Both Southern white women and female slaves were disadvantaged by the patriarchy present in America, and were considered objects rather than people. These similarities, however, end when the institution of slavery is considered. Slavery during the Antebellum affected both white and black women negatively, but the institution damaged a black women exponentially more than it damaged a white woman. Slave labor changed the way that the Southern household was run, and Southern white women became even more inferior to their husbands because of it. For black women, however, the institution of slavery affected their psychological states, their marriages, and their family life.
Unlike describing the slaves as helpless, mindless livestock, he portrays the slaveholders as predators, usually lions. One example is when his master died, so all of his property had to be collected and divided between his children. Douglass became the property his late master’s daughter, Lucretia, and she sent him back to Baltimore; with a sigh of relief, he exclaims, “I escaped a fate worse than lion’s jaws” (41). The lion’s jaw does not directly represent Lucretia, but a slave plantation as a whole, which Douglass had never before labored on. He mentions slavery as a whole again as being a dangerous place of animals when he escapes north; he notes, “I felt like one who had escaped a den of hungry lions” (92).
You have probably thought that slavery was bad but you have no idea how bad it actually was. In Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, a Autobiography by Frederick Douglass, his purpose of the story was to expose the real darkness of a slavery. Douglass was a slave before and he has gone through a lot of pain during those times. Douglass’ position on slavery was that slavery was terrible for slaves & that it corrupts the slave owners because the slave owners dehumanized other slaves, the slaves were treated inhumanely and were broken mentally. People believe that slavery is good for the slave owners and for the slaves, on the other hand Frederick Douglass believes that slavery corrupts the slave owners.
From this, derives a bond with the reader that pushes their understanding of the evil nature of slavery that society deemed appropriate therefore enhancing their understanding of history. While only glossed over in most classroom settings of the twenty-first century, students often neglect the sad but true reality that the backbone of slavery, was the dehumanization of an entire race of people. To create a group of individuals known for their extreme oppression derived from slavery, required plantation owner’s of the South to constantly embedded certain values into the lives of their slaves. To talk back means to be whipped. To fail to do work to a respectable level means to be sold to another plantation and ripped away from one’s family.
By using a simple yet a formal English language, Harper manages to convey the reality of how slaves were treated brutally and tortured continuously on a daily basis and how she hopes that slavery would vanish and never return. However, we can perceive from the beginning of the poem what the theme is about. Prior to the Civil War which begun in 1861, there were almost four million black slaves located in America. Slaves would work for free in terrible living situations; they were put together in one place to sleep, usually in wooden shacks. They were given only two sets of clothing to wear for an entire year.
Animals who were enslaved did not get water to hydrate nor did they get food to eat. When working twelve to fourteen hours a day in scorching hot weather, animals need food and drink to survive, but the slave owners thought otherwise. Slave owners thought that the job, the reason animals were brought to this world, was to work all day. Slavery of animals is depicted in many books from history, but one of the greatest and most famous novels is Animal Farm. In George Orwell’s 1945 novel Animal Farm, the various types of slavery portrayed are reflections of the types of slavery that existed in English society at that time.
Frederick Douglass wrote his narrative as a freeman, therefore, he is able to reflect on his life as a slave and decode the cryptic artifice of his former slave owners. Douglass lived a harsh life in the south before he made his valiant escape to the north, in order to evade further physical and mental torture. Therefore, Douglass is able to understand what it is like to be an invisible entity with a lack of identity, on physical earth. Metaphors are like string that Douglass uses to weave together a cohesive argument to support the eradication of slavery. As Douglass reminisces on his life he states that he “was made to drink the bitterest dregs of slavery...” (Douglass) Slavery, in this instance, is taken out of its literal context and liquefied in order to emphasize that it was hard for Douglass to swallow and digest the painful sorrow that it caused thousands of African Americans.
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.
Then, when people claimed that they stayed in Europe to send money back to their mothers, Sissie goes on to bemoan the hypocrisy of the situation. If the african’s hadn’t had to “[wake] up to forced labour and thinly veiled slavery on colonial plantations” and other actions of the colonizers which put their nation into such poverty, then their mothers wouldn’t so desperately need money (Aidoo, 123). This is a perfect example of the claim Hamilton makes that “a common experience throughout the age of diaspora has been the persistence of oppression, radicalization, prejudice and discrimination, political disenfranchisement, and hostile social environments” (Hamilton, 7). Sissie then goes on
Abina is a young woman who grew up on the Gold Coast of Africa. Abina’s life starts off when she is born into Asante and is taken into the colonies with several other children as children workers. History makes it out to believe that during this time, even though slavery had been outlawed by the British, younger girls like Abina became the majority of the slave workers simply because they were less likely to run away. In the main characters time as a slave, she is sold to work for a man names Quamina Eddoo. While working as Eddoo’s slave under harsh conditions, Adina runs away to another town where she thinks she can be free.