A Thematic Review of Sojourner Truths Aren't I a Woman - Essay Example

?Running Head: English Literature The Struggle to Regain Womanhood A Thematic Review of Sojourner Truth’s Ar'n't I a Woman of Professor Date of Submission Abstract The Civil War eventually evoked anticipations of freedom, and liberation guaranteed change. African women understood what freedom implied. They knew that being free from the clutches of abusive white men is genuine freedom; being allowed to look after and nurture their families away from violent owners and authorities. Freedom for these women implied having control over one’s own labor. Basically, the women in Ar’n’t I a woman desired all the privileges of citizenship and the liberty to see themselves as a ‘woman’ in their own way. The experience of Sojourn Truth as a woman plays as an allegory for the common experience of slave women portrayed in Ar’n’t I a woman. These slave women of Southern plantations do not see themselves as a ‘woman’. When 19th-century America was fixated with safeguarding women and fixing them in domestic responsibilities, only slave women were absolutely defenseless. Merely African women had their ‘identity’ and ‘womanhood’ absolutely refuted: this is the overriding theme of Ar’n’t I a woman, and the primary argument of this paper. The Civil War had only just started, even if, before black women acquired the same message Sojourner Truth gained in Silver Lake. The Americas was ill-equipped to value their nationality, even less their being a ‘woman’. Throughout the conflict, they suffered insurmountable difficulties. They were objects of violence and cruelty, the targets of insults and derision, and their being a ‘woman’ was stripped away from them repeatedly. It was a difficulty simply to remain free, and a much harder difficulty to establish womanhood (Gates & McKay, 2004). Still, slavery had strengthened them for this struggle. They had not endured maltreatment and abuse to submit to freedom. The methods created under slavery turned into a design for free existence. However, evidently, perils had to be confronted if freedom was to be achieved. Instead of hanging around until the war’s conclusion to be freed, enslaved people freed themselves. At the onset of the war they decline to carry out particular types of task and debated over issues of obedience and the supervision of the plantation (Fox-Genovese, 1988). A young white woman revealed in her diary that “the negroes seem very unwilling to work” (White, 1999, 165) as children, women, and men reduced their work tempo to a snail’s pace. Whenever the chance emerged, slaves run off. Normally, the black people waited to be emancipated once they arrived at the stronghold of Mr. Lincoln (Camp, 2004). However, at the onset of the conflict neither the defense force nor Lincoln was predisposed to make the conflict a struggle against enslavement. Northern combatants in fact brought back escaping slaves to their owners, and when Union officials released decrees emancipating all slaves in their controlled areas, Lincoln took precedence over them (Camp, 2004). The mere size of the population of running away slaves, nevertheless, compelled a reevaluation of army regulations. Free, women laborers on Northern plantations had a slightly more favorable condition. They expected to be compensated, but they were usually given insubstantial wages and at times received no wage at all. Basic necessities, such as clothing and food, were normally scarce, and women paid for their needs and those of their children. Overseers of Northern plantation had promised not to physically punish ex-slaves, but suggestive of enslavement, labor agreements usually obliged women to acquire consent and an authorization (Litwack, 1980) to run off the plantation. Most problematic to owners of slaves throughout the war was the fleeing of women they had viewed their ‘black mammies’ (Booker, 2000, 33). Aunt Polly, her master’s favorite, run off the moment she noticed the Northern army on the horizon. Eliza Andrews, during the fighting, revealed in her journal that numerous African-Americans had become Yankee moles that made Mammy suspicious (Booker, 2000). Catherine Edmundson of North Carolina could not comprehend why the companion who had looked after her in “the most devoted and affectionate manner” (Booker, 2000, 33), who throughout a protracted illness in fact “wept over me,” left her “without provocation or reason” and “without the slightest notice” (White, 1999, 168). A number of favorite slaves run off, comprising the men who worked as drivers and domestic helpers, but the escape of Mammy had particular relevance. As shown, Mammy embodied the perfect woman and the perfect slave, the focus in the view of the antebellum Southerners of the ideally structured society (White, 1999). Mammy was immediately a woman and an African American, and hence in truth myths and reality was obedient to white men. For the males whose manhood and pride totally relied on their capability to supervise slaves and women, the running off of Mammy was simply as certainly as weakening as being crushed in the combat zone. More importantly, although only a handful of African-American house slaves had been what owners viewed them to be, a lot of the women had been depicted as substitute mothers (Booker, 2000). In the point of view of white masters and mistresses who had in no way challenged the commitment of their black servant, even motherly attachment, the running off of Mammy was experienced as profoundly as a mother’s departure or denial. This journal entry of a Florida woman discloses an intolerable sorrow (Litwack, 1980, 301): I hardly know how to tell it, my dear black Mammy has left us… I feel lost, I feel as if someone is dead in the house. Whatever will I do without my Mammy? When she was going she stopped on the doorstep and, shaking her fist at Mother [with whom she had had an altercation] she said: I’ll miss you—the Lord knows I’ll miss you—but you’ll miss me, too—you see if you don’t. Southerners had formed this image as evidence to the world and to themselves that enslavement was compassionate, that its restorative energies could house-train or tame Jezebel; before the masters of slaves had possessed the absolute power to put into life their imagined mother for themselves. Freedom broke the delusion and threw them into a realm loaded with struggle, terrifying women abandoning them. As barriers between the African American female realm and themselves collapsed, white women and men confronted an African American woman alien to them. Akin to Jezebel, this emerging contrast to Mammy appeared perilous and intimidating. Quite forceful in justifying her free will, she barely appeared a woman. However, to Southerners she was somewhat blatant and quick-witted. Just like Sojourner Truth appeared to the Silver Lake spectator, she largely resembled as well a man with feminine parts. It was unavoidable that the collapse of slavery would spread the legend of Mammy (Gates & McKay, 2004); it was unfortunate that African American women had to begin their newfound lives in a civilization grieving the demise of the model whose status developed from the portion of the body white men and women thought African American women had misplaced. Yet begin their liberation they did. The black women’s regained standing was viewed by the white people as proof of an evil released. For instance, they could not comprehend that African-American people had to challenge their emancipation by acting. For every black person a genuine indication of freedom was to ebb and flow freely, without the authorization of the white people, without permission. African-American women had been particularly imprisoned by slavery and hardly any kept away from the right to act. They resembled the woman from South Carolina who abandoned her duty as chef and journeyed just a little distance to perform the same task, at this point for compensation, for another white folks. Her previous masters provided her two times what her new masters were giving her, yet to their disappointment she chose to leave (White, 1999). When asked for a justification, she was straightforward and determined (White, 1999, 165): “I must go. If I stay here I’ll never know I am free.” References Booker, C. (2000) I Will Wear No Chain! A Social History of African American Males. Westport, CT: Praeger. Camp, S. M. H. (2004) Close to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Fox-Genovese, E. (1988) Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Gates, H.L. & McKay, N.Y. (2004) The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Litwack, L.F. (1980) Been in the storm so long: the aftermath of slavery. The University of Michigan: Vintage Books. White, D.G. (1999) Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South. New York: W.W. Norton. Read More