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Harriet ann jacobs incidents in life of a slave girl analysis essay
Harriet ann jacobs incidents in life of a slave girl analysis essay
Octavia butler's kindred analysis
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Octavia Butler's Kindred vs. Harriet Jacobs' Incidents In The Life of a Slave Girl According to 'the conventions for slave narratives', it is possible to categorize Kindred by Octavia Butler as a slave narrative. However, the circumstances that take Dana back in time are imaginative and fantastical compared to slave narratives such as Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs. While reading Kindred, one doesn't really get the experience of the slaves, but how Dana feels as she participates in slave times. Compared to the lives of slaves, her life is much easier and she has the luxury of knowing she is not and never was a slave. In contrast, Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl is a direct portrayal of slavery through the eyes of a slave. Although the viewpoints are very different, there are similarities in their experiences and in the way each responds and fights for their freedom. The first parallel exists in how both Dana and Jacobs are taught to view themselves. Jacobs states, ? I was born a slave; but never knew it till six years of happy childhood had passed away? (Jacobs 7). Jacobs? father allowed her the freedom to grow up happy and unfettered by slavery. Once she did realize she was a slave, her mistress further encouraged independent thought with kind treatment and by teaching Jacobs to read. Therefore Jacobs had little worries about slavery for the first twelve years of her life. Dana grew up in 20th century America, where life for African-Americans is drastically changed. She never had to worry about slavery nor gave it much thought beyond what she read in books or learned in classes. She is even married to a white man. When transported back in time she is truly perplexed by the treatmen... ... middle of paper ... ...wn time where slavery doesn?t exist, and Jacobs, desperate to save her children and give them freedom. As stated earlier, Jacobs and Dana experience slavery from very different perspectives. Dana is well educated and prior to going back in time, has only read about slavery, while Jacobs, although literate, is born into slavery and knows nothing else. Yet these major differences do not change the veneer of slavery. Both are considered property and both had to endure and watch others endure unimaginable cruelties. It seems only natural that the similarities in their experiences produced similarities in how they reacted and how they escaped to freedom. Works Cited: Butler, Octavia E. Kindred. Boston: Beacon, 1988. Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Ed. Jean Fagan Yellin. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1987.
Slavery is a term that can create a whirlwind of emotions for everyone. During the hardships faced by the African Americans, hundreds of accounts were documented. Harriet Jacobs, Charles Ball and Kate Drumgoold each shared their perspectives of being caught up in the world of slavery. There were reoccurring themes throughout the books as well as varying angles that each author either left out or never experienced. Taking two women’s views as well as a man’s, we can begin to delve deeper into what their everyday lives would have been like. Charles Ball’s Fifty Years in Chains and Harriet Jacobs Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl were both published in the early 1860’s while Kate Drumgoold’s A Slave Girl’s Story came almost forty years later
When the slaveholders transfer this fear by corrupting something they revere, religion, slavery’s perversive power is shown in horrifying clarity. The slaveholders will stop at nothing, they will leave nothing untouched and unsoiled if it means the preservation of slavery. Slavery isn’t just a physical and mental burden upon the slaves it imprisons; it is a moral burden on the entire society in which it exists. Jacobs’ depiction of religion in the South throughout the Incidents reveals it to be much more than merely a place to gather and express beliefs; it is yet another tool owned and used by slaveholders to strengthen the system of slavery.
Butler alludes to the significance of the problem by choosing the adjective kindred as a title for her work. Throughout this novel, familial bonds are built up, and at the very end get a perverse form because of gender and racial mistreatments. Throughout time, Dana witnesses families clinging to each other while they are treated unjustly. The veracity of this assertion is confirmed by examining scenes where the heroes stick together with their family because they are put in circumstances where it is impossible to escape racial violation. An example of such a case is the incident between the slave called Tess and Dana. After Weilyn sells the man for attempting to flirt with Dana, other slaves try their best to not displease their masters because they do not want to be separated from their family. This scene suggests that racial violation was so horrifying that African Americans could not even choose to live with their family, and it made them even more dependent on each
In conclusion, the experiences that Jacobs and Douglass had were no different, albeit the forms of their slavery were dissimilar. Abuse is abuse no matter how you slice it the desired effect is to break the spirit of the one being abused. One cannot say that their experience was worse than another because all they have is what they’ve been through. If the eyes are the windows of the soul, then no one but the owner of those eyes can be able to perceive what they have been through and the severity of it. The most important thing to come from what they went through was that it turned these two into great minds of the generation.
Jacobs, Harriet, and Yellin, Jean. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press
Jacobs, Harriet. "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl." The Classic Slave Narratives. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Mentor, 1987.
