"Cruelty is contagious in uncivilized communities"
About this Quote
Cruelty doesn’t just happen in Harriet Ann Jacobs’s world; it spreads. “Contagious” is the detonating word here, yanking violence out of the realm of private sin and into public health. Jacobs is telling you to stop treating brutality as an isolated character flaw and start seeing it as an environment people breathe in, then exhale onto the next person. The line carries a writer’s precision and a survivor’s anger: cruelty is learned, normalized, incentivized, and eventually performed almost automatically.
The phrase “uncivilized communities” isn’t a genteel bit of Victorian name-calling so much as a strategic reversal. Jacobs is writing out of the moral theater of 19th-century America, where “civilization” was the brand slogan of the slaveholding republic. Her subtext is a rebuke to that self-image: a society that can domesticate slavery is the one that forfeits any right to call itself civilized. She also implicates community, not just the obvious villains. Enslavers, overseers, neighbors, even “respectable” households become vectors; complicity is epidemiological.
Context matters because Jacobs, in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, documents how sexual coercion, surveillance, and domination seep into daily life until they feel like ordinary weather. The sentence works because it refuses melodrama. It’s cool, almost clinical, which makes the accusation sharper: cruelty is not a rupture in social order; in a corrupt order, it is the social order.
The phrase “uncivilized communities” isn’t a genteel bit of Victorian name-calling so much as a strategic reversal. Jacobs is writing out of the moral theater of 19th-century America, where “civilization” was the brand slogan of the slaveholding republic. Her subtext is a rebuke to that self-image: a society that can domesticate slavery is the one that forfeits any right to call itself civilized. She also implicates community, not just the obvious villains. Enslavers, overseers, neighbors, even “respectable” households become vectors; complicity is epidemiological.
Context matters because Jacobs, in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, documents how sexual coercion, surveillance, and domination seep into daily life until they feel like ordinary weather. The sentence works because it refuses melodrama. It’s cool, almost clinical, which makes the accusation sharper: cruelty is not a rupture in social order; in a corrupt order, it is the social order.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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