Slavery in Literature: Key Narratives and Authors
Slavery and Literature: Black Literary Declarations of Independence
In the US, Black people started to write from the 18th century onward, differently from other countries, because they weren’t Catholics (where education was limited to the upper classes) but Protestants. This gave an impetus to introspection and general writing, encouraging and making it necessary for people to read and write. Literacy was a really common element in Protestant US.
One of the ways to dehumanize slaves, to prevent them from becoming human beings, was to forbid their access to literacy. This was a common practice in Spanish America, but in the US, it kept them away from the anthological status of human beings. Transatlantic slavery worked not just in one continent, but was highly profitable for many countries. Some theorists call it the ‘Atlantic Circus’ or ‘Black Atlantic’. From the 15th and 16th centuries, millions of slaves were taken. “Black despair”: thousands of people living and working in plantations. Africa-England-Caribbean-America. The passage of the Atlantic was for the slaves a process of death, transculturation, and false mobility. Phillis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano are the only well-read individuals who were born in Africa and taken away.
Savages are always imagined as naked people. Nakedness is a semiotic symbol to convey a lack of civilization (the more covered figures appeared in the images, the more civilized they seemed). The sartorial (dressing) usages of the country. If Black people are dressed, it’s in an ironical way (exaggerating the ape-like manner of Black people: big lips, for instance). When Darwin published The Origin of Species, scientific racism appeared to ‘justify’ Black people’s inferiority (science was an ‘objective’ element). Black people were seen as ‘the missing link’ between white people and the apes (they were defined as sub-humans).
Phyllis Wheatley (c. 1753-1784): Selected Poems
She’s the mother of African-American literature, the first author to have her book published. Nobody questioned Bradstreet’s authorship, but they did with Black authorship. Black people were considered to be non-human beings. Philosophers in the 19th century established The Great Chain of Being: all the elements of creation were hierarchically presented (God on top, angels, Heaven creatures, humans, beasts, plants, flames, stones, the ladder of intellect). But in the definition of humans, Black people were not included (ontologically, they were excluded from personhood, from being human beings). In North America, people took the Bible and science (with objective data, such as skull measurements or intellectual tests) to justify Black people’s inferiority.
Once she was free, she married a free Black man. It seems that he was involved in the abolitionist movement. Unfortunately, Phyllis died very young after having a baby. So her poetry was forgotten for a while. However, later on, she became the first, the mother of African-American literature.
On Being Brought from Africa to America
The title itself is quite polemical. Many readers were very disappointed because they expected her to show her anger towards slavery. She was writing to people who believed Black people were animals, who justified slavery by the Bible. By writing being brought, she was hiding a terrible fact: slaves were kidnapped, robbed. Using the passive voice, she gives us an idea of their own ‘passivity’ towards their awful situation.
- It’s an eight-line monologue addressed to Christians by an African voice who has been converted to Christianity. For Black people in the United States, Christianity was, and still is nowadays, one of the most powerful weapons to struggle for equality, an antiracist instrument. The White Church in the US, since the very beginning, was far from being oppressive, but a place for reflection (for example: Martin Luther King was a pastor).
- During the three parts of the poem, the poetical voice is going to show a crescendo in authority:
- First 4 lines: She wrote about her gratitude for the divine mercy which brought her from a pagan land to civilization and taught her to look for her spiritual redemption. These first lines are a kind of hymn for gratitude. She’s repeating the common idea in their times which said that Black people were brought into civilization to become part of the Christian world.
- Two next lines: She changes from grateful testimony to a reproach to those people who believed that Black color was synonymous with the devil: “Their color is a diabolic dye”. She uses the direct style.
- The two last lines: She forgets about grateful testimony. It’s a kind of warning: “Remember”. She uses the imperative form because she’s empowered through writing. She addresses directly to the reader with an imperative.
- Phyllis is ‘questioning’ white people’s knowledge: she’s talking about theology and telling Christians that redemption is not only for white people, but also for Black people. She threatens white people and at the same time she’s using Cain: it sounds like cane (‘caña’), which could be refined to become sugar. So she’s saying that Black people could be ‘refined’ to “join the angelic train”. It’s their way to acquire spiritual redemption.