After reading the slavery accounts of Olaudah Equiano 's "The Life of Olaudah Equiano" and Harriet Jacobs ' "Incidents In the Life of a Slave Girl", you gain knowledge of what slaves endured during their times of slavery. To build their audience aware of what life of a slave was like, both authors gives their interpretation from two different perspectives and by two different eras of slavery.
Jacobs, Harriet A.. Incidents in the life of a slave girl. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988
...f Jacobs’s narrative is the sexual exploitation that she, as well as many other slave women, had to endure. Her narrative focuses on the domestic issues that faced African-American women, she even states, “Slavery is bad for men, but it is far more terrible for women”. Therefore, gender separated the two narratives, and gave each a distinct view toward slavery.
The book follows Dana who is thrown back in time to live in a plantation during the height of slavery. The story in part explores slavery through the eye of an observer. Dana and even Kevin may have been living in the past, but they were not active members. Initially, they were just strangers who seemed to have just landed in to an ongoing play. As Dana puts it, they "were observers watching a show. We were watching history happen around us. And we were actors." (Page 98). The author creates a scenario where a woman from modern times finds herself thrust into slavery by account of her being in a period where blacks could never be anything else but slaves. The author draws a picture of two parallel times. From this parallel setting based on what Dana goes through as a slave and her experiences in the present times, readers can be able to make comparison between the two times. The reader can be able to trace how far perceptions towards women, blacks and family relations have come. The book therefore shows that even as time goes by, mankind still faces the same challenges, but takes on a reflection based on the prevailing period.
Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. New York, NY: W. W. Norton &
The history of slavery in America is one that has reminders of the institution and its oppressive state of African Americans in modern times. The slaveholders and the slaves were intertwined in a cruel system of oppression that did not yield to either side. The white slaveholders along with their black slaves became codependent amongst each other due to societal pressures and the consequences that would follow if slaves were emancipated with race relations at a high level of danger. This codependency between the oppressed and the oppressor has survived throughout time and is prevalent in many racial relationships. The relationship between the oppressed and the oppressor can clearly be seen in Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred. In this novel, the protagonist Dana Franklin, a black woman, time travels between her present day 1977 and the antebellum era of 19th century Maryland. Throughout her journeys back to the past, Dana comes in contact with her white ancestor, Rufus Weylin, a white slave owner and Dana ultimately saves his life and intermingles with the people of the time. Butler’s story of Dana and her relationship with Rufus and other whites as she travels between the past and the present reveals how slaveholders and slaves depended on and influenced one other throughout the slaves bondage. Ultimately, the institution of slavery reveals how the oppressed and the oppressor are co-dependent; they need each other in order to survive.
For this very reason Jacobs uses the pseudonym Linda Brent to narrate her first-person experience, which I intend to use interchangeably throughout the essay, since I am referencing the same person. All throughout the narrative, Jacobs explores the struggles and sexual abuse that female slaves faced on plantations as well as their efforts to practice motherhood and protect their children from the horrors of the slave trade. Jacobs’ literary efforts are addressed to white women in the North who do not fully comprehend the evils of slavery. She makes direct appeals to their humanity to expand their knowledge and influence their thoughts about slavery as an institution, holding strong to the credo that the pen is mightier than the sword and is colorful enough to make a difference and change the the stereotypes of the black and white
Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred is categorized as science fiction because of the existence of time travel. However, the novel does not center on the schematics of this type of journey. Instead, the novel deals with the relationships forged between a Los Angeles woman from the 20th century, and slaves from the 19th century. Therefore, the mechanism of time travel allows the author a sort of freedom when writing this "slavery narrative" apart from her counterparts. Butler is able to judge the slavery from the point of view of a truly "free" black woman, as opposed to an enslaved one describing memories.
As female slaves such as Harriet Jacob continually were fighting to protect their self respect, and purity. Harriet Jacob in her narrative, the readers get an understanding of she was trying to rebel against her aggressive master, who sexually harassed her at young age. She wasn’t protected by the law, and the slaveholders did as they pleased and were left unpunished. Jacobs knew that the social group,who were“the white women”, would see her not as a virtuous woman but hypersexual. She states “I wanted to keep myself pure, - and I tried hard to preserve my self-respect, but I was struggling alone in the grasp of the demon slavery.” (Harriet 290)The majority of the white women seemed to criticize her, but failed to understand her conditions and she did not have the free will. She simply did not have that freedom of choice. It was the institution of slavery that failed to recognize her and give her the basic freedoms of individual rights and basic protection. Harriet Jacobs was determined to reveal to the white Americans the sexual exploitations that female slaves constantly fa...