Comparing History for Hawthorne and Brent

Belle is identified as a courageous who about the 230 slaves who were killed for insurance money. John Davinier and Belle work together to fight against racial injustice. These two character fight against the political view and discrimination to educate and empower the British society on slavery. Belle uses herself as an example to question Lord Mansfield authority, and she says, “You’ll not abandon my people as I am one of them as well. Unless you never truly loved me?” (Jones).

Slavery Injustice Male versus Female Harriet Jacobs author of “Incidents of a Slave Girl” depicted the life of a women enslaved to white planation owners between the years 1819-1842. Harriet Jacobs escaped for enslavement and went on to become a pivotal figure for the African American culture with tales of cruelty from her owners and her need for freedom. Jacobs penned her story to persuade white people in the North to fight against the maltreatment of African Americans in the South. Jacobs highlighted for abolitionist and non-abolitionist alike the abuse slaves felt for many years and the obstacles they went through to secure their freedom. Harriet Jacobs asserted, “Slavery is bad for men, but it is far more terrible for women.” In contrast to Jacobs, slavery for women did not exceed or fall below that of men.

White women are idealized as pure, angelic, and chaste while black woman are idealized as exotic and contained an uncontrollable, savage sexuality. Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of A Slave Girl, brought the sexual oppression of captive black women into the public and political arena. Harriet Jacobs takes a great risk writing her trials as a house servant in the south and a fugitive in the north. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl gives a true account of the brutality slavery held for women. A perspective that was relatively secretive during Jacobs’ time.

In’ Beloved’ Morrison shows the physical and psychological effects slavery had on African American women. Morrison takes a true life event from African American history to remind people of the horrors and terrors of slavery. Beloved was inspired by the true story of Margaret Garner, a slave. On Jan. 28, 1856, Garner who was facing recapture killed her two-year old daughter and attempted to kill her other two children in order to protect her children from slavery. The theme of mother hood is present throughout the novel.

Harriet went to great lengths to protect her fellow slaves. Like every other slave, obviously, she too hated slavery. But I think there was more to slavery than just hate, for Harriet. In one case, she put her life on the line to protect a slave named Jim from getting beaten. She refused to move when a white supervisor asked her to help him tie up Jim for a whipping.

Altogether, this forces her audience to feel uncomfortable and guilty about learning the corruption slavery imposes on families. Just like Wheatley needed to familiarize herself with her audience, Harper successfully draws attention to her audience by emphasizing the persona of a mother. This is seen when she uses anaphora to dramatize the following quatrains, “[h]e is not hers, although she bore/ For him a mother’s pains;/ He is not hers, although her blood/ Is coursing through his veins!/ He is not hers, for cruel hands “(14-24). Harper is educating her audience by informing them that even though a slave mother gives birth to her child, she is not the caregiver of her child. In fact, when she repeats “he is not hers”, Harper uses a didactic tone to really condemn the fact that a slave mother is being robbed the natural right to raise her own child.

It gave people permission to question the things that society was making them believe, and gave them the determination and the motivation to join abolitionist movements to put an end to the injustices of slavery. Stowe used Uncle Tom’s Cabin to appeal to her women readers especially, emphasizing the way that slavery attacked family life and ruined family values. It wasn’t just a market that affected slave owners, either, but also the slaves. Stowe showed how slavery was harmful to everyone and everything that it came into contact with, and forced her readers to see slavery through a new set of eyes. Uncle Tom’s Cabin successfully shows how Stowe believed slavery eradicated domestic stability, and set itself up to be an important novel that helped bring the importance of the abolitionist movement to the forefront of the anti-slavery movement.

Educating the North of the horrors of slavery through the use of literature was one strategy that led to the questioning, and ultimately, the abolition of slavery. Therefore, Harriet Jacobs’s narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is very effective in using various tactics in order to get women in the North to pay attention and question the horrifying conditions in the South. By acknowledging that not all slaveholders were inhumane, explaining the horrific abuse and punishments slaves endured, and comparing the manner in which whites and slaves spent their holidays, Jacobs’s narrative serves its purpose of arousing Northern women to take notice of the appalling conditions two million Southern slaves continued to endure. If Jacobs had only told stories of “the evil slaveholders”, she would have portrayed that all whites were vile people. As a result, white women in the North would have looked right past such a book, and thus not bothered to pick it up and read it.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a deeply symbolic narrative depicting the lives of a group of black slaves in southern America and the slave owners and slave hunters that followed them through their lives. Author Harriet Beecher Stowe, a white woman, uses her striking narrative to raise philosophical and moral questions about the implications of the institution of slavery in mid-19th century America. Her novel touches on the limits of the human spirit and the common human connection that brings together all people, whites, blacks, men and women alike. Her work was designed and intended to shock and horrify readers with its blatant and vivid descriptions of the atrocities that blacks endured during this both, both free and enslaved alike. Her work was written after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which made aiding any fugitive slave a federal crime.

It mostly concentrates on the emotional viewpoints on it and what it did to shape who she is. When writing her story, Jacobs had a clear motive. Her motive was one of a political taking. She writes through her experiences and sufferings to make it clear to people, mainly the Northerners, and more specifically white women in the North, how slavery really is. She does not want sympathy, however, she does want "to arouse the women in the North to a realizing sense of the condition of two millions of women of the South, still in bondage" (460).