During the Antebellum Period, none of the black people can have any rights and none of the white people will sincerely care about their black slaves. However, this kind of complicated background couldn’t change the kinship tied among Dana and her white ancestor. Even by the time that her white ancestor had tried to rape her, she couldn’t really kill him without remorse. Moreover, the whole storyline of this book depends on this kinship. The author uses these two personages depicted with different races, genders, and even cultures to express herself, to prove herself that the family ties will conquer all the unjust social norms or…
In Lose Your Mother by Saidya Hartman, Hartman gives the reader a unique perspective on the institution of slavery than is often examined. This work begins to question our previous knowledge of the slave trade and forces us to look at the story from a perspective that as a society we may not want to acknowledge. Her work demands a deeper understanding of the institution of slavery be known and no longer allows society to perpetuate the misunderstandings of slavery and Africa that we have been perpetuating since the trade started. Often we are taught slavery from a Western perspective; we discuss how America prospered from the industry and how devastating the institution treated the individuals it captured.…
This brief description of Janie’s grandmother living in a slave house and the book review depict the general influence that slavery had on African Americans during the Harlem Renaissance in the eyes of Zora Neale Hurston. She accurately shows how awfully African American people were treated in these slave houses, especially African American women who were sadly often raped by the owners of the houses like Nanny was in the…
Harriet Jacobs, embodying women’s struggles to overcome a male-dominated society, demonstrates how agency is not limited to well-off white women. Jacobs, the first woman to write a slave narrative, was not even legally recognized as person, let alone as an individual on equal standing with any man, black or white. Although Fern and Jacobs both struggled to navigate complex relationships in a male dominated society, Fern at least enjoyed the luxury of citizenship. Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was extremely influential because it relayed the struggles of African American women struggling in the same society as white women, just in a very unique, often amplified way. Fern saw how women were seen as vessels to serve men’s needs…
According to scholar Bush, many individuals in the White dominated society undermined the “social significance” of Black families since they believed that female slaves became mothers unintentionally and ended up neglecting their children because their primary responsibilities rested in their work as slaves (Bush 18). This “Mammy” stereotype describes mothers as being more loyal to their master’s family as opposed to their own. Jacobs’ inclination to nurture her children ultimately negates this stereotype that prevailed within the American society. To add on, Jacobs’ acts of resistance illustrate the notion of matrofocality as described by scholar Stevenson (177) since she holds the decision-making power of her family. For example, by escaping from the plantation, she implicitly makes the decision that her children will not be plantation slaves.…
The continual reminder that she is “the granddaughter of slaves” looms over her, but it doesn’t upset her, instead she feels that slavery is quite literally a thing of the past, and what matters…
Throughout the course of Sethe’s journey as a slave, she encountered many close calls; one being her crossing the “bloody Ohio river”(31) after giving birth to Denver. The Ohio river is depicted as a barrier that endangered the life of Sethe because many factors such as drowning or freezing to death could’ve possibly killed both Sethe and the newborn Denver. On the other hand, Beloved experienced a journey similar to that of Sethe’s. When asked why she’s called Beloved, she recalls being called Beloved in the “dark place”(75) that was “hot”(75) and had no “room to move in”(75). This so-called dark place is a reference to the memories experienced by Beloved in her resting place.…
Deborah Gray White, author of Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South, courageously plunges into the research and understanding of the slave experience through race and gender. The overall slave experience of the antebellum South is often represented by the male experience. For the first time, White brings forth an understanding of slave life through the female lens. White reasons that the female slave experience differed from the male slave experience due to the assigned gender roles.…
Kate Chopin’s short story, Desiree’s Baby, is set in Louisiana in the mid nineteenth century on two white-owned plantations. The story discovers the psychosomatic bearings of slavery and racial discrimination. The physical abuse and violence that was a part of slavery are present only on the borders of the story which was disguised in Armand Aubigny’s “strict” dealings of his slaves. Armand sees certain things in his lifetime, Desiree, their son, and his slaves, but as ordinary properties, “those that either mirror well or poorly on him.” (Wolff, Cynthia Griffin)…
Sula Peace is a black woman who fights against racism, conservative thinking, and Bottom women in a small town. She, in addition, wants to destroy traditional thoughts and beliefs; such as conservative traditions [marriage, children, and a patriarchal society]: “By showing complementarily of the two women’s identities, Morrison explores the creative possibilities of women’s friendship. She promotes the spectrum by means of which communities’ access human action, suggesting that distinctions between socially acceptable and socially unacceptable practices are arbitrary” (Matthews and Watson 8). In conclusion, Sula Peace’s character is greatly influenced by her mother’s independent behavior.…
In the novel Beloved, by Toni Morrison, one of the main characters, Sethe, is faced with a difficult decision. Should she kill her children or allow them to possibly live a terrible life? Well some might argue that what sethe did was wrong, but there are many reasons to believe that Sethe was right to kill her children. Sethe's decision to kill her children was the right choice because keeping them alive would have lead to possible enslavement, lack of community, and no sense of self.…
This disconnection causes Sethe to alienate herself from the community, thus alienating her daughter Denver as well: Not anybody ran down to say some new white folks with the Look just rode in. The Look every Negro learned to recognize along with his ma’am’s tit. Nobody warned them, and … it wasn’t the exhaustion from a long day’s gorging that dulled them, but some other thing….like meanness….that let them stand aside, or not pay attention, or tell themselves somebody else was probably bearing the news already to the house of Bluestone Road where a pretty little slave girl had recognized a hat, and split the woodshed to kill her children (157) This failure of the community leads to Sethe murdering Beloved (Sethe’s crawling already baby). After she commits infanticide in order to spare her child from the chokehold of slavery, the community rejects Sethe.…
As a former slave and a mother, it is understandable for her to prevent her child to be enslaved because when we look at what she has gone through. On the other hand, thinking about the difference between the child unalienable rights, to live and to be free, made killing the child not just, because, and even though she was doing it out of love, to distinguish which one should prevail over the other should not be up to only Sethe. The baby should have had her say in such decision. With that said, the complexity of such act made it difficult to see it through one lens of ethical…
This essay will be discussing how the motif of sacrifice is used by Toni Morrison throughout her novel Sula (1974), namely the sacrifice of motherhood. Sacrifice is found in different forms in Sula; physically through self-mutilation, murder or suicide and also the emotional sacrifice of love. This sacrifice of love is shown primarily through the mothers in the story, through what they have had to give up to keep their children alive.…