“We Were But Property – Not a Mother, and the Children God Had Given Her”: The Figure of a Child in Abolitionist Literature
Keywords:
slave childhood, sorrowing child, abolitionist literature, slave narratives, H.B. StoweAbstract
This article discusses the use of the figure of sorrowing child in slave narratives and in texts by abolitionists and draws attention to the way abolitionist rhetoric employed the sharp kontrast between the period’s idealization of childhood as a state of innocence and purity and the reality of slave childhood. It points to the ways abolitionist literature challenged the “paternalistic” justification of slavery and exposed it as inhibiting the performance of the ideal of childhood.
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