Narrative Of The Life Of Frederick Douglass Synthesis Essay

Frederick Douglass, an eminent human rights leader in the anti-slavery movement, advises high official officers on a range of causes: women’s rights, anti-slavery, and Irish home rule. Before gaining freedom, he acquired the ideological opposition to slavery from reading newspapers and political writings even with the defying ban of literacy for slaves. After a anti-slavery lecturer, William Garrison, urged Douglass, he wrote his first narrative, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, a thought-provoking memoir portraying the hardships of slavery. He vividly illustrated the institution of slavery and its destructive force effectively through the use of imagery and biblical allusions. Comparably, Mary Wollstonecraft,

Douglass refers to the Bible, to demonstrate the negative influence this sacred text had toward slavery. Alluding to the Bible, Douglass has the ability to explain how slave owners justified slavery. For example, he states that “...God cursed Ham, and therefore American slavery is right. If the lineal descendants of Ham are alone to be scripturally enslaved, it is certain that slavery at the south must soon become unscriptural...” (Page 4) as slave owners argument regarding from what is moral and immoral to justify their injustice towards other human beings. Utilizing this illusion creates credibility to be able to refute the common arguments. Douglass wanted to break the bind that slaves didn’t have the power of knowledge through declaring, “Will not a righteous God visit for these thing?” (Page 43), after learning the news of his grandmother’s death. Criticizing Christianity, Douglass explores a new form Christianity through exploiting the authorization over slaves and the ideology of white supremacy. Similarly, Wollstonecraft refers to gender inequality through Biblical allusions of relating animals to humans and environments as to evil. She presents society as "... noisome reptiles and venomous serpents lurk under the rank herbage; and there is voluptuousness pampered by the still sultry air, which relaxes every good disposition before it ripens into virtue" (Para. 1), depicting that the environment is decaying with dangerous serpents referred as humans. Wollstonecraft creates a evil, cynical connotation of serpents to refer humans, more specifically men, being the dangerous animals infecting the