Dealing with mental illness is hard, but even harder when you are the one caring for a loved one with a mental illness, making you feel as though you have been condemned to a lifetime of servitude. Bebe Moore Campbell usage of slavery allusions throughout the novel 72 Hour Hold explains just how taking care of a family member with a mental illness can feel like being enslaved to their illness. Slavery allusions are used throughout the novel to describe a mother’s, Keri, struggle of taking care of her bipolar daughter, Trina, while also insinuating that she feels as if her daughter’s illness enslaved her to her own daughter. With the usage of slavery allusions author Bebe Moore Campbell creates a new reality, one in which mental illness does …show more content…
Which is what would also occur with family member dealing with someone who has a mental illness. Thus describing how someone may feel like a slave to that person’s illness and how when a recurrence would appear it felt as though they are being sold to auctioneers. When Keri goes to pick up Trina from the 72 hour hold she states, “Something bad was going to happen. The signs were all there: massa was on his deathbed; mistress was crying. Auctioneers and lawyers were assembled on the veranda. I could feel the overseer’s eyes assessing the value of my flesh, her flesh. This wasn’t my first plantation. Deep South, that’s where I was heading” (Campbell 79). In this case, Keri uses how a slave would observe their surroundings while being auctioned. But also uses the viewpoint of a slave who has been sold multiple times and realize that this is not a favorable position to be in. Also referring to the Deep South which would be the worse environment for them considering their current position. As a result, this allusion describes how many family members taking responsibility for someone may feel as their person goes down a dark path once again. While also describing how they have begun to notice when that somebody is going to go down that path and would realize that what is going on is not taking them anywhere wonderful. In conclusion, this allusion helps to create a sort of imagery as to how a caretaker may feel when they experience multiple recurrences with their person’s mental
An example of a real life situation that constitutes this idea is one mother’s recount of her son’s illness, “Her son would no longer come out of his trailer home to get food to make a meal. So, she became a delivery service. She brought food to the trailer, left it outside and hoped her son would open the door and take the food”(“Impact of Mental Illness on Families”). In this example, a mother describes when the situation with her son became so severe that he would no longer leave his house even for necessities. To the point of his mother becoming his so called “slave” and delivering groceries to his house. Even though he would not acknowledge her due to the amount of fear his illness created. Through this instance in which a mother becomes a delivery service to her son’s illness shows this slave like impression on
Slavery is a system under which people are treated as property to be bought and sold, and are forced to work. Slavery was cruelty at its best. Slavery is described as long work days, a lack of respect for a human being, and the inability for a man or a woman to have gainful employment. The slaves were victimized the most for obvious reasons. Next on the list would be the families of both the slave and slave owners. At the bottom of the list would be the slave owners. Slavery does in fact victimize slaves, slave owner and their families by repeating the same cycle every generation.
To understand the desperation of wanting to obtain freedom at any cost, it is necessary to take a look into what the conditions and lives were like of slaves. It is no secret that African-American slaves received cruel and inhumane treatment. Although she wrote of the horrific afflictions experienced by slaves, Linda Brent said, “No pen can give adequate description of the all-pervading corruption produced by slavery." The life of a slave was never a satisfactory one, but it all depended on the plantation that one lived on and the mast...
Slaves are aware of their positions in society and have the choice to comply with their masters’ demands in order to gain a greater benefit to themselves often in the form of physical protection from abuse. Within the plantation hierarchy, the house slave was considered higher up than field slaves due to their close proximity to the master (Hall 566). The house slave’s position in the plantation microcosm evoked not only favor from the master, but jealousy from the field slaves. The fair-skinned, house slave woman and her master’s control over her mental psyche is a defining factor of her identity in relation to the other slaves on the plantation. Linda Brent in Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is an excellent model of the mental bondage endured by light-skinned house slave women because she makes a conscious choice to continue her mental bondage in order to gain physical freedoms. Although many house slaves, like Linda, were granted physical freedoms, they experienced an unfathomable level of mental bondage that defined their character and prompted them to pick their own place in society.
Slavery consisted of numerous inhumane horrors completed to make its victims feel desolated and helpless. Many of these horrors of slavery are conveyed in the “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass”. The entire prospect of the duration of the story is to plan an escape from the excruciating conditions awaiting Douglass as a slave. When his escape is finally executed, unpredictable emotions and thoughts overwhelm him. Within the conclusion of his narrative (shown in the given passage), Frederick Douglass uses figurative language, diction, and syntax to portray such states of mind he felt after escaping slavery: relief, loneliness, and paranoia.
Valerie Martin’s Novel Property is an engrossing story of the wife of a slave owner and a slave, whom a mistress of the slave owner, during the late 18th century in New Orleans. Martin guides you through both, Manon Guadet and her servant Sarah’s lives, as Ms. Gaudet unhappily lives married on a plantation and Sarah unhappily lives on the plantation. Ms. Gaudet’s misserableness is derived from the misfortune of being married to a man that she despises and does not love. Sarah, the slave, is solely unhappy due to the fact that she is a slave, and has unwillingly conceived to children by Ms. Gaudiest husband, which rightfully makes Sarah a mistress. Throughout the book, Martin captivates the reader and enables you to place yourself in the characters shoes and it is almost as you can relate to how the characters are feeling.
