Thesis On Celia A Slave

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.

The purpose of the book is to demonstrate how slavery crippled African American slaves from defending themselves due to oppression, particularly women. The trial of Celia, A Slave opens a gateway where people’s morals and actions were put into question after the death of her master. Themes such as gender oppression, chattel slavery, race, prejudice, revolt are some themes present in Celia,

Her narrative focuses on the domestic issues that faced African-American women, she even states, “Slavery is bad for men, but it is far more terrible for women”. Therefore, gender separated the two narratives, and gave each a distinct view toward slavery. Douglass showed “how a slave became a man” in a physical fight with an overseer and the travel to freedom. Jacobs’s gender determined a different course, and how women were affected. Douglass and Jacob’s lives might seem to have moved in different directions, but it is important not to miss the common will that their narratives proclaim of achieving freedom.

Slavery and the Life of Harriet Jacobs It is well known that slavery was a horrible event in the history of the United States. However, what isn't as well known is the actual severity of slavery. The experiences of slave women presented by Angela Davis and the theories of black women presented by Patricia Hill Collins are evident in the life of Harriet Jacobs and show the severity of slavery for black women. The history of slave women offered by Davis suggests that "compulsory labor overshadowed every other aspect of women's existence" (Davis 5). This is quite apparent through examination of the life of Harriet Jacobs.

The novel’s rendering of the slave holding south is not entirely an accurate interpretation of what it was like though. Beecher over exaggerated and overlooked several facts in novel, especially pertaining to the practice of slave trading. To have her readers empathize more with the slaves, Beecher put the worst stories in and the cruelest practices of the slave trade depicted by run away slaves. Although most of Uncle Tom’s Cabin is very close to the reality of slavery, many aspects of the slave trade were portrayed inaccurately. One of the first miscalculated aspects of the slave trade is the reason for southern states involvement in the interstate slave trade.

A victim is a person who is embittered or tricked by someone else ("Victim - Definition and More from the Free Merriam-Webster Dictionary"). Victims of slavery are induced into slave-like corruption through deception, force or coercion. The enslaved are subjec... ... middle of paper ... ...were obligated to fulfill. The main purpose for Harriet Jacobs writing ILSG is to attack the specific role that slavery has played on African American lifestyles, also how the institutionalization of slavery permits a degrading behavior that has a negative impact on all African Americans. The special effects of slavery are due to the fact that when slaves were eventually freed they were not given any reintegration or help to be accustomed into the mainstream of society.

Throughout the history of the world slavery and discrimination has existed in many societies. Discrimination can be defined as the unjust or prejudicial treatment of different categories of people or things, especially on the grounds of race, age, or sex (Newman, 2015). By 1860, Abraham Lincoln felt compelled to note that nearly one-sixth of the total population of the American land of the free consisted of slaves (Herron, 2015). Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is narrative written by an ex-slave, Harriet Jacobs, under the pseudonym Linda Brent, which reveals the unique brutalities and discriminations inflicted on enslaved women. Jacobs starts her story recounting her childhood years in the house of a slave family.

A moral dilemma in the book is how the white women “chose to support slavery, and to accept, the abuse of black women it produced” (McLaurin, pg. 138). They emphasized in court how Celia struck her master with the stick until he was dead, and burnt him to get rid of him. The courts accepted that Celia was a murderer with or without a motive simply because she was a slave. White women generally went with what their husbands’ said since they made most of the earnings.

CELIA, A SLAVE. A MIRROR TO SLAVERY AND INJUSTICE? A critical overview Celia, a Slave was a factual interpretation of one isolated incident that depicted common slave fear during the antebellum period of the United States. Melton A. McLaurin, the author, used this account of a young slave woman's struggle through the undeserved hardships of rape and injustice to explain to today's naive society a better depiction of what slavery could have been like. The story of Celia illustrates the root of racial problems Americans still face in their society.

While it may have seemed to be detrimental to the blacks only, Jacobs asserts that slavery ruins the lives of many in the immediate environment including the slaves, the slave owners, their wives and their children. This was despite the wives of the slave owners releasing their infuriation on the women slaves (Jacobs, p. 49). To avoid marriage breaks due to the women slaves doubling as sex partners for the slave owners, the white women had no choice but hearken the pleas by Jacobs and join the slave abolitionist