“How ‘The Birth of a Nation’ Silences Black Women” relates to many of the women that are portrayed in “The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass”. The film aims to bring to light the nature of rape during slavery and how this fueled Nat Turner’S revolution. It also takes into account that even though Nat Turner may have been the hero, black women weren’t allowed to voice their mistreatments. Frederick Douglass wrote about both white women and of black women and how they differed greatly but also how eerily similar their struggles were. Douglass wrote about the slave master’s wife that had taught him how to read. Once her husband found out, he immediately told her to stop and she would suffer the consequences had she continued. Women were treated as inferior to men regardless of their race during slavery and couldn’t do anything about it. Douglass also wrote about his birth mother and how he was separated from her to ensure his inability to form an attachment to a woman. He wrote about the slaves being used as mere tools for procreation. Douglass also wrote about the hardening effects slavery had a white woman’s soul. They would start out as gentle and caring individuals but would turn into cold-hearted women because they were forced to be evil. Women were treated unjustly and forced to conform to the rules of men. Women were the victims of cruelty and Douglass was aware of this unjust treatment. And in many aspects women are still subjugated to the pressures of men.

The article How ‘The Birth of a Nation’ Silences Black Women from the New York Times brings to light how the horrors faced by female slaves in America are not depicted in our discussions today. Rather, the prospective of the male slave and the emasculative life they endured are depicted instead. The argument that the author, Salamishah Tillet, provides is that in all of the narratives about Nat Turner, the raping of women and the violence they faced was just another factor or source of motivation for his rebellion. Attention is taken away from the rapes and focused more on the effects on Nat Turner himself. When referring to the victimization of enslaved African American women, Tillet states, “…their voices sidelined to the plot of Turner’s realizations of his own manhood in the horror of slavery.” When asked to think of this in the context of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, I think of the raping and torture of his Aunt Hester. The impact this had of Frederick Douglass was evident. He speaks angrily of the event and even says how he feels like the attack on her made him feel victimized as well. This is an autobiography so one would assume Frederick Douglas would just provide the impact these violent occurrences had on him. Even so, he still depicted the “importance” of the events that women had to go through. What the New York Times article is suggesting is that in narratives and movies trying to bring light to the struggles of slaves, the hardships of being a female slave, which were just as bad if not worse than that of men, are often overlooked and silenced by the attention of the victimization of the male slaves’ manhood.

Birth of a Nation:

In Douglass’ autobiography it mentions a few instances of women being silenced and not having a voice. An event that really sticks with Douglas is watching the beating of his dear Aunt. It is described as her being stripped naked and beat hard being told she cant scream. This really disgusted Douglas and is something that he will never forget, all the blood and tears. In the New York Times article it goes more into depth with women in slavery. They had absolutely no voice, they would get raped and not be able to do anything about it. These women would be forced to carry their rapists (typically the slave owner) baby and after the birth be ripped apart from each other before a few months. In the film A Birth of A Nation a woman named Esther had to leave her husband and go inside the slave owners house, knowing what was going to happen.  She walks out and doesn’t say a word you can just see it in her face of what is described as the final blow to her dignity.

The Metamorphosis:

In the novel The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, Gregor a traveling salesman wakes up one morning to find himself turned into an insect. I found the whole story pretty confusing and was unclear of the message. In the beginning you see Gregor waking up unclear about what was going on with his body and going into great detail about trying to get out of bed. He also talks a lot about where he works and how much worse his boss is than everyone else’s. When he is able to open the door, to greet his mother father and manager. They are all terrified his mom starts crying and his dad covers his eyes, his manager is utterly confused. Eventually Gregor and his family realize this is their new life, and Gregor can no longer leave his room, scared that he will terrify his family. His sister begins to bring him his food. You can tell that his father is done with him when one day he throws apples at him and one permanently gets stuck in his back. The ending of the story comes with Gregor leaving his room while wanting to hear his sister play the violin. The family has boarders staying with them and they get a sight of Gregor, and leave without paying. Gregors family eventually decides that they can no longer handle this “creature” living with them and realize they have to get rid of him, Gregor over hears this and becomes severely depressed which eventually leads to his death.