In the article, “The Cause of Her Grief”, Anne Warren tells us a story of a slave woman ordered to be raped and forced to reproduce. Warren first begins telling the slave woman story by taking us back and recollecting the slave woman’s voyage from her home land to the ownership of Mr. Maverick. She used vivid language during this passage to help the reader imagine what type of dissolute conditions she traveled in to end up being a rape victim. For example in the section where Warren attempts to describe the condition of her travel. She wrote “When speaking of the origins of captured slaves, we are often reduced to generalities”. (Warren 1039) In that moment she addresses the fact that as readers we often over simplify the idea of slavery and what it was like, we could only imagine. The author uses the words “captured slave” to set the wretched and forced precedent for the remainder of the reading. At this moment she is requiring that you imagine being captured, held upon your rightful will of freedom. This is important to the slave experience; they did not have a choice just as this woman had no choice. She goes on to address the conditions of the vessel on which the salve woman traveled. She wrote “crammed into the holds of wooden ships, trapped in excrement, vomit and sweat” (Warren 1040). This was yet another demand from the author for the reader to place themselves in the feet of the slaves. It is also another key element in understanding not only slavery but also John Maverick’s slave woman. She travelled weeks, sometimes months to make arrive at the given destination. Once the slave woman arrived to land it was time for her to be sold. Yet again we are now asked by the author to paint a more vivid picture of the slavery exp...
Many plantation owners were men that wanted their plantation ran in a particular manner. They strove to have control over all aspects of their slaves’ lives. Stephanie Camp said, “Slave holders strove to create controlled and controlling landscapes that would determine the uses to which enslaved people put their bodies.” Mary Reynolds was not a house slave, but her master’s daughter had a sisterly love towards her, which made the master uncomfortable. After he sold Mary he had to buy her back for the health of his daughter. The two girls grew apart after the daughter had white siblings of her own. Mary wa...
In her essay, “Loopholes of Resistance,” Michelle Burnham argues that “Aunt Marthy’s garret does not offer a retreat from the oppressive conditions of slavery – as, one might argue, the communal life in Aunt Marthy’s house does – so much as it enacts a repetition of them…[Thus] Harriet Jacobs escapes reigning discourses in structures only in the very process of affirming them” (289). In order to support this, one must first agree that Aunt Marthy’s house provides a retreat from slavery. I do not. Burnham seems to view the life inside Aunt Marthy’s house as one outside of and apart from slavery where family structure can exist, the mind can find some rest, comfort can be given, and a sense of peace and humanity can be achieved. In contrast, Burnham views the garret as a physical embodiment of the horrors of slavery, a place where family can only dream about being together, the mind is subjected to psychological warfare, comfort is non-existent, and only the fear and apprehension of inhumanity can be found. It is true that Aunt Marthy’s house paints and entirely different, much less severe, picture of slavery than that of the garret, but still, it is a picture of slavery differing only in that it temporarily masks the harsh realities of slavery whereas the garret openly portrays them. The garret’s close proximity to the house is symbolic of the ever-lurking presence of slavery and its power to break down and destroy families and lives until there is nothing left. Throughout her novel, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs presents these and several other structures that suggest a possible retreat from slavery, may appear from the outside to provide such a retreat, but ideally never can. Among these structures are religion, literacy, family, self, and freedom.
After she was deemed too old to be useful, she was left alone in a desolate and remote cabin, as Douglass’s phrases it, “turning her out to die!”(Douglass 29). Following this exclamation, he describes her wrenched condition; she was alone, without the children and grandchildren she cared so deeply for, too old to care for herself and with no one there to care for her. He believes she must have died; he imagines her death, her suffering, her loneliness, and misery (Douglass 29). Douglass ends his depiction of his grandmother’s fate by remarking that if she lives, “she lives to suffer” (Douglass 29). This specific example, enriched by the potent imagery, makes the myth, that slave owners tended to their slaves when they were no longer useful, shatter in his readers
2. Sex Trafficking: Involving commercial acts induced by force, fraud or coercion, or in which the person performing the act is under age 18. Victims can be found working in massage parlors, on the streets, in brothels, strip clubs, and escort services. (Williams, 2013)
...tive on the psychological damages of slavery. White believes “pairing the psychological with the enslaved woman’s means of survival has helped us analyze many patterns that emerged after slavery (10).”
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.
Emotional discomfort can sometimes be perceived as mental instability. A person may look, act, or feel insane, when in truth they are just very uncomfortable in their own skin. The narrator has a genuinely difficult decision to make which far outside his comfort zone. He is choosing between a woman who has been like a mother to him and much needed job that he feels he may enjoy. This choice is tearing him apart from the inside out. From the ringing noises that interrupt his every thought to the skin he is scraping off. The author uses diction, syntax, and extended metaphors to express the complete and utter discomfort of the narrator, both physically and emotionally.
The word “slavery” brings back horrific memories of human beings. Bought and sold as property, and dehumanized with the risk and implementation of violence, at times nearly inhumane. The majority of people in the United States assumes and assures that slavery was eliminated during the nineteenth century with the Emancipation Proclamation. Unfortunately, this is far from the truth; rather, slavery and the global slave trade continue to thrive till this day. In fact, it is likely that more individuals are becoming victims of human trafficking across borders against their will compared to the vast number of slaves that we know in earlier times. Slavery is no longer about legal ownership asserted, but instead legal ownership avoided, the thought provoking idea that with old slavery, slaves were maintained, compared to modern day slavery in which slaves are nearly disposable, under the same institutionalized systems in which violence and economic control over the disadvantaged is the common way of life. Modern day slavery is insidious to the public but still detrimental if not more than old American slavery.