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.

I found the “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,” Frederick Douglas’s autobiography of his life as a slave, extremely informative in that it was accurate account of the trials and tribulations of a slave. It was interesting to see the various subject matters Douglas focuses on. In retelling his story he spotlights some of the most serious problems during the time in everything from his craving for freedom and education to the mistreatment of women. Additionally, he shows the importance the slave owners put on the suppression of slave knowledge. His wanting for freedom is enabled by his education, and he partly attributes his eventual escape to his learnedness and background. One thing I noticed was the glaring connection between the way the slave owners kept the slaves contained and Douglas’s eventual escape to freedom. The slave owners contained the slaves by keeping them uneducated. They refused to let them learn to read or write so that they wouldn’t be able to become educated. We clearly see this when Sophia Auld started to teach Douglas to read and write until her husband vehemently opposed her. He explains that the reason the slaves are so docile is because they are uneducated. Later on in his life, Douglas realizes that the reason for his escape was his education, and determines the way to achieve eventual freedom is to educate. I feel Douglas wrote his autobiography for this reason, in order to educate America on the hardships of slaves. His works were highly influential and responsible for abolitionist movements across America.

The biggest surprsie in the film is that the role of woman does not change, even across countries. The film Birth of a Nation shows a slave named Esther who was raped and has all of her emotions communicated through facial expressions.  She has no lines dialogue in the film. It also happened in Asia a lot in the past, or even in some rural areas today. A long time ago, men considered women as their possession and not as humans. A man chose a woman when they married and a woman had to be silent, even if their husband had affairs with other women. Polygamy is also still acceptable in some countries now. I believe women have been suppressed and unfairly discriminated against within many fields of society. For example the glass ceiling  barrier that prevents women from reaching the executive suite. I question that there are many films and histories regarding racism and freedom where men were running things. But what about women’s rights or the things that women were or are running? There are tons of unbelievable and unacceptable discrimination against women, some of which protect violence and female genital mutilation all over the world.

I was really shocked by the scene where one of the masters called Mr. Severe whips a woman and it causes the blood to run for half an hour at the time from the Douglass autobiography. I cannot even imagine this scene and believe it actually happened at that time. Birth of a Nation and Douglass’s autobiography strongly show how weak women were during that time and how cruel human beings can be as well.

The New York Times article How ‘The Birth of a Nation’ Silences Black Women exploits the absence of the perspective and narratives of female slaves. Although slavery was a horrid time for all black Americans, women undoubtedly had to deal with much worse conditions than men. While a racial construct separated black people from white people, gender constructs separated males from females. Gender stratification made women powerless compared to men and therefore easily susceptible to beatings and often rape by white slave owners. Although in Douglas’ narrative there weren’t really any female slave characters, he portrayed several vidid and horrific scenes of female slaves such as the beating of his aunt Hester in the very first chapter. Douglas stated he felt so traumatized that he himself felt as if he was the victim.   While rape among female slaves was quite common, it is often ignored today when covering this time period. As stated in the New York Times article,  in The Birth of a Nation while there are depictions of women being raped, the viewer does not see the female narrative but rather the tole it has on Nat Turner.  Similarly in the Douglas autobiography, there are scenes with women being raped but we only see how it affects Frederick Douglas. As views or readers, we really don’t get an accurate portrayal of how female slaves coped with these hardships. The conclusion I’ve drawn from the article is that it is hard for us as a society to anknowlge that the reoccurring rape among female slaves was at one point reality, therefore directors and authors often times find it easier to avoid it.

It is clear from both the film “The Birth of a Nation,” as well as Frederick Douglas’ autobiography, “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,” that the abuse and mistreatment of women of color during those times was overshadowed by the accomplishments and acts of  the men. In the film, although the primary motive behind Nat Turners rebellion was the mistreatment of women, Salamisha Tillet explains that, “the women themselves are doubly marginalized.” The film is focused much more on Turners brave rebellion than the victimization and abuse on the women. They play a minuscule role in the main storyline and are depicted as helpless victims silenced by the abuse. Similar to the film, the novel also portrays women of color as powerless sufferers unable to respond to their continuous abuses. Douglas rarely talks about the abuse, and when he does, it is not completely noteworthy. He describes his aunts traumatic abuse by her owner, however she is not a complete character in the story. Her, as well Henrietta, Mary, and Henny, are really only used to highlight the fact of abuse of white slave owners rather than play an actual role in the story. From the criticism of the film we can see that this is a common portrayal of colored women in the south. They should not only be looked upon as figures of mistreatment, but also as characters with expressions, roles, and influences. Unequivocally, women of color are not being recognized enough for the important roles they’ve played in history – not just as victims of abuse.