How Audience Has Shaped Black Autobiography
Images of Harriet Jacobs and Booker T. Washington respectively. When reading any literary work, understanding the audience the author intended to reach reveals fresh layers of meaning. In Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl she clearly indicates through the preface that she is writing for a specific audience: white northern women. Booker T. Washington, by contrast, intended his autobiography Up from Slavery to reach a somewhat broader audience, though it was still largely shaped by white readers’ expectations. By analyzing both texts we see how the differences in audience lead to either emphasis on particular ideas or sanitization of certain experiences from slavery. While both Harriet Jacobs and Booker T. Washington shape their narratives around white audiences, Jacobs exposes the emotional and moral horrors of slavery to elicit sympathy and provoke Northern women into action, whereas Washington strategically edits and moralizes his experiences to reassure white readers ...