Kafka’s Metamorphosis starts out by telling us about a man’s sudden and unexplainable transformation. Instead of harping on this outlandish occurrence, the story immediately shifts to describe the sad life of the man who transformed, Gregor. We learn that he is a lonely man thanks to his job, and that he has to work because of a family debt he has to repay. Gregor’s life prior to his transformation was clearly in a state of despair, and his transformation into a hideous creature doesn’t help. His family, who should be supportive, is terrified of him, with the exception of his sister. Being the only one in his family with an income, you would assume they would treat him better, but because of his transformation he is now useless to them. I would consider Gregor’s transformation something of an expression of his emotions based on what was described about his life as a worker. His job was so detrimental to his life that him being a self loathing monster hated by his own family couldn’t have been much worse. Gregor’s hardships are all brought upon by his own family, and his desire to provide for them. While everyone in his family was clearly able to work, they relied upon Gregor solely, and lived a decent lifestyle as evidenced by their maid. Even at the end of the story, Kafka makes a point to mention Grete the sister’s beauty, implying she could be married, possibly as a source of income.

In Douglass’s autobiography, he usually associates women of color with pain and suffering. Although during this time period most women were seen as proper, wearing voluptuous dresses and always acting lady like, women of color had it much differently. Douglass recreates disturbing accounts of black women slaves being beaten and abused by their masters. Slave owners saw these women only as pieces of property in which they could do as they please with them with no consequences to follow. According to the article it says that these slaves that were raped are usually “doubly marginalized,” meaning that they are treated as extremely insignificant human being despite the horrors that they went through. This can be seen by the beating of Aunt Hester in Douglass’s autobiography and by how little people react or care about the situation. The beating of female slaves was a common occurrence on plantations and made them feel even more worthless and abused than they already are. In most cases women were separated from their husbands and children and thus were able to get no support from loved ones after these traumatic experiences. The article describes how husbands sold to different plantations than their wives, “had no more power to protect her than the man who lies bound upon a plundered vessel’s deck has power to protect his wife on board the pirate-schooner disappearing in the horizon.” One of the most powerful statements in this movie regarding the treatment of women can best be seen in the director’s choice to have a raped slave named Esther to have no dialogue at all in the movie. The actress who plays this slave says, “all her emotions are communicated through facial expressions.” This is expressed during moments of ferocious violence in Douglass’s book. Both this article and Douglass’s autobiography open the reader up to seriousness and severity of the treatment of women of color during this time period.

After reading the article in the New York Times that described a helpless colored slavery woman in the movie called, “The Birth of a Nation”. The main theme of the movie is a black woman whose name is Esther was the subject to be raped. Her emotions were so silent but her facial expression shows a lot about her feeling in that situation, painful, helpless, and hopeless. This tells us that most women slaves often suffer the worst tortures from their slavery owners, but they cannot do or say anything about that. This connects to Fredrick Douglass ‘s narrative, in his narrative’s beginning, Douglass shows us how her aunt, Hester, suffered tortures from her slavery owner, Mr. Plummer. There is an image about her aunt who was stripped her clothes and beaten by the anger man. Douglass also shows us that some of the slave masters even let other men raped their women slaves in order to earn money.  Esther and Hester, woman slaves had suffered unimaginable violence and abuse continuously, they were unable to fight back or do anything to against their master in that era. They had suffered not only physiologically, but also physically. Women of colored had been treated very unfairly in that era around the world.  After Douglass witnessed the helpless, painful, and hopeless of woman slaves, his feeling has been abused. In addition to that, witnessing what his aunt had been through and all other sufferings of the slavery system have made him hate the slavery. Those experiences have led him to become a leader of the movement of abolition.

“The Metamorphosis,” a novel written by Franz Kafka in the early 20th century is a bizarre story of a man, waking up and somehow bizarrely turning into an insect type creature. The story is so bizarre it is hard to even depict the message Kafka wants the audience to know. I trying to discern Kafka’s message I made the comparison to the novel “Frankenstein”. In both novels new creature were created – and in both novels we don’t know how they were created. I believe that there is significance to this fact, because just as we learned that Mary Shelly didn’t want the creation of Frankenstein to take away from the true meaning of the book, so too Kafka didn’t want the creation of Samsa to take away from the message. What Kafka is really trying to say in the novel is that change can happen to all of us, and how we, as well as our peers respond to that change may differ. We see this right from the start when Samsa boss, and parents are outside his house, looking to see if anything happened to him. Initially everyone responds differently, his boss runs away, his mother faints, and his father pushes him back into the house. He then finds out the next day that his sister as accepted the fact he has changed and begins to help him. The fictional aspect of this book is extraordinary and the multitude of holes in the plot allow it to be highly interpretable in different ways.

