Beloved by Toni Morrison

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs strongly speaks to its readers by describing the brutalities of slavery and the way slave owners can destroy peaceful lives. After reading and rereading the story have noticed certain things regarding how Jacobs tries to educate her readers and her intended audience which is the women of the North. As if we do not know enough about how terrible slavery is, this story gives detailed examples of the lives of slaves and provokes an incredible amount of emotions. She uses several tactics in her writing to reach her desired audience and does so very well.

After reading Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, I could not help but feel shocked and taken aback by the detailed picture of life she painted for slaves at the time in American history. The grotesque and twisted nature of life during the era of slavery in America is an opposite world from the politically correct world of 2016. Morrison did not hold back about the harsh realities of slavery. Based on a true story, Toni Morrison wrote Beloved about the life of Sethe, a slave and her family. Toni Morrison left no stone unturned when describing the impact slavery on had the life of slaves. She dove deeper than the surface level of simply elaborating on how terrible it is to be “owned” and forced to do manual labor. Morrison describes in detail, the horrors and profoundly negative impacts slavery had on family bonds, humanity of all people involved and the slaves sense of self even after they acquired their freedom.

Since the publication of the first slave narratives as early as 1740, black authors accounting their experiences as former slaves have used a variety of tactics to best reach audiences with whom it was thought they had little in common with beyond basic humanity, including testimonials, documentation, and use of the popular literary techniques of the era. As the tradition of the slave narrative grew alongside the abolitionist movement, these narratives became increasingly political, as authors hoped to not only share their stories of subjugated, but motivate those in power to action against the institution oppressing them. Two of the most significant

Slavery is one of the darkest parts of American History. Slave narratives are personal accounts written by former slaves about their experiences during slavery as well as their struggles to obtain freedom. The slave narratives offer chronological events and individual experiences. This is important because it gives us writers perspective on slavery. Slaves, like Frederick Douglass and Jacobs, wrote narratives using ethos, pathos, and logos in their rhetoric to persuade their readers. In comparing both authors, Frederick Douglass uses pathos the most effectively.

Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs narratives are both very similar and yet are very different as they give different points of reference from the hardships African Americans faced during the slave era. Both of Douglass and Jacobs emphasize the need to keep family together and how far someone they knew would go to attain freedom or buy back freedom and how it really never happened. It was emphasized by slave owners to separate families at young ages which is known to be cruel and serves a purpose in the maturation of a slave. Although they both agree that slavery dehumanized slaves and depict gory images, these narratives come from two different perspectives; Jacobs-a female slave who had a happy sheltered child hood which lead to sexual and mental abuse, and Frederick- a male who knowledge was with held from and who was tainted with gory mental images at a very young age of slaves being beat right before him.

Throughout the eighteenth century, many fugitive slaves wrote narratives to express their experience as a slave. Fredrick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglass, an American Slave and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl are two famous examples in which the writers demonstrate their perspective as slaves and dangerous, agonizing life. Nevertheless, there are also many dissimilarities between these narratives, including gender based treatments, main character’s first steps towards freedom, and main character’s personality.

Through literary techniques, authors create stories that are appealing and build on the understanding of their audience, providing them with the tools necessary to bring change within society. This is exhibited in Jacob and Douglass’s narratives as they depict the human relationships between races through their description of the dehumanizing body of slavery. In the novel, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas, set from early to middle 1800s in southern states, Frederick Douglas highlights the brutal aspects of slavery as he transitions into adulthood and seeks to obtain freedom, something that serves as a source of inspiration for former slaves. Similarly in the slave narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs depicts Linda’s journey to freeing herself from the powerful grasp of slavery while trying to save her relationships with others at the same time. Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs share their stories in order to present white audiences with the horrors of slavery and serve as agents for change within society.

