EMILY DICKINSON HARRIET JACOBS

Discuss about Emily Discuss about “Incidents in

Dickinson poetries the Life of a Slave Girl”

LITERATURE OF FRANCES ELLEN

THE CIVIL WAR WATKINS HARPER
Discuss about “Free
Slave Narrative. Labor” (Poem)
 Emily Dickinson rarely ventured beyond the confines of her
family home in Amherst, Massachusetts, but her restless mind and
creativity knew no such boundaries. In her bedroom overlooking the
village graveyard, Dickinson meditated on life and death and wrote
about these subjects with startling originality. Today she and
Walt Whitman are considered the greatest American poets of the
19th century.

Family Ties Dickinson was born in 1830 into a well-to-do

family, which would become the center of her existence. She stood
in awe of her father, a stern, imposing man committed to Puritan
ideals, and felt estranged from her mother, who “did not,”
Dickinson once commented in a letter, “care for thought.” However,
she had a close relationship with her older brother, Austin, and
EMILY DICKINSON her younger sister, Vinnie.
1830-1886
In 1847, Dickinson left home to attend Mount Holyoke Female
Seminary in nearby South Hadley, but she left after just one year.
She missed her family, but she also resented the intense pressure
she felt there to join the church. All her life, Dickinson felt
torn between her own convictions and the religious beliefs of
those around her. This conflict is reflected in many of her poems.
 A Writer’s Life In the 1850s, Dickinson began to devote
herself to poetry. Late at night, she wrote by candlelight. During
the day, she jotted down her thoughts between household chores.
Inspired by her own observations and experiences, Dickinson
composed a remarkable number of profound, gemlike poems.

Perