In his essay “The Battle for My Body” Richard Rhodes relives the two of the most difficult years of his childhood, the period during which he lived with his father and his stepmother, Anne. She was a selfish and sadistic woman and as Rhodes says, “we never did call her Mother…” (45). Anne made it her mission to abuse Rhodes and his brother and she employed a variety of methods to do so: she beat them, she fed them spoiled foods, and she refused to let them used the bathroom at night. The boys, too young fight back, had no choice but to suffer. The first method Anne used to abuse the boys was to beat them viciously if they broke a house rule.
These events shape the audiences response to the novel and manipulate how we perceive these issues. Figurative language has been used in this text to portray the horrific scenes depicted in the prologue. Fellows’ most gruesome experience is illustrated through similes which enables the reader to visualise the horrid experience. He explains how the “wound opened up like a flower… worm-like creatures oozing and wriggling out of it like spaghetti” which compares this unthinkable experience to items we are more familiar with. By incorporating this simile, Fellows is able to manipulate the audience into being shocked and disgusted by the conditions of this prison.
This treatment is unfair for the narrator, who accused of being a spy by the process of
In the same page, he also tells how a woman killed his wife’s cousin in the cruelest way. Afterwards, he talks about the horrible feeling this murder produced throughout the entire community. Douglass also recounts the experience of watching the slaveholder whip his aunt until she was covered in blood and the pleasure the slaveholder seemed to take in it. The graphic description of her abuse makes readers feel the same anger Douglass must have
Throughout the narrative, the author includes his personal stories about experiencing the violence of slavery first-hand. For example, on page 20, he writes about the first time he witnessed a slave, his own aunt, getting the whip. “The louder she screamed, the harder he whipped; and where the blood ran fastest, there he whipped longest…I remember the first time I ever witnessed this horrible exhibition… It struck me with awful force. It was the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery…” The author including his experience of his aunts whipping, in detail, appeals to the emotions of the reader.
Henny, a slave girl subject to being crippled, was seen as a waste of money and waste of space, and her master would release his anger onto her, a victim to whom had no control in her ailment (Douglass, 1845/1995, p.33).Even though physical abuse was the most common method to rebuke slaves it was not the only way. Starvation, privation of sleep,
While analyzing “The Torture Myth” and “The Case for Torture”, it is very clear to see the type of rhetorical appeals used to persuade the audience. Anne Applebaum, the writer of “The Torture Myth” --in context of the decision of electing a new Attorney General--would argue that torture is very seldomly effective, violates a person’s rights, and should be outlawed due to the irrational need upon which physical torture is used. On the other hand, Michael Levin strongly argues that physical torture is crucial to solving every imminent danger to civilians. Levin claims that if you don’t physically torture someone, you are being weak and want to allow innocent people to die over something that could have been simply done.
Human suffering anywhere concerns men and women everywhere”. There is so much bad form and enduring, shouting out for attention victims of yearning, of racism and political abuse in Chile, for occasion, or in the occasion journalists and artists, prisoners in such a large number of terrains administered by the left and by the
The sentence, “I wanted to keep myself pure; and, under the most adverse circumstances, I tried hard to preserve my self-respect; but I was struggling alone in the powerful grasp of the demon Slavery; and the monster proved too strong for me,” exonerates Jacobs while pinning the crime on the corrupt social institution, slavery (48). To further this point, Jacobs employs the rhetorical device of personification to describe slavery in terms of human attributes. In effect, Jacobs transforms the ideology that is slavery into a material object upon which the reader can place blame. Each carefully chosen word works toward Jacobs’ ultimate goal of revealing the underbelly of benign paternalism, the backbone of Southern
They were hanged from chains and whipped till they were no longer able to scream. This unjust treatment was aimed to tame mental individual from “lashing out.” Their mental conditions were unrecognized; they were forced to endure harsh “punishments” due to their mental state of mind. The stand
Karen Hollinger is a professor of English at Atlantic University, an author and is also a very strong feminist. Hollinger’s essay, “The Monster as Woman: Two Generations of Cat People,” is an essay merely expressing how most monsters in novels or films are characterized as masculine identities and that viewers forget how powerful feminine identities in novels and films can be. Hollinger’s goal in this essay is to explain that feminine monsters are just as frightening all masculine monsters. She uses many references to movies with feminine monsters and expresses how powerful they are compared to masculine monsters and also expresses that males and females have castration anxieties. I think Hollinger succeeded in a sophisticated way because she
To show his perception on the very cruel slaveholders, Douglass uses a multitude of adjectives to create an image in his reader’s mind, while also using metaphors to better comprehend the situation. For example, Douglass stated, “No words, no tears, no prayers, for his gory victim, seemed to move his iron heart from its bloody purpose.” By using this metaphor, Frederick Douglass made the reader question how one could be so cruel to another human being. By visualizing one whipping another without any guilt, it makes the audience understand the inhumanity of slavery. In total, this metaphor creates a agonizing image in the reader’s
Reliability is an intriguing topic within the world of literature due to the vast amount of speculation on what makes a narrator reliable or unreliable. It comes down to whether or not the narrator’s words are trusted. Ralph Ellison’s narrator in Invisible Man (I.M.) is not a reliable narrator. Within the novel, I.M. is proven to be emotional, naive, and has undergone traumatic events in the course of the novel. These aspects of the narrator cause his recollection to be untrustworthy; however.
Looking at this passage in the context of the rest of Narrative of Life, the woman being beaten is not only innocent and undeserving of the whipping but she is also whipped to the extent of blood pouring from her wounds. Douglass’s specific phrasing, “(amid heart-rending shrieks from her, and horrid oaths from him)”, is a clear example of who the victim is and the mentality of the perpetrator. By going into such graphic detail of the beating of the enslaved woman, Douglass evokes more pathos and empathy from the female
(King, 263). The use of words like victim, horrors, heavy with the fatigue, are all there to make the
