Author Archives: westbroo

Westbrook Blog Post 11/17/17 — Possession as an American ideal

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Since our discussion on Tuesday, I’ve been thinking about possession in the context of American culture. The concept of possession has been extremely relevant in the news as well as in my classes. With today’s “purge” of sexual predators, I find that the cause of these incidents are driven by the desire to possess two things: women and power. In fact, the mistreatment of women most often stems from the desire to possess them. It is apparent in Zeitoun, where Zeitoun stalks Kathy and physically abuses her for fear of no longer “possessing” her. In American history, the possession of things, and people, is an essential pillar in one’s position in society. In revolutionary times, the possession of property determined one’s citizenship rights. In the antebellum South, the possession of slaves became a status symbol. And even today, the possession of women (as wives, girlfriends, mistresses, etc.) is still a demonstration of one’s power. When observed altogether, it seems as though American culture was built around the possession of things and people. This may be why the second part of Black Boy caused such discomfort in the public discourse. The distinct communist tone (in other words, the rejection of possession) pushed the novel in a new, frightening direction.

Blog Post 9/8/17

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Something that I noticed in Jacobs’s writing was how much women affected her story. She was herself a woman, and in her chapter “Trials of Girlhood,” she talked about how beauty is a great burden on women because it makes their lives more difficult. Jacobs also was protected and guided by her grandmother while she was in slavery. After she ran away, she was taken in by yet another woman who protected her until Jacobs was truly free. While Douglass made some comments about women in his writing, he mostly centered around his own journey and the greater injustice of slavery as a whole. I find that Jacobs’s writing is more compelling because her identity is twice-disadvantaged: she is both black and a woman. In class, Martha mentioned that Jacobs was more popular in England while Douglass was more popular here. We pondered about the causes for that, and it is possible that Jacobs was less popular in America because she was more overt in her writing. Like I mentioned in class on Tuesday, Douglass’s writing could possible be taken out of context of slavery and speak to a greater truth on human existence as a whole. This is more difficult to do with Jacobs’s writing. Professor Rodrigues said that her work would have been seen as explicit in her time, and while she was a part of the growing abolitionist movement in the United States, her writing could have made Americans uncomfortable. It is evident that Jacobs’s gender heavily influenced her writing. Her double-minority identity may have made it easier for her to be overshadowed in the abolitionist movement. Douglass is seen as an American hero today, but Jacobs is hardly known in modern American culture.