AADS/ENGL 3328.01
I’d like to build on my last post by looking at the same area of Incidents and sticking with the idea of family, but this time analyzing a different textual object. I found this section of the text to be incredibly rich for analysis. After talking about Benjamin, Linda then goes on to talk about…
In Chapter I, “Childhood,” the author is giving a description of her “early formative years,” and through this, provides a lot of information regarding her family’s experience with slavery (Jacobs, p. 7). Linda first introduces her grandmother’s youngest son, Benjamin, stating that, “There become so little distinction in our ages that he seemed extra like…
In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs describes the cruelty she is shown at the hands of her mistress, Mrs. Flint. In Chapter VI “The Jealous Mistress,” however, the empathy that Jacobs shows towards Mrs. Flint depicts Flint as not just an enforcer of the institution of slavery, but rather a…
In Chapter I, Childhood, the author begins to introduce her family dynamic. She speaks of her grandmother’s youngest son, Benjamin, describing him, and his experience being sold, as such: “He become a brilliant, good-looking lad, almost white: for he inherited the complexion my grandmother had derived from Anglo-Saxon ancestors. Though handiest then years vintage, seven…
In chapter 4 of “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” Harriet Jacobs recounts the first time she was punished by her mistress, Mrs. Flint. She notes that unlike many other forms of discipline on the plantation, hers was not corporeal, but rather “petty” and “tyrannical.” Jacobs had gotten new shoes, courtesy of her…
Throughout Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe uses the examples of supposedly kind and good-natured white men to show that structural, rather than solely individual, change is needed to dismantle the institution of slavery. Furthermore, Stowe uses these characters to show how religion, when misinterpreted and treated as a series of laws can contribute to…
Throughout the novel, Stowe presents varying accounts of slaves – some had “kind” masters, some had their children stolen from them, some had their families separated, and some incurred physical abuse – but no experience is more profound than that of Prue’s. Towards the end of chapter XVIII, Prue is introduced as a gruff, scowling,…
In Chapter XVII of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe uses the character George Harris as a Christ-like figure that has come to bring freedom to those he loves, as well as lay the groundwork for black freedom in America. George, Eliza, Harry, and the Quakers had evaded Tom Loker and his band of slave catchers, only…
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