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

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.