SOURCE: "The Devil and the Virgin: Writing Sexual Abuse in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl," in Violence, Silence, and Anger: Women's Writing as Transgression, edited by Deirdre Lashgari, University Press of Virginia, 1995, pp. 38-61.

In the following essay, Dalton examines the "tensions between what [Jacobs literally states and metaphorically suggests about sexual exploitation," pointing to the parallels between the way in which Jacobs, through Linda Brent, describes her sexual exploitation and twentieth-century studies on the effects of molestation on girls and women. Dalton suggests that through her language and imagery, Jacobs implies that greater sexual abuses occurred in her life than what Brent reports.]

Harriet Jacobs confronted multiple binds as she attempted to render her experiences of sexual abuse and the systematic sexual exploitation of slave women. In her 1861 narrative, she grappled with the constraints of the literary conventions of the time, while also making...