Through the abolition movement, slaves, both men and women, were making attempts to escape from the slavery. Though many could not make it to see their freedom, there were few who did. These men and women came forward to write about their stories. Although, many if not all slave autobiographies focused on the desire to gain their independence and not be owned by white men, slave-experience differed among the men and women. For example, the struggles encountered, the mindset, and the views on topics differed between sexes. The self-written autobiographies of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs’ showcase the thoughts of men and women on these topics, allowing for a comparison

The book The Classic Slave Narratives is a collection of narratives that includes the historical enslavement experiences in the lives of the former slaves Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, and Olaudah Equiano. They all find ways to advocate for themselves to protect them from some of the horrors of slavery, such as sexual abuse, verbal abuse, imprisonment, beatings, torturing, killings and the nonexistence of civil rights as Americans or rights as human beings. Also, their keen wit and intelligence leads them to their freedom from slavery, and their fight for freedom and justice for all oppressed people.

During the final years of legal slave ownership in the United States, the slave narrative became a popular way for literate enslaved people to express their anti-slavery stance through their own testimony. Two of the most influential writers on the slave narrative topic were the autobiographical authors Fredrick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs. Since Douglas and Jacobs were both born in a similar time period, there are many similarities found in their works. Douglass’s Narrative of the life of Fredrick Douglass, an American Slave is closely comparable to Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl when analyzing how they represented their enslavement in their autobiographies. The two authors have similar ideas when portraying their struggles with forced ignorance. Their writing also contains parallels with the corrupting power of slavery for the slave owners, as well as the parallels in pointing out the hypocrisies of using the bible to defend slavery. These similarities can be explained in part due to Douglass and Jacobs following the same basic slave narrative outline to maintain the shared goal of abolishing slavery in the United States.

Being raised as slaves; both Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass devoted their professional life for telling their true story based on their own experience. As a matter of fact, their works “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” (1861) and “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave” (1845) are considered the most important works in the genre of slave narrative or of enslavement. Thus, this paper will compare and contrast between Jacobs and Douglass in terms of the aforementioned works.

A slave narrative is to tell a slave's story and what they have been through. Six thousand former slaves from North America told about their lives during the 18th and 19th centuries. About 150 narratives were published as separate books or articles most slaves were born in the last years of the slave regime or during the Civil War. Some Slaves told about their experiences on plantations, in cities, and on small farms. Slave narratives are one of the only ways that people today know about the way slaves lived, what they did each day, and what they went through. There are three famous slave narratives in history, Incidents in The Life of A Slave Girl by Harriet A. Jacobs, Narrative of The Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave

One of the points that is consistently brought up in Toni Morrison’s Paradise is that of the all black town “Ruby”. Paradise uses the setting of Oklahoma to discuss how many black towns are shaped by past history and religion. While the town in this novel is fictional, there have been real all black towns in the United States, and it seems that these towns influenced many aspects of the town Ruby, which is why it is so easy to imagine that the story could actually be real. Many authors have written in general about the novel, and specifically about the town within it.

A Slave Narrative Fiction is literature in the form of prose, especially short stories and novels, that describes imaginary events and people. Many scholars believed “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” by Harriet Jacobs was fiction before the early 1980’s. This autobiography tells the world the remarkable life of Harriet Jacobs. The book consists of torture, abuse, and the horrors she suffered as a slave girl. This is a rare look from a firsthand account of a women determined to show the world what was going on during her life.

Beloved (1987) is a sensitive novel written by Toni Morrison a renowned Afro-American author. It deals with the forgotten era of slavery and the pathos of black slaves. The novel tells a wrenching story of a black female slave, Sethe, who kills her own daughter to protect her from the horrors of slavery. Morrison has excelled in creating her female characters. Her novels show a deep sense of bonding between the female characters. In Beloved the female bonding and the multiple layer of meaning in their relationship makes the story emotionally appealing and according to Barbara Schapira in Contemporary Literature it is the story that, “penetrates perhaps more deeply than any historical or psychological study could, the unconscious emotional and psychic consequences of slavery.”(194). The story touches the social, psychological, philosophical and supernatural elements of human life.