Jacobs details the many ways in which she is preyed upon.

Thus, there exists a clear gender divide between these two narratives, a divide that Jacobs makes use of. Knowing that her narrative needs to stand out from a male-dominated genre, she uses her gender as an asset in the telling of her story.

Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) both have elements of the conventional fugitive slave narrative. Both authors recount their horrific experiences as slaves and their escape northward. The authors also explain how they came to be literate in order to counter proslavery arguments that their narratives were not authentic. Finally, they prove themselves devout Christians who expose the hypocrisies of their supposedly religious southern slave masters.

However, their narratives differ both in style and substance. Douglass, a rousing orator, writes with rhetorical flourishes that he used on the lecture circuit, including repetition and allusions to Biblical stories. Jacobs, on the other hand, uses the style of the popular women's domestic novel to stress her commitment to family and home (this was also the style of the very popular Uncle Tom's Cabin). Douglass, a man, fights for his freedom and wins it, while Jacobs's story is more complicated. Having given birth to children with a white man of her choosing, she has to not only fight for her own freedom but also that of her children. Hence, her path to freedom is different and in some ways more complicated than that of Douglass.