Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Quotes Flashcards
Direct quotes from the text
Degrading language used to describe her father?
‘he was merely a piece of property’
What is treating slaves as human described as?
‘blasphemous doctrine’
What was her statement in the preface?
her desire to ‘add my testimony to that of abler pens to convince people of the Free States what slavery really is’
How has the system treated women?
‘She may be an ignorant creature, degraded by the system that has brutalised her from childhood, but she has a mother’s instincts, and is capable of feeling a mother’s agonies.’
This uses rhetorical shape strategies which are deployed with great tact, such as the syntactical shape and use of repetition - reference to the slave mother in general rather than the first person
What did Dr Flint attempt to do?
‘destroy [her] pure principles’
What did she realise after her mother died?
‘for the first time, I learned, by the talk around me, that I was a slave’
What she wants to happen to her children?
’rather see [her children] killed than have them given up to [Dr Flint’s] power’
How society views mothers?
’nobody respects a mother who forsakes her children’
Hypocrisy of Christian slave holders?
‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself’
‘But I was her slave, and I suppose she did not recognise me as her neighbour’
Metaphor of what slaves are forced to drink?
‘the cup of sin, and shame, and misery’
What her story ends with?
‘Reader, my story ends with freedom; not in the usual way, with marriage’
This subverts patriarchal expectations and explores commonalities with readership
Description of a female slave being punished?
‘her mistress ordered he to be stripped and whipped’
she committed suicide to ‘escape the degradation and the torture’
Mississippi senator’s description of slavery?
Senator Brown - ‘a great moral, social and political blessing; a blessing to the master, and a blessing to the slave!’
