I’M Not Sure, Exactly, What I Felt.I Do Know; It Was During

This turns out to be an ironic contrast to life at the Weylin plantation, where a slave who visits his wife without his master's permission is brutally whipped. Perhaps a more painful realization for Dana is how this cruel treatment oppresses the mind. "Slavery of any kind fostered strange relationships," she notes, for all the slaves feel the same strange combination of fear,

In the novel Cutting for Stone, the author, Verghese displays many of the women suffering great loss and agony as a result from promiscuous behavior. Most of the women in the novel are presented as nothing more than an object placed for men’s pleasure. However, when the women initiate this pleasure-seeking behavior and follow through with it, they suffer greatly. The men consistently participate in unwed intercourse, and it is accepted as the way of life. Marion’s thoughts, at sixteen years old, are stated, “Little did I know that our Ethiopian peers both at our school and at the government schools had long ago gone through their sexual initiation with a bar girl or a housemaid” (Verghese, 2009, p.391). Support of this sexist perception of women are given in this discussion from the novel.

In chapter one, also known as ‘the hurting’, the author focuses on trauma that people have dealt with such as sexual abuse from a father or relative, failed relationships with parents, and difficulty with one’s self-expression. One of the poems in chapter one states that the girl’s first kiss was by the age of five and was carried out in an aggressive manner by the young boy, she assumes that he had picked that up from his father’s interactions with the mother. In the poem it says “He had the smell of starvation on his lips which he picked up from his father feasting on his mother at 4 a.m.” It is insinuated that the father uses forceful actions towards the mother during times that should be gentle and affectionate. In that specific poem she felt as if that was when she was taught that her body is only for giving to those who wanted out of satisfaction but she should feel ‘anything less than whole’. In another poem in chapter one, there is a family setting during dinner in which the father orders the mother to hush. This represents how women are constantly oppressed in their own

Being a religious person, as I read, I compared and contrasted my experiences in church with those of the snake-handlers. Though there are distinct differences to contrast, when thought about more deeply, there is also a similarity between the two denominations. The glaring differences include the snake-handling versus no snakes; the loud, chaotic music versus quiet, serene music; and the shouting and proclaiming God’s name versus quiet prayer to God. However, the one sentence that Covington wrote

As this was being done - by other slaves - Weylin stood whirling his whip and biting his thin lips” (92). The man being naked, alone, makes him more vulnerable therefore providing Weylin with the dominance and power over the situation. Weylin feels the need to overly assert his dominance in a way that can be viewed as unnecessary, but at the time was considered part of everyday life. Dana, being new to participating in the act of slavery, was frightened by the fact that one could be so cruel to another human being,“The whipping served its purpose as far as I was concerned. It scared me, made me wonder how long it would be before I made a mistake that would give someone a reason to whip me” (92). Weylin ordered the slaves to witness the beating, using the man as an example of what was to come if they did not obey his commands and perfectly complete the task at hand. The whip itself represents power and the use of it represents the abuse of that power; not only the use of the whip on slaves but Weylin used it on Rufus, his son, “But then I remember the stable and the whip he hit me with...mama said that if she hadn’t stopped him, he would have killed me” (26).This highlights that if power is left in the wrong hands, it can take a devastating toll on one’s life and family as well.

White explores the master’s sexual exploitation of their female slaves, and proves this method of oppression to be the defining factor of what sets the female slaves apart from their male counterparts. Citing former slaves White writes, “Christopher Nichols, an escaped slave living in Canada, remembered how his master laid a woman on a bench, threw her clothes over her head, and whipped her. The whipping of a thirteen-year-old Georgia slave girl also had sexual overtones. The girl was put on all fours ‘sometimes her head down, and sometimes up’ and beaten until froth ran from her mouth (33).” The girl’s forced bodily position as well as her total helplessness to stop her master’s torture blatantly reveals the forced sexual trauma many African females endured.

With the shock of coming face-to-face with death, she starts to let go of her power-hungry and deceptive behavior and decides to act out of love and humility. Her head has become clear, and more than ever she becomes aware of the situation. All her shallow and hypocritical thoughts seemed to have dissipated, and she sees the Misfit as a child of God just. The grandma notices a voice crack in the Misfit’s voice and thought he was about to cry; she murmurs, “Why you're one of my babies. You're one of my own children” (O’Connor 458-459)! The grandmother calls the Misfit one of her kids despite the crimes he has already committed; God’s spirit may have entered the grandmother and is attempting to offer redemption to the Misfit since she has now accepted it. The still figure of the grandmother is described as “her legs crossed under her like a child’s and her face smiling up at the cloudless sky” (459). God has given the grandma salvation now, and her spirit has a journey to heaven via the cloudless sky. O’Connor shows the protagonist to be hypocritical, but the protagonist found salvation and appeared happy after accepting God and feeling love towards the Misfit; the Misfit appeared to reject God when he shot the grandmother in the chest after she was trying to lend him a hand. The grandmother was able to find salvation through the violence the Misfit brought.

Jacobs’ narrative is open and honest in its depiction of sexual harassment, describing the nature of the abuse and the tortured emotional state it leaves its victims in. Though the narrative tells of a girl’s life over one hundred and fifty years ago, it remains timely in its reminder that many suffering women do not have the ability to safely end the harassment they face every day, and yet, they continue to endure the consequential

Some of the short stories featured in “Woman Hollering Creek” explores various aspects of domestic violence, teen pregnancy, and interracial relationships. The author Sandra Cisneros challenges the social standards of how we normally view interrelationships, physical abuse, and sexual promiscuity among teens. Significant recurring themes that are presented are victimization of women, sexual love as an exercise of power, and conflicts in cultural traditions. These central themes compel the readers to think critically about these issues and how they impact our identities.

Shackled down with chains, the male slaves at Sweet Home had no choice but to say yes when asked if they wanted breakfast. The “here you go” the masters declared before demanding fellatio be performed captures the cruel, sadistic nature of the dialogue, and the nature in which sexual aggression was used as means of domination in the slaveholder to slave relationship in the slave narrative (Morrison 127). In the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Douglass was the offspring of a similar instance of forced sexual encounters between slaveholder and slave when he acknowledges “my father was a white man,” (Douglass 12). Through acts of sexual aggression in slave narratives, the ability for slaves to form individual sexual identities is diminished. Sexuality in Beloved establishes a view of sex for former slaves that hinders the creation of a personal identity beyond slavery, and through this use of sexuality, even following physical freedom, a former slave’s identity is still very much tied to their past enslavement.

“His voice seemed about to crack and the grandmother’s head cleared for an instant. She saw the man’s face twisted close to her own as if he were going to cry and she murmured,’Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!’ She reached out and touched him on the shoulder. The Misfit sprang back as if a snake had bitten him and shot her three times through the chest”(132).

Blow argues that childhood sex abuse should never happen and could be avoided. He supports his claim by first invoking when a child is sexually abused it breaks the bonds of trust, then he expresses that children could develop exploitation of when he/she was abused and would remember the tragic moment, finally he states that children that have been abused never say a word about the attack and never seek professional help, any child that has had a relationship with an abuser can remember how he was treated and would never forget. Blow’s purpose is to inform readers that sexual abuse should be focused on being prevented in order to protect other children in the future. He establishes a pessimistic and sympathetic tone for readers and mainly for child

how he was before moving the Falls City, but I can’t help compare the horrors he endured in his last year of life to the contradictory feelings towards females and their bodies. Women are consistently viewed as ‘sacred’ and pleasurable yet so many acts of violence are commit to it or because of it.

This construction reinforces control over young women’s sexual expression. Faus highlights how it forces women to partake in this patriarchal culture where women’s bodies are under control

It will also seek to identify the nature of sexual relationships between masters and their slaves. Jacobs describes an incident when at about 12 years old her mistress had died . She explains that she and her mistress had an amicable relationship. Her mistress had taught her that God’s word required one to love one’s neighbor as themselves and hoped that her mistress would release her from bondage. Her mistress had however bequeathed her to her five year old niece. This act caused her much grief and made it clear that her late mistress did not quite consider her a neighbor.