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Sojourner Truth

This research argues that Nell Irvin Painter's biography of Sojourner Truth goes far in accomplishing an interactive approach to dealing with issues of race, class, and gender oppression as they overlapped and converged to affect the life and work of the biographical subject. The method works in part because of the evidence that Truth responded to found experience in psychologically complex and ever-evolving ways. To see how the method unfolds over the course of the text, it will be useful to look at its narrative structure and then discuss the manner in which Painter analyzes the various features of social structure to critique and explicate Truth's life.

Painter develops Truth's biography in three phases, which roughly coincide with the history of slavery policy in the US over the course of the 19th century. The first concentrates on what could be called her socially preconscious experience as a slave born in rural New York and the impact that obtaining her freedom had on her development. It includes details of how her experiences shaped her perceptions of the varieties of human experience and such abstractions as justice, truth, freedom, and slavery. This section of the text takes her life through the Constitutional abolition of the slave trade in the North and her own manumission, as well as the way personal experience affected the emergence of a wider social consciousness (and conscience).

The second part of the narrative, subtitled "A Life," shows the shaping of Truth's psychology by way of the reformist religionism that flowed from the Second Great Awakening and the protoapocalyptic and social-reform strands of thought and action that followed. It was during these young middle years of her life that her awareness of the realities of American social structure of the period grew and that she found her activist voice. As well, she found the name that would become as much social, religious, and political symbol as it was an in...

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Sojourner Truth. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 09:09, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1681854.html