Abstract
The novel Incidents in the life of a slave girl is an autobiography written by Harriet Jacobs in 1861. In this book, she relates various events of the life she had when she was a slave in South Carolina. She confides in the reader and gives details of the difficulties she had to face in her everyday life.
We are going to show to which extent this book can be seen as a female Bildungsroman. First, you have to know that a Bildungsroman is the story of a single individual's growth and development within the context of a defined social order; it is a novel about a main character's self-development from childhood to adulthood.Can we say that Harriet Jacobs reached that self development when reading her story? And how does she manage to tell the reader about her experience? In a first part, we'll show that Incidents in the life of a slave girl is a Bildungsroman (according to the criteria that we've just mentioned). Then, we'll analyse the book as a female narrative. And eventually, we'll clarify the relations between the author, the heroine and the reader in the book.
