Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
This is an excerpt from the paper...
Linda Brent, in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, sheds light on the gender and racial discourses of her time. Her book is the story of how she, as a slave and later as a free woman, resists and redefines conventional notions of womanhood, motherhood, female sexuality, and family, all in the context of her struggle against the inhumanity of her own and her family's slavery. Her resistance to oppression is all the more remarkable because as a black woman she is at the very bottom of the social ladder in the eyes of the whites who define that ladder. At the same time, her account presents a realistic portrait of what could be done in the name of resistance by a female slave. She is an intelligent woman who knows when she can resist and when it is better for her and her loved ones to appear to appear to be in agreement with the system. This realistic quality keeps her story from romanticization and leads to the reader's deeper identification with her as a real woman and not a mythical figure of superwoman qualities. Brent gives the reader the sense that she is operating not so much from a position of feminist theory but from an intuitive, spiritual center which informs her choices and actions and which allows her to accept and understand her own shortcomings as a woman and as a human being. Her story is consciously aimed at other women, calling on them to rise up together in strength of numbers and female dedication to right the wrongs of slavery and abolish that horrif
. . .
as a result are less than fully human. For example, riding on a train in the north as a free woman for the first time, Brent discovers that "They don't allow colored people to go in first-class cars. . . . It made me sad to find how the north aped the customs of slavery" (480-481). Clearly, a black person who is relegated to second-class citizenship will not exercise much political power, especially if that person is female. It is telling that black men won the right to vote long before black women, or any women. Brent surely stands out as a heroine in American history for her refusal to allow racial and gender bigotry to triumph in her life.
Work Cited
Brent, Linda. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Boston: N.P., 1861.
The Dred Scott decision by the Supreme Court in 1857 was a landmark which in part led to the Civil War. There is no knowing whether a decision upholding Scott's claim of citizenship and freedom would have prevented that War. It probably would not have, but the decision as it occurred signaled that slavery was indeed the law of the land and that the highest legal body in that land had now so decreed. No slave could become a free citizen simply by leaving slave territory, even if he were taken there
. . .
Some common words found in the essay are:
Slave Girl, Constitution United, Civil War, Dred Scott, Court Court, Supreme Court, dred scott, political power, blacks political power, Scott Sandford, Boston NP, blacks political, Incidents Life, Life Slave, incidents life slave, slave free, civil war, constitution united, court decides, blacks court, life slave girl, court saying, white people,
Approximate Word count = 1650
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
More Essays on Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
|
Customer Service
to Over
32,000 Professionally Written Papers!!!
