Harriet Jacobs and Shevek: What the heck were they thinking?

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is no ordinary book. Not only is it filled with action and adventure, it’s all true with all of the names changed to protect the innocent and not-so innocent. What makes it even more amazing is that its author, a former fugitive slave named Harriet Jacobs, wrote it herself. But what is this book all about? A rather brief summary of the story would say that the story is about Jacobs running away to freedom. However, I think it is more than that. It’s a story of hardship and sacrifice, from when Harriet has to leave her children behind to escape to the seven years she spent hiding in her grandmother’s attic. This is not the first story that the class has read about giving up certain things for the greater good, however. Last semester, we read The Dispossessed, where we met a brilliant scientist named Shevek, who had left his home planet of Anarres to travel to Urras, another planet different than his own. The big question is, why would both Jacobs and Shevek leave the only world they’ve ever known?

Harriet Jacobs spent seven years in her grandmother’s attic, hiding from her master, Dr. Flint. Not only did she give up seven years of her life to hide in a space not big enough for her to stand upright in, she also gave up seeing her children grow up. Why would she rather live in a dark, cramped place with no light than submit to her master? Perhaps looking at her history will give us a clue. Harriet Jacobs was born a mulatto slave in the South in 1813, and remained a slave until her escape to the North in 1842. During her twenty-nine years in the South, she had experienced a great variety of masters, from the one that taught her to read and write, to her tormentor, Dr. Flint, who began sexually harassing her when she turned fifteen.

In the South, master-slave relationships in general consisted of the master’s need to be able to control his slave, while the slave’s viewpoint of the master took on a position of loathing. With a male master and a female slave, this bond could take on different forms. Occasionally, it grew into feelings of mutual affection, as in the now famous relationship between Thomas Jefferson and his slave, Sally Hemings. Most of the time, though, the master-slave connection continued as it always had, with lust and disgust, respectively, and the master usually getting the object of his desire. In Jacobs’ case, she tried to escape her master’s advances by giving herself to another white man. In her own words, “I wanted to keep myself pure; and, under the most adverse circumstances, I tried hard to preserve my self-respect…the monster proved too strong for me (Jacobs, 58).” She not only lost her purity, she also gained two more anchors to the slave world, her children. Although she loved her children, she realized that if she didn’t escape, she would never have a chance to free all three of them. So, she left them behind and hid from her master for seven years, waiting for her chance to escape. How could she leave her children like that?

Shevek left his family and friends behind on Anarres, not knowing if or how he would ever return, to go to Urras, another planet he had only heard evil things about. At first, he didn’t even want to go to Urras, but decided that he had to go to be able to complete his theory of Simultaneity. Why was this so important to Shevek? Shevek had spent almost the whole of his adult life formulating this theory and he had been hindered for a number of years, so it’s no wonder he decided to go to Urras to continue his research. But when he arrives there, he finds out that although it’s not the horrible place

the Anarresti have said it was, he is still an outsider, only tolerated because he holds the key to the Simultaneity theory. Once Shevek realizes this, he gets involved with a revolutionary group and suddenly finds himself alone on a strange planet. Yet, in the end, he manages to transmit the theory to all of the known worlds and go back to Anarres, although he is unsure of the reception he will get because in Anarresti eyes, he is a traitor. He has turned away from the established way of doing things.

How could Harriet Jacobs and Shevek turn away from everything they held dear? That is the significance of these books; we learn Shevek and Harriet could do those things because they believed that they were doing it for the greater good of others. Shevek didn’t leave Anarres to just get prize money; he went to Urras to bring comprehension between the two governments by his actions and to get a better understanding of A-Io’s culture. He went to A-Io with the intention to give Urras and Anarres the Simultaneity so that it could be shared. He even says, “It ought to be given out, handed around (LeGuin, 378).”Harriet Jacobs didn’t leave her children because they were useless baggage; she knew that if she didn’t leave them, that there would be no hope for them to be free. No mother leaves their child unless it is absolutely necessary. In conclusion, the significance of Shevek and Harriet Jacobs is in the fact that they sacrificed themselves for the greater good of others.