The Housemaid

As a young child, she received cruel and unusual punishment as a consequence for her wrongdoings. Shortly after, she began the process of being tossed back and forth from her mother’s house to her father’s. While her mother was away, working as a housemaid, Oprah was repeatedly molested by male relatives (this lasted from ages 9-13). After several months of acting out, Oprah’s mother sent her back to live with her father in Nashville. At the age of only 14, Oprah found out she was pregnant. She…

both of them as they both had a fulltime job and a business on side. Most of our family used to live at least 4 to 5 hours away. It went for like that for couple of days then someone suggested that we should a house maid. Though, we never had a housemaid before but it was not out of the norm as most of our friends and neighbors had maids. That being said, my dad and uncle asked friends and neighbors to them a maid. We never thought finding a maid was really hard too as it took five interviews…

Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, the United States developed several laws designed to guarantee slave subordination and white supremacy through fear, limitation, and degradation. White Americans did not want to chance that slaves would become educated or have the opportunity to unite and initiate a revolt, as the American revolutionaries had just demonstrated against their own British master with success. Slave codes legally degraded slaves and demonstrated white superiority on…

the way her father acts is wrong. There are contradictions between his behavior and actions. He claims to love her mother but ruins her self-esteem and beats her for “defiance”. He claimed to love her aunt but he placed her in the role of bitter housemaid. He even claimed to love Vera on rare occasions but painted her as an evil witch. Everything her father touched he destroyed throughout the formative years of her life he slowly does…

Arthur Miller wrote an imaginatively creative interpretation of the famous Salem Witch Trials in his 1953 fictional play The Crucible. Though the actual details of these true events are unknown, Miller brings to life some of the characters found in historic documents from the 1692 hearings. He cleverly unfolds an intriguing tale about the Salem witch hunt which occurred during an era when America was partially unsettled and primitive. This harsh setting produced a fear that overshadowed many…

Appropriations of successful texts often make critical changes to the original novel for a variation of intentions. These changes often reflect the cultural values of the time period and upon analysis the similarities and differences between the cultures are revealed. The film Mary Reilly (1996) is a recent appropriation of the 1886 classic novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. Stephen Frears, director of Mary Reilly, has cinematically and creatively chosen…

In both of the films, I Walked with a Zombie from 1943 and George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead from 1968, race and Vodou play a large factor in creating the elements that compose the zombies of the stories. I Walked with a Zombie addressed the complications of white power by representing slaves working in the sugar industry as nothing more than mindless zombies, being manipulated by the white race to conform to their will. Night of the Living Dead also incorporated a wide range of racially…

The developmental stage of oneself as a person is a very critical part of their lives. It is a period in which every second of every day may have a lasting impact on one’s future beliefs, morals, habits, and work ethic. An adolescent’s world is quite vast, filled with time spent at schools, hobbies, extracurricular, and social outings that can mold a teenager into a fully developed societal adult. But many people fail to recognize that most of a child’s physical and mental attributes come not…

that causes it. In Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, several characters are put through a lot of bad experiences. Starting off with a man called Arthur Shelby which faces the possibility of losing everything he has. His wife ,Emily Shelby, also has a housemaid called Eliza. Mr. Shelby being a farmer in Kentucky at the time meant he owned several slaves. Some of them being Uncle Tom, a…

to construct the argument of using gender as a bridging device. To hone in on the sympathy and understanding of the jury. Instead of Alice being consumed by images of racial stereotypes she was a victim of the gender rolls of her class. She was a housemaid with a working class family and Leonard was a son of a wealthy family. His social dominance over Alice surely countered the argument that he age was used as a tool to manipulate…