ENGL 4384: Senior Seminar Student Anthology Spring 2015 Dr. Stacy Boyd, Professor Department of English & Philosophy Printed on campus by UWG Publications and Printing. To Tell a Free Story: Representations of Race and Slavery Representing Womanhood in Slavery 5 “My Body Belongs to Slavery; My Mind Belongs to Me”: Exploring 7 Female Sexuality in Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave By Hannah Parr Enslaving the Weaker Sex: Black and White Womanhood in 19 Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) and Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave (2013) By Hannah Grubbs The White Mistresses Loss of Control and Desire to Inflict Pain in 31 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) and 12 Years a Slave (2013) By Shabina Panjwani Deconstructing Power in Representations of Slavery 41 Illusions of Dominance and Submissiveness Portrayed in Chomsky’s 43 Roots (1977) and Zwick’s Glory (1989) By Brandie Smith Bound and Divided: The Effects of Patriarchy and Slavery on 55 Mixed-Raced Women in the Film Adaptations Queen (1993) and Belle (2013) By Ra’Niqua Lee Representing Race in Adolescent Texts 67 Retelling a Traditional Narrative in Christopher Paul Curtis’ Bud, 69 Not Buddy (1999) By Mary Camille Land Instructing Adolescents on Race and Slavery: Using Moral Develop- 79 ment Theory to Examine Mulligan’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) By Katie Saba Representing Slavery in Sci-Fi Dystopia 91 Heritage of Slavery in Never Let Me Go: Slave Experience as Sci-Fi 93 (2010) By Sebastian Lubbers Representing Slavery within Cultural and Social Norms 103 “From Bodies to Souls”: The Effects of Christianity on American 105 Slavery in the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) and What to the Slave is the Fourth of July (1852) By Megan Marshall Comparing News Headlines in Modern Day Mass Media with Rep- 117 resentations of Slavery in Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave (2013) By Cera Alexis Smith Surviving the System of Slavery: Stephen as the ‘Trickster’ in Quentin 127 Tarantino’s Django: Unchained (2012) By Tim Patterson Cover Art: “Slavery Real to Reel” The images captured in the piece all instill a sense of oppression and bondage. None of the three symbols specifically give away the gender, age, or identity, such as slaves were not allowed to retain their identities or names. This piece is a direct representation of the nameless, faceless abuse, and punishment slaves received at the hands of their captors. The film strip is intentionally continued on either side, as the three images within do not symbolize the beginning and end of slavery, rather the standard treatment that continued for far too long, and is unfortunately lost in the middle of the long, tumultuous story of slavery in the west. By Michael Davis, April 21, 2015 Representing Womanhood in Slavery Damned Queen. Born and bred to the field. A nigger among niggers, and God give 'er to me. A lesson in the rewards of righteous livin'. All be observant ta that. All! —Edwin Epps Hannah Parr “My Body Belongs to Slavery; My Mind Belongs to Me”: Exploring Female Sexuality in Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave BY HANNAH PARR Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave presents a consensual sex scene and a rape scene to demonstrate how an enslaved woman gained agency over her mind and body in a time when “slave women’s sexual rela- tions with white men were primarily based on force” (Altink 271). A slave master considered slaves as his property, which meant that if he wanted to have sexual relations with a slave, he could choose any one of them. Although masters owned the female slave’s body, she could take back control through her mental state. In the film, Patsey takes control of her mental state through blacking out when her master, Mr. Epps, rapes her. A female slave could also embrace her sexuality through con- sensual sex with another slave, as the unnamed slave woman does with the protagonist, Solomon Northup. The institution of slavery in the antebellum South stripped female slaves of humanity through viewing them as property, of sexual safety through the constant fear of rape, and stability through the constant migration of slaves. Slavery strips her of these characteristics in reality, but she also stripped of them in repre- sentations of slavery. The topic of a slave woman’s s is not as analyzed or questioned very often, as most slavery films tell the male story, as seen in Edward Zwick’s Glory. 12 Years a Slave, however, does not strip the slave woman of agency in its representation of slavery; instead, the film 7 grants her power to claim her sexuality and her mind during a period that threatened the safety of the female body every day. Although a female slave had the power to claim her mind and sexuality, forming relationships was difficult during a period of slavery expansion, otherwise known as the antebellum era (1800-1860). Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin (which separated the seeds from the cotton) made the already profitable fabric even more valuable. The growing demand of cotton from British textile mills meant that there was now a growing demand for free labor workers. The antebellum era gave rise to a new kind of slavery that dominated the United States. In the article “The Everyday Life of Enslaved People in the Antebel- lum South,” Calvin Schermerhorn describes the era as an “agricultural revolution… [Which] profoundly altered the lives of America’s slaves as owners and traders separated families, parted friends, ad orphaned children” (31). In a country that already thrived off free labor, the migration of hundreds of thousands slaves was not an issue for the slave owners and traders. The profits that slave labor brought in to the owners was what motivated the migration. Without the obligation to pay the laborers, the owners and traders could keep all of the profits for themselves, and life a lavish life as black bodies were “weakened by fatigue and hunger, [and] wracked by chronic illnesses and injury… daily existence often came down to an endless struggle of will and endurance” (Schermerhorn 31). The danger of fieldwork and the lack of proper clothing, nutrition, and sleeping arrangements for slaves presented the risk of death at any moment. Along with the fact that owners constantly sold slaves to other plantations, the looming threat of death made it impossible for a slave to have a sense of stability, thus, making it difficult for some to form relationships with other slaves, even if sexual relations occur. As described in “’The Strangest Freaks of Despotism’: Queer Sexuality in the Antebellum African American Narratives” Aliyyah L. Abdur-Rahman says, “Slavery had the effect of corrupting and contorting the most basic bonds. The institution of slavery den[ies] slaves basic claims to familial, spousal, and hereditary bonds” (223). The selling and migration of slaves broke families apart, and because slaves never knew how long they would be on a plantation, some of them did not form bonds with others. Nineteenth-century conventions placed a women’s virtue as price- less, but slave masters used sexual violence to dehumanize female slaves. In “Deviant and Dangerous: Pro-Slavery Representations of Jamaican Slave Women’s Sexuality Henrice Altink says, “Female purity was 8 Senior Seminar, Spring 2015 considered priceless in the metropolitan society of the day, the sexual abuse of female slaves was an excellent means… to demonstrate that slavery reduced slaves to a less than human condition” (272). Female slaves were dehumanized in the same way male slaves were through the law of slavery, but unlike male slaves, masters continually violated their bodies. As a result, presentations of slave women deemed them as promiscuous for having sexual relationships that they did not have the right to consent. The hyper-sexualized stereotype was falsely given to slave women because they did was what necessary to survive. If having sexual relations with her master kept her alive or protected her children from a beating, and then she had no choice but to do it. Slave own- ers did not need permission to access a slave’s body because under the law, slaves were property. The high standards placed on white women affected how society viewed slave women although they did not have equal rights to white women. To be a good woman in society, white women had to be submissive, pious, chaste, and domestic. If she missed even one of these qualities, she would be an outcast of society. Even though the threat of rape still presented itself to white women, it was not nearly as common as the rape of black women, especially because the male members of soci- ety actually respected white women. The oppression of white women occurred in society just in a different way. The same way that slavehold- ers used religion to justify slavery, they used it to make white women submissive. The Bible talks about how a woman must be submissive to her husband, and trust every action he takes and every word he says. To question your husband would be to question the will of God, and the fear of God instilled in Christians would prevent a woman to step out of her place. There was only one place allotted for the majority of women in the nineteenth-century, and that was the domestic sphere. Even slave women would work in the house to serve the family or to cook. A woman could not have a career, or run a plantation. The patri- archal society was help up by men, but also by women just as the slaves held the system of slavery in place.