A Recovered Self in Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Date
2017-12
Authors
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Publisher
Faculty Arts in English
Abstract
The present thesis entitled “A Recovered Self in Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of
the life of Olaudah Equiano and Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” explores the
process of changing the mental and physical sufferings of the slave narrators, Equiano and
Jacobs. They transform their miseries into strength through autobiographies and contribute to
the slavery abolition movement respectively; in Europe and America. Both of the narrators were
slaves and sold to different white masters in their early age. They continuously struggle against
the system and extricate themselves which reveal the atrocities of slavery system to the world in
these two texts. They become the representatives of all those who were bound by the slavery
system. Their autobiographies help them to construct a new identity as a writer and as an
abolitionist. Here, the researcher believes that they have been able to transform their
weaknesses into strength with the help of writing.Their ways of being transformed will be
exposed in this paper. To support this claim, the researcher uses ideas and perspectives related
to autobiography, slave narrative, scriptotherapy and anti-slavery movement. Thus, in these
autobiographies, Equiano and Jacobs explore their miserable condition of slave life and their
escape from it. Both of them take the help of writing to recall the past memories and show the
miserable conditions of black slaves.
Description
Keywords
Scriptotherapy, Freedom, Recovered-Self, Abolition