History

The Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglas is a concise biographical account which he tells a story of his life under slavery. This moving literary commentary is based on Fredrick slavery and how his attempt to eventually escape leads him to settling in the North of the United States. At the age of twenty, Fredrick became involved in the campaigns against slavery in a movement famously known as the abolitionist Movement. This literary piece is an American slave narrative that was written by him. Fredrick uses clear language to depict how violence was used against slaves, thus offering a mental insight into the dynamics of power between the slaves and their masters. This paper seeks to examine the role that violence played as written down by Fredrick Douglas, explanation on how gender determined the type of violence period as well as the whole experience of slavery.

The Narrative of the Life Fredrick Douglas is more than a story about the evils bad things of slavery in the American society. Touching on important issues to all Americans, the narrative includes ideas of values of social justice, freedom and equal rights that condemns violence against all those who do not have the legal powers to protect themselves. Violence was used as the traumatizing tool to treating the slaves. For instance, in this narrative, Douglas gives a tale of how his childhood was marred with slavery, his struggle to escape and his triumph over stereotypical restraints put upon because of his color (Douglas, 196014-19).

Douglas provides a terrible and detailed account of violence throughout the narrative. Without interest on exaggerating, the author wanted to paints a truthful picture of the senseless violence of slavery. Through this description, it is plausible to note that violence was a justification by the white society as the best way to handle the slave because slaves were property owned by the master and were subject to mob justice, whipping and other forms of physical infliction. On the plantations for instance, slaves were violently forced to work for longer hours without rest and those who were not around slavery were sheltered to the true events that happened to slaves on a daily basis. Douglas offers us an exciting insight on how the slaves were treated at his time right from childhood until when he escaped.

Slave masters did not differentiate from children, men or female slaves. To them, a slave was a slave and thus they all merited to be treated violently as well as inhumane although it is only the degree of violence that differed. For instance, the wifes of masters did treat children of the slaves very cruel and to some extent this children were produced illegitimately by the masters. Such children had to accompany their mothers to the plantations while naked. In addition, slaves received one blanket but without beds and generally, slaves were severely beaten by their masters and masters wife to basically prove a point that they were not human and thus not worthy of any decent treatment. To make the matter worse, slaves were enticed to betray and spy on others. Those who followed this understanding were rewarded by their master. This phenomenon, although it is not overtly conceptualized as violence, did strip of the slaves their sense of brotherhood and family unity. Those slaves who did not oblige to telling on other slaves were beaten and traumatized psychologically, such that they remained insecure before other slaves as well as slave owners.

Moreover, in light of the narrative of Fredrick Douglas, violence took various forms. Douglas speaks of slavery as the activity that was executed by violence. He speaks of it in terms of heavy work, the routine of work and how work was to be done in all kind of weather and on any type of day. Accordingly, this form of life made Douglas to break in body, soul and spirit. Considering that the slave masters could not allow slaves to rest or subject them to favorable working conditions resonate the notion that they were punitively treating them as beast. It is plausible to note that violence played a center stage role in the whole practice of slavery.

Slaves themselves, due to unfavorable conditions that their masters treated them with, developed to be brutes that could exercises violence to other slaves. This is true as Douglas describes slavery as the darkest night. The gloomy mood enhanced in this narrative shed more light on the reality of violence in the entire story of slavery in America. For instance, Douglas describes that their masters were ghostly and terrifying which shows that they dreaded them. Douglas uses this narrative to portray the hardships that he was faced with as a slave and how beaten his soul and his life truly became (Douglas, 1960 23-31).

Throughout the narrative, discrepancy between the fact that slaves were human beings and the slave owners treated them as property is shown. Through violence, slaves actually and frequently passed between their masters regardless of where their slave families were. The only value that the master attached to the slaves resides on the proposition that they had to perform productive labor.

Essentially, and on the basis of this premise, the masters often treated slaves like livestock, beasts of burden and mere animals without a reason. Douglas thus presents this treatment of human as objects to be cruel, absurd and constructed within the precincts of violence.

Through violence, Douglas argues that slaves were kept ignorant hence giving slaveholders a chance to perpetuate slavery. From the birth of the slave children, the masters prevented them from acquiring birth certificates and as they grew up, they were not allowed to go to school and acquire knowledge. This illiteracy model kept slaves from getting a sense of sufficiency and capability hence controlled them as they pleased.

Gender determined the kind of violence one was to get. Women appear in the narrative as not as full characters. Although they were not physically beaten up or whipped, the images of their abused bodies depict how violence was used against them. For instance, Douglas aunt Hester, Mary and Henrietta appear only in the scenes that demonstrates how their masters abused them. The womens mangled and emaciated bodies are meant to incite pain and outrage to the unnaturalness of slavery. Gender thus dictated the nature of violent treatment on a slave was subjected to (Douglas, 1960 89-94).

The behaviours of the slave masters depict the damaging effect of slavery. Douglas recounts how many slave master were tempted to rape and adultery, thereby fathering children with their female slaves. Because such approach is a threat to the masters family, the father of the child is forced to perpetually punish his own child or sell the child of as the wife to the master becomes cruel and resentful to the child and the female slave.

In Conclusion, The Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglas is an example of a historical document and literary piece that employs a variety of rhetorical. Slave narrative is a concise revelation of the historical perspective of how slavery impacted on the human dignity and well as moral decadency of both the masters and slaves It offers a concise account of how largely deals with how adversely slavery affected the physical as well as psychological orientations of the slaves.