In another story, Douglass’s Narrative shows us the road from slavery to freedom. At the beginning of the book, Douglass is a slave in both body and mind. When the book ends, he gets both his legal freedom as well as his mental one. He constantly has moments of insights or “epiphanies” that allow him to dissolve what is going on around him and how he can act on it. These events are turning points in Douglass’s life, but they also help show how he got there, and what he had to learn along the way. The first epiphany is Douglass’s realization about what slavery is. He sees his Aunt Hester always get beaten and since he was so young it was hard for him to understand what was going on. So his first turning point is sort of basic, but also important: realizing that he is a slave and all that, that entails. Baltimore was a whole new world for him, with a lot of new experiences, but the most important thing was that he was able to understand the power of education. He has this second epiphany when his master’s wife started teaching him how to read. Douglass finds ways to continue educating himself, but the real lesson is that slavery exists not because the masters are better than their slaves, but because they keep their slaves ignorant. His third epiphany happens, however, when he decides that he’d rather die than be treated like a slave anymore. But even after he’s free, he discovers that his journey isn’t over. This is his final epiphany: even after he acquires his own freedom, he realizes he can’t rest until all slavery is abolished. He not only becomes an abolitionist activist himself; he writes the narrative of his life to teach others, both whites and blacks alike, how to follow in his footsteps.

A man named Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to discover that he’s become a “monstrous vermin.” He uses the term monstrous vermin to show how hideous this creature really is while he is also aware of how humiliating people will view him as. Samsa then manages to crawl to his bedroom door, and expose his deplorable new buggy form. Everyone is completely appalled by how he looks and his mom begins to freak out. Now after seeing how his family reacted he knows that he’s been sort of degraded from a human being to a creature. His father is unhappy with what has happened so he pushes him into the room and closes the door behind him. Samsa and his family get into a routine after they accept what has happened to their beloved brother and son. Grete, Samsa’s sister is the only one who is really taking care of him. His mom also helped clean out his room so that he would have more room to roam around. Samsa’s father, however, does not seem to be accepting his son and, one day he throws apples at him one day, which paralyzes Samsa for a month. After he heals he roams into a room where his sister is playing violin and there are boarders watching her play her violin. As they see Gregor crawling in they are horrified and leave immediately without paying rent. After being fed up by Samsa, the family discusses and then insists on the idea that Samsa must be gotten rid of. Samsa hears this, becomes seriously depressed, and dies the next day

While most people believe that African American slaves were men who were subjected to menial labor, Frederick Douglass focuses on the fact that women were slaves too. Contrary to popular belief, in some cases, women were subjected to a more degrading and harsher form of abuse. Douglass speaks about his Aunt Hester who was brutally tortured and raped by their slave owner. There is evident hatred in the way that Douglass speaks and recounts the brutality and inhumane acts that they suffered when he speaks about watching his Aunt being physically abused.

The article discusses the film “The Birth of a New Nation” speaks about the atrocities and heinous act that Esther faced during her time as a slave. Esther was raped, and physically abused by her slave owner on many different occasions for absolutely no reason. The article put an emphasis on Esther’s silence. Her silence is portrayed as a lack of power since she essentially had no say.

There is clearly a similarity between The Narrative of Frederick Douglass and the article that discusses the film “The Birth of a New Nation.” They discuss the issue of slavery, particularly in colored women that have been taken advantage by their slave owners. The black women are looked at as victims because they have done no harm yet are consistently tormented and abused. Douglass has given many inferences where he has seen his Aunt Hester being beaten and the article has also shown how women are losing their say and are afraid to act. In most cases, these women’s husbands couldn’t do anything for them except for hold them in the hopes of lessening the pain they were bound to endure.