To the University of Cambridge, in New England
Instead of directly attacking slavery, because of the circumstances, Black writers had to be rogue. If they had directly attacked the authorities, they would have been killed. The under-dog (people who are out of power, the poor and powerless) needed to use those strategies of indirectness (non-violent techniques) through moral suasion (used by abolitionists, but also by Martin Luther King and Gandhi). Nowadays, there are many non-violent demonstrations all over the world. So Phyllis was very careful when talking about that delicate issue. However, Thomas Jefferson, the man who wrote in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal”, pointed out she was nothing more than a parrot, a simple imitator. He said her poetry wasn’t as good as ‘real poetry’.
She’s directing her writing to the sons of the most powerful American families. Problems: There’s a terrible distance between the people she’s addressing and herself. The poem is directed to male students of Harvard. In real life, she had never had the opportunity to talk to them, neither to attend that University. But she tries to bridge the gap between them, between racism, social classes, genres, and so on, through the written words. Through writing, she could address herself to those guys who were by class, genre, and race quite far from her. Writing gave her freedom and new possibilities. Religion was the only field where white people and Black people could be equal. White people explained the Bible, the theory, but Phyllis was denouncing that they didn’t take it to practice.
The poem has three parts:
- First six lines: She talks about her life: “‘Twas not long since I left my native shore”. She hides the fact that she actually was moved by force. She empowers her message using religion (Christianity). She recurs to an issue she feels comfortable when talking about.
- Second paragraph: She wants students not to forget about religious principles (about Jesus’ sacrifice).
- Third paragraph: She uses imperatives such as “Improve” and “Suppress”. When she talks about Ethiop, she refers to Black people because in the Bible Africa is called Ethiopia. Through writing, she reminded those white, rich, young Americans of their duty as Christians.
First Slave Narratives
Together with captive narratives, slave narratives are a genre which developed in the United States because of American history. Slave narratives are autobiographical texts written by someone who was a slave. The slave narratives could be written by:
- The slave him/herself or with the aid of others (because they were excluded from the world of literacy).
- The text is written by a white abolitionist pretending to be a slave.
- The text is dictated to a white abolitionist because the slave cannot write. So the white abolitionist becomes the editor (‘preparador’) of the text, and he can modify the original story. In these cases, at the beginning of the book appeared a note which said: “taken orally”, or something similar.
Slaves and literature (pg. 38 dossier): When these people wrote, they were already literate, so their narratives “drew on Biblical allusion and imaginary”. However, they ‘Africanize’ the typology: the journey from Egypt to the Promised Land in Black writing becomes the journey from the south of slavery to the north of freedom or Canada. Slavery is presented as bad for the slaves but also for the masters: slavery is corrupting to Black people because it brutalizes and dehumanizes them, but it’s also bad for white people because slavery perverts and corrupts them and their morality. Black writers criticized the difference between Christian values in theory and in practice.
Olaudah Equiano (1745-1797)
The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself
- It’s a book written to avoid the slave trade, not only slavery.
- He appeared dressed as a Western man, and he had a book in his hand (meaning he’s literate).
- He decided to keep his two names: Olaudah Equiano (his original African name) and Gustavus Vassa (the name that one of his masters gave him, which ironically was the name of a European king). He was born in Africa and grew up in America, but he decided to maintain his two identities.
Many critics questioned his origins. They thought the first chapter of the book (which talks about his origins in Africa) was an invention because they believed he was born in South Carolina. He might have invented it because it is not necessary to have been there (in Africa) to know things about the country (he could just read about it). The complete title of the book is quite important. As it is a text which denounces the slave trade, he needs to construct himself as an African slave in order to write about the horrors as a real testimony. The word true in the title legitimizes his voice as a first-hand witness of the cruelties of the slave trade. His narrative describes his journey from slavery into freedom, from illiteracy (darkness) into literacy (the light).
It’s a journey from nothing to everything, from being possessed to possessing oneself (it can be connected with ‘from rags to riches’ by Benjamin Franklin). Slave writers used to start their slave narratives telling where they were born, but they were unaware about when.
