Hannah Tay Yee Ern Mrs. McNeill 3A 5 November 2014 Psychological Impacts of Slavery As Harriet Ann Jacobs (1813-1897), an African-American writer who escaped from slavery, once said: “When they told me my new-born babe was a girl, my heart was heavier than it had ever been before. Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women.” Indeed, slavery was an obstacle to emancipation. It left both physical and emotional scars on those who were enslaved. They were shackled to the past - the unforgettable past. In the historical fiction novel Beloved, written by Toni Morrison, the lives of female and male slaves were explicitly described.
In this commentary, I propose to show that, in her novel Beloved, Morrison makes the reader become aware of the psychological damage done to the African American people by the brutal inhumanity that constituted American slavery. The
African-Americans have lacked a written cultural history because of the trauma of the peculiar institution. Their his/herstory (her story) is missing accurate narratives from crucial parts such as the middle passage, the era of institution of slavery, as well as the Jim Crow laws of the Reconstruction years. The trauma many black suffered because of these periods have been unspeakable until recently. Tony Morrison in her 1986 noble prize winning book, Beloved, creates a neo-slave narrative to confront these issues. Morrison brings emotional healing to blacks by speaking what was formally unspeakable by going into the psyche of the African American consciousness and reveals historical trauma.
The practice of slavery is one of the most significant events in the US history. It not only caused a civil war between the north and the south that almost separated the whole nation, but also many African Americans suffered from the slavery. Referring slavery as the “original sin” of the United States, Morrison indicates the profound impacts of slavery to both antebellum and postbellum society in the US. In her novel Beloved, she suggests the loss of identity, separation of family, and physical and mental abuse that are brought up by the slavery and reminds people not to forget the history. The slavery causes a destruction and confusion of the identities of the African Americans.
“Uncle Tom´s Cabin” is a profound novel in American literature and history because it brought forward a new ideology with regard to the national view on slavery, and change the cruel system that treated black people as property. This epic making narrative was seen as an inspiration for humankind because it set the grounds for the American Civil. Its author, Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896), published the text in March 1852 as a response to the “Fugitive Slave Act” that had been passed two years earlier, and in which it was considered a criminal act to help or aid any escaping slave; this brought great outrage among the citizens and transformed the novel into the most prolific anti-slavery text in American history. The foregrounding for the novel´s narrative framework is constructed with the help
I’m referring to the experience of slavery. In our history class and through the readings in our English class we have learned that African Americans were once forcefully brought here as slaves. As property, and animals that were here to work for whites. For centuries, African Americans experienced the traumatic events that many slaves had to survive, which consisted of abuse, violence, and suffering. Toni Morrison described it as the thought “That anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind.
And so American racial trauma became submerged. Morrison ' s Beloved is a revelation of this trauma portrayed by apocalyptic events, such as infanticide. ‘Beloved’ is the wrenching story of a woman who murders her children rather than allow them to live as slaves. It employs the dream-like techniques of magic realism in depicting a mysterious figure 'Beloved, ' who returns to live with her mother who had slit her throat. The novel is again a powerful assertion of the Black Woman 's
Moreover, the protagonist’s strength is depicted through her attitude to her past. As a former slave, she experienced the atrocities inflicted upon African Americans. According to Beaulieu, Sethe’s willingness to fight with her past can also be considered as one of her male feature. The protagonist believes that “the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay” (Beloved, 1988: 42). By means of that, she wants to protect her children from the painful memories of slavery.
The theme of male oppression over the women in the novel reaches its brutal climax during Cholly's rape of his own daughter Pecola. This scene, which details the ultimate form of violence and oppression against women is narrated completely through Cholly's perspective during the rape scene demonstrates the silencing effect of male oppression over women. The Bluest Eye shares concerns with the two most powerful social forces in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s, the black power movement and the feminist movement. The feminist movement worked for changes in women's economic opportunities and social roles in general. The early movement had three main goals.
These slave narratives gave the most powerful accounts that contradicted the flattery statements and claims given by slave owners in concern to slavery. These narratives gave accounts of the abuse done to slaves both physically, sexually and emotionally, the fear and brutality of floggings, the horrid conditions they were kept in, the fear of separation from their families. Twelve Years A Slave, written by Solomon Northup is a