Olaudah Equiano: Chapter 1
He was born in 1745 in Eboe, Essaka in the kingdom of Benin. He tells how his father and his family were prominent figures in his village and that he was destined to be a leader as well. He describes a few of the social customs, including what happened to those who disobeyed basic laws, including kidnapping and adultery. He says with such heinous deeds, the guilty are often sold as slaves to pay their sins. However, during happy customs like marriage, Equiano describes what happens in the tribes of Benin. He lists what the bride and groom are mandated to do by the social norms and laws before and after the engagement is announced and writes about how Africans love to dance and play music during all happy occasions. He goes on to describe what types of food they eat and how they ate, with cleanliness and passion, two things that he never saw in the Europeans. He also described the housing of all the people and the markets, markets which are mainly used for social gathering. Instead, most of the people actually work the fields to get their food, not pay for it using money. He says that this hard work which all men, women, and even children do is the reason why slaves from this region are considered the best of all Africans. And because of this reason, he says he was taken from his family. When slave traders or raiders come to invade the village, all the village people, men and women, fight against the invaders. Lastly, he ends this first chapter of his autobiography by explaining one concept that has always bothered him. He believes that Africans and the modern-day Jewish people are closely related.
Chapter 2
Equiano immediately describes the day that he was kidnapped. He tells how the kidnappers wait until the adults were not around and kidnap children. Children often had one lookout while the rest would play, however, one day he and his sister were unlucky and they were captured by two men and a woman. Equiano and his sister were sold separately and each was forced to follow their master instead of staying back with the other. Equiano is able to write a compelling and heart-wrenching scene which shows the two separated and the effects on Equiano afterwards when he realizes he has no one left in his life who he has known since his childhood. However, his new master, a well-to-do African man, was very generous and consoling. He gave Equiano almost all the freedoms. One day, while outside helping an elderly slave with the chickens, he accidentally killed one of them. When she left to call the mistress, Equiano hid in a bush near the house. They thought he escaped. Finally, while trying to take some food, Equiano is discovered, but his master, being kind-hearted, scolds him lightly. However, his fortune does not last long. The master’s eldest daughter to his first wife dies and Equiano is sold off. He travels through a series of masters before finally reaching another memorable destination. After so long, he did not expect to see any of his relatives ever again, one day, he was reunited with his sister, in a heartfelt reunion, so touching even the slave masters felt it a memorable moment. But, when they part for the second time, he feels even worse than before. He was sold again. However, throughout his servitude as a slave in Africa, he could always identify with the people.
The masters were, in general, kind and courteous. So, when he first arrived on the slave ships and saw these strange white men with long hair and saw how cruelly he treated the slaves, he was completely frightened. Eventually, the ship arrives in the West Indies and the slaves are sold off, but Equiano ends this chapter with an emotional appeal. He asks the readers, good Christians, if there is any excuse that a mother and son, brother and brother, or any other close family bond should be broken just for the sake of the pure avarice of the white man.
Chapter 3
One day, a lieutenant in the royal army named Michael Henry Pascal arrived on the plantation and bought Equiano as a gift for his friends in England. While on board with Pascal, Equiano and the ship’s crew set out for England where Equiano is first given the name Gustavus Vassa and learns some English. They arrive in Falmouth at the beginning of spring in 1757 after a thirteen-week journey. He left for England. During the trip there, the ship is boarded by a warship, but they quickly find themselves in England. Equiano soon travels to London when his master calls him there. There he meets Mr. Guerin who was related to his master. Equiano is then sent to recover in St. George’s Hospital from battle wounds and smallpox. Leaving Dick behind aboard the Preston, Equiano joins Pascal on a trip aboard the Royal George. The Royal George landed up in Tenerife due to strong winds. They arrived in the St. George port in Halifax. Their ship was joined by numerous other ships, and they once again set out on the ocean for Nova Scotia. They soon landed at Cape Brenton in the summer of 1758 and pushed the French troops back to Louisburgh. They eventually lose sight of the French ships and make their trip back to England after a couple of short stops at nearby areas.
Chapter 4
Equiano left England with his master and set sail on the Mediterranean for Gibraltar. Pascal and his crew left again to sail up the Mediterranean. The ship landed in Barcelona. The crew had a small fight with two French ships which the English ended up winning. Equiano became Pascal’s steward, and he was treated well by everyone else. He was able to further educate himself in reading and writing. Equiano and the crew landed in Cowes (in the Isle of Wight), and he enjoyed his stay here. Equiano met a young Black boy of his stature, and they became good friends until Equiano had to leave in the month of March in 1761 for Spithead where they would be joined by a large fleet commanded by Commodore Keppel. This fleet was headed for Belle Isle. He then comes back to the present time and tells of how the English soldiers have landed on the shore and attacked the French. News of peace had excited the soldiers, and they would have to travel up to London for their ship to be paid off. Equiano was greatly excited at hearing this news as well because he wished for nothing more than being freed to even further improve his skills in reading and writing like he had aboard the Aetna thanks to the help of others. One of those who helped Equiano read and write was Daniel Queen, and those two became very close friends. Equiano always assumed that Pascal would free him once the ship was paid off because of how nice Pascal treated him, but Equiano soon learned that he was wrong. Equiano arrived at Deptford on December 10th, and Pascal ordered that Equiano be put in the barge. Equiano was surprised at this, and he told Pascal that he was free. Pascal was enraged at hearing this and threatened to slit Equiano’s throat if he moved out of Pascal’s sight.
Chapter 5
In this chapter, Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, is very depressed for he believed his old master, Pascal, was going to give him his freedom, yet Olaudah was sold to a slave trader to be addressed as Captain Doran. He reflects on his situation, lamenting over his fate and notes that his current master was much more strict than Pascal and his freedom was much more restricted.
I think that slavery in Africa was much less harsh and much more humane than slavery in the New World (and the Western world). His African slave owners treated him very similarly to other people and did not discriminate with an exception of some small exceptions (such as not eating at the same table, etc.). Caucasian slavery, as we see later, is incredibly cruel; his first experience on the slave ship makes this very evident. Slaves were treated as worse than animals by Caucasians and were very severely discriminated against. I think Olaudah was treated much better by Europeans than Americans and the original slave owners and traders he originally faced in the first few chapters. For example, he was educated by Miss Guerins, sent to school, baptized, and cared for. He was rather portly and was well-fed. He was not whipped and not made to do grueling labor. And unlike the slave ship he traveled in, he was given a respectable position on an English navy ship, where he was free to move around and aid the English navy men in their fight against the French navy.
Male Slave Narratives
Frederick Douglass (1818-1895)
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself
He wrote 3 autobiographies. When he ran out and arrived to the north, he started to collaborate with the abolitionists: few people, extremely religious, who believed in non-violence – they believed they could convince about the cruelty of slavery by using their words and propaganda, using the body of the slaves, their experiences and testimonies. They used moral persuasion to convince people: they wrote and used engravings. The Black man’s body became the most striking, shocking text to read slavery. We are fed with the body images, we consume their bodies as proof, so we became images cannibals. Douglass was writing the truth and nothing but the truth. Frederick Douglass never supported the movement of going back to Africa. He described himself as an American slave who wanted to become an authentic citizen. “Written by himself” meaning that the text is not an invention, but the fruit of his experiences, an authentic text. He’s one of those individuals who have completed the journey from illiteracy to literacy. His book was published at the anti-slavery office.
He starts his text as all the slave narratives: “I was born in”. The first paragraph is a list of gaps of information in his life, due to the historical context, due to the pernicious conditions of slavery which deprives, robs the Black individual of his own historical information. He’s saying that the lack of education, ignorance means slavery. Right from the very beginning, he’s questioning the power of the master to keep and take information. “My father was a white man”. Everything which seems natural is violated by slavery. He’s addressing himself to middle-class white readers, so the only way to achieve their attention was to make them feel identified with him through the question of age. On the other hand, Frederick Douglass being partly white means that his white audience can feel identified with him. He approaches the reader. He’s not the other side because he’s partly white. Secondly, he’s talking about the cruel and terrible separation of son and mother at a time when the family was a sacred institution. That act of separation was the epitome of the cruelty of slavery.
In his journey, he’s going to complete the way ‘from rags to riches’, from slavery to freedom, from oppression to liberation. He also talks about the sexual exploitation of Black women. The master took advantage of these women: pleasure and profit (bastard children who will become new slaves). It was a very cheap way to get more money. In the second paragraph, he’s talking about racial mixing (Crossbreeding-‘mestizage’), about the mulatto people who are neither Black nor white, but Black by law. All these mulatto people were the fruit of the systematic rape of Black women. Douglass is back to the story of Noah: slavery was historically defended by God and justified by the Bible. He also talks about the critical moment in his life which became his initiation into slavery, how he woke up to the cruelty of slavery.
What’s Douglass’ text about: His struggles to get an education, to become a literate subject (the journey from illiteracy to literacy). Education is a real obsession for him. He also talks about his physical confrontation with the white master (a very controversial issue).
How the process of education is materialized in his text: Pg. 38: the beginning of his desire for education. “Very soon after I went to live with Mr. and Mrs. Auld, she very kindly commenced to teach me the A, B, C. After I had learned this, she assisted me in learning to spell words of three or four letters”. “A [n-word] should know nothing but to obey his master -to do as he is told to do”: that sentence expresses the white men’s thought about Black people’s education – they believed education made slaves unhappy. The real fact was that the more education they had, the less dehumanized they were, so there were more possibilities to plot rebellion. The more education, the less brute, ignorant, and passive. Education right in this text is a privilege which has been stolen from the Black people. They were robbed of their right because of their Black color. Douglass vindicates he wants what is his. If you give education to someone, then he could think critically. “The white man’s power to enslave the Black man”. “From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom”: education as the only way to become a free man. Pg. 40 (Chapter 7): he explains the way how he learned to read and write. Pg. 41 (last paragraph): he explains his plan to get an education, not spontaneity. Nevertheless, his strategy could be an invention: the people he took advantage of were poor white children in the slave south, who probably were as well illiterate. He manipulated the events, so in his narrative, he becomes an agent: he has power over these white children and takes advantage of every small possibility of learning. The audience is shocked by his determination to learn to read and write. He’s working all the time to get an education. “I used also to carry bread with me”: it was really unusual for a Black slave to steal bread from his house. This is an image of sacrifice: instead of eating the bread to stop his huge hunger, he uses it as money to pay to his white teachers. Now that he can read and write, he describes his teachers as “hungry little urchins”. He uses biblical language: the bread of salvation in Douglass’ narrative becomes the bread of knowledge (‘secularization of salvation’).
Pg. 34 (Chapter 5): How can he show the transformation from slave to a free man, from a brute to a human being. In the texts, there are some moments where the past and the present are linked to show the differences between his past of misery, ignorance, and brutalization, and his present as a free man.
Pg. 26: music for Black people is a manifestation of their personality, of the oppression they suffered. Music in slavery is a way to survive. The idea of call and response. He also talks about Heaven and religion, and again combines the past and the present.
Pg. 96: he now has the power to sign his story with a full name, date, and place. Differently from his origins, now he has his own name. Then, he has completed his journey from rags to riches, from darkness (illiteracy) to light (literacy).
Harriet A. Jacobs (1813-1897)
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself
Black women were always silent characters who were destroyed and whipped. In her old age in 1886, Harriet Jacobs published her slave autobiographical narrative. Her book it’s exceptional, there is nothing like it in American literature. She is an ex-slave woman telling her story. She throws away the iron-muzzle and finds her own voice. She has nothing to do with Frederick Douglass, because Jacobs talks about Black femininity, Black motherhood and more importantly, rape and Black women’s exploitation in the south. In the 19th century, women were sexless. In fact, nobody talked about anything related to sex, it was a taboo. Therefore we have to emphasize Harriet Jacobs’ power when talking about sex where nobody discussed these issues. When publishing her narrative, she used the pen name of Linda Brent and made up fictional names which did not correspond to the real characters because she wanted to protect herself. On the other hand, when she wrote her narrative she needed a white voice to present her book. She tried to convince Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but she, as a white woman, refused because she did not believe Jacobs’ story. Then Jacobs turned to Lydia Maria Child, a white woman who had written many antislavery narratives, novels, and speeches.
The cult of the true womanhood: in the 1900s people talked about women’s self-sacrifice, they were described as devoted wives and mothers. Chastity was an investment. All white women in The United States were chaste by definition, they were true women. However, Black women were all promiscuous by definition. They were not included in the definition of womanhood.
Jacobs’ text is so far the only text that has been written by an ex-slave woman. Before the Civil War, there were already texts written by free Black women, but not by slaves. Jacobs wrote once she was free, and her writing was so good that many people doubted its authenticity. When Harriet Jacobs wrote her book the first problem she had to deal with was the distrust of the reader. People did not believe her because she was a Black woman. Differently from Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs was concerned about the incidents of her life. They both are nowadays classics because they showed the other side of The United States during the 19th century. Black women were writing to question the official story. It was exceptional and just happened in The United States (for example, in Spanish America, negroes were turned to Catholicism and never wrote). In that period, women were constructed to be respectable, they should follow the principles of motherhood (America in the 19th century was a representation of the Sacred institution of the family). They made up the stereotype of the angel in the house: white middle-class women, different from the low-class women who had to work at fields and factories. Moreover, Black women had nothing to do with white women’s appearance or personality.
Summary: Born into slavery, Linda spends her early years in a happy home with her mother and father, who are relatively well-off slaves. When her mother dies, six-year-old Linda is sent to live with her mother’s mistress, who treats her well and teaches her to read. After a few years, this mistress dies and bequeaths Linda to a relative. Her new masters are cruel and neglectful, and Dr. Flint, the father, takes an interest in Linda and tries to force her into a sexual relationship with him. Linda resists his attempts and maintains her distance. Knowing that Flint will do anything to get his way, Linda consents to a relationship with a white neighbor, Mr. Sands. As a result of their relations, Sands and Linda have two children: Benjamin, often called Benny, and Ellen. Linda is ashamed but hopes this relationship will protect her from assault at the hands of Dr. Flint. Linda also hopes that Flint would become angry enough to sell her to Sands, but he refuses to do so. Instead, he sends Linda to his son’s plantation to be broken in as a field hand. When she discovers that Benny and Ellen are also to be sent to the fields, Linda makes a desperate plan. Escaping to the North with two small children would be nearly impossible. Unwilling to submit to Dr. Flint’s abuse, but equally unwilling to abandon her family, she hides in the attic of the house of her grandmother, Aunt Martha. She hopes that Dr. Flint, under the false impression that she has gone North, will sell her children rather than risk having them disappear as well. Linda is overjoyed when Dr. Flint sells Benny and Ellen to a slave trader secretly representing Sands. Mr. Sands promises to free the children one day and sends them to live with Aunt Martha. But Linda’s triumph comes at a high price, and she becomes physically debilitated by her harsh living conditions. The longer she stays in her tiny garret, where she can neither sit nor stand, the more physically debilitated she becomes. Her only pleasure is to watch her children through a tiny peephole, as she cannot risk letting them know where she is. Mr. Sands marries and becomes a congressman. He takes Ellen to Washington, D.C., to look after his newborn daughter, and Linda realizes that he may never free their children. Worried that he will eventually sell them, she determines that she must somehow flee with them to the North. However, Dr. Flint continues to hunt for her, and escape remains too risky. After seven years in the attic, Linda finally escapes to the North by boat. Benny remains with Aunt Martha, and Linda is reunited with Ellen, who is nine years old and living in Brooklyn. Linda is dismayed to find that her daughter is treated as a slave by Sands’s cousin, Mrs. Hobbs. She fears that Mrs. Hobbs will take Ellen back to the South, putting her beyond Linda’s reach forever. She finds work as a nursemaid for a New York City family, the Bruces, who treat her very kindly. Dr. Flint continues to pursue Linda, and she flees to Boston. There, she is reunited with Benny. Dr. Flint claims that the sale of Benny and Ellen was illegitimate, and Linda is terrified that he will re-enslave her and her children. After a few years, Mrs. Bruce dies, and Linda spends some time living with her children in Boston. She spends a year in England caring for Mr. Bruce’s daughter, and for the first time in her life, she enjoys freedom from racial prejudice. When Linda returns to Boston, Ellen goes to boarding school, and Benny moves to California with Linda’s brother William. Mr. Bruce remarries, and Linda takes a position caring for their new baby. Dr. Flint dies, but his daughter, Emily, writes to Linda to claim ownership of her.
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 is passed by Congress, making Linda extremely vulnerable to capture and re-enslavement. Emily Flint and her husband, Mr. Dodge, arrive in New York to capture Linda. Linda goes into hiding, and the new Mrs. Bruce offers to purchase her freedom. Linda refuses, unwilling to be bought and sold yet again, and makes plans to follow Benny to California. Mrs. Bruce buys Linda’s freedom from Flint. Linda is grateful to Mrs. Bruce but expresses disgust at the institution that necessitated the transaction. Linda then notes that she still has not yet realized her dream of making a home for herself and her children to share. The book closes with two testimonials to its accuracy, one from Amy Post, a white abolitionist, and the other from George W. Lowther, a Black antislavery writer.
On the Duty of Civil Disobedience by Henry Thoreau
Thoreau begins his essay by arguing that government rarely proves itself useful and that it drives its power from the majority because they are the strongest group, not because they hold the most legitimate viewpoint. He contends that people’s first obligation is to do what they believe is right and not to follow the law dictated by the majority. When a government is unjust, people should refuse to follow the law and distance themselves from the government in general. A person is not obligated to devote his life to eliminating evils from the world, but he is obligated not to participate in such evils. This includes not being a member of an unfair institution. Thoreau further argues that the US fits his criteria for an unfair government, given its support of slavery and its practice of aggressive war. Thoreau doubts the effectiveness of reform within the government, and he argues that voting and petitioning for change achieves little. He presents his own experiences as a model for how to relate to an unfair government. In protest of slavery, Thoreau refused to pay taxes and spent a night in jail. But, more generally, he ideologically dissociated himself from the government, “washing his hands” of it and refusing to participate in its institutions. According to Thoreau, this form of protest was preferable to advocating for reform from within government, he asserts that one cannot see government for what it is when one is working within it. Civil Disobedience covers several topics, and Thoreau intersperses poetry and social commentary throughout. One of the most important themes throughout Thoreau’s work is the notion of individualism. Deeply skeptical of government, Thoreau rejects the view that a person must sacrifice or marginalize her/his values out of loyalty to her government. For Thoreau, a person can very legitimately have concerns that must take priority over improving the world; individuals should maintain their integrity by staying true to their values and concerns. However, precisely for this reason, a person is responsible for the evil that they perform, both directly and indirectly. Thus, there is a special duty not to cause or participate in evil.
The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe
An unnamed narrator arrives at the House of Usher, a very creepy mansion owned by his boyhood friend Roderick Usher. Roderick has been sick lately, afflicted by a disease of the mind, and wrote to his friend, our narrator, asking for help. The narrator spends some time admiring the awesomely spooky Usher edifice.
While doing so, he explains that Roderick and his sister are the last of the Usher bloodline, and that the family is famous for its dedication to the arts (music, painting, literature, etc.). Eventually, the narrator heads inside to see his friend. Roderick indeedappears to be a sick man. He suffers from an “acuteness of the senses,” or hyper-sensitivity to light, sound, taste, and tactile sensations; he feels that he will die of the fear he feels. He attributes partof his illness to the fact that his sister, Madeline, suffers from catalepsy (a sickness involving seizures) and will soon die, and part of it to the belief that his creepy houseis sentient (able to perceive things) and has a great powerover him. He hasn’t left the mansion in years. The narrator tries to help him get his mind off all this death and gloom by poring over theliterature, music, and art that Roderick so loves. It doesn’t seem to help.As Roderick predicted, Madeline soon dies. At least we think so. All we know is that Roderick tells the narrator she’s dead, and that she appears to be dead when he looks at her. Of course, because of her catalepsy, she might just look likeshe’s dead, post-seizure. Keep that in mind. At Roderick’s request, the narrator helps him to entomb her body in one of the vaults underneath the mansion. While they do so, the narrator discovers that the two of them were twins and that they shared some sort of supernatural, probably extrasensory, bond. About a week later, on a dark and stormy night, the narrator and Usher find themselves unable to sleep. They decide to pass away the scary night by reading abook. As the narrator reads the text aloud, all the sounds from the fictional story can be heard resounding from below the mansion. It doesn’t take long for Usher to freak out; he jumps up and declares that they buried Madeline alive and that now she is coming back. Sure enough, the doors blow open and there stands a trembling, bloody Madeline. She throws herself at Usher, who fallsto the floor and, after “violent” agony, dies along with his sister. The narrator flees; outside he watches the House of Usher crack in two and sink into the dark, dank pool that lies before it . Abraham Lincoln: The Gettysburg Address: The remainder of Lincoln’s opening paragraph reminds listeners of the creation of the United States, noting that its government was based on the idea of freedom (liberty), and quoting the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence: “…all men are created equal.” With his opening lines, Lincoln frames his speech in a historical and philosophical perspective.Keep in mind that, in 1776, the United States was a new kind of country with a different kind of political philosophy. Its formation was known as “the Great Experiment” because it ventured into new ground, and no one knew if such a government could survive. That is the idea Lincoln refers to in this section of the speech: The Civil War was testing whether the United States, which was founded on liberty and equality, could survive. Thus, Lincoln succinctly expressed the magnitude of the Civil War: What was at stake was not simply lives, or money, or government control, but the very foundations upon which the United States was founded. This last paragraph is the most important part. In the first three sentences, Lincoln acknowledges that anything he or anyone else says at this ceremony are just words, and those words are nothing compared to what the soldiers gave during that battle. .Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address became a rallying cry that easily ushered Lincoln into his second term in office and reinforced Union resolve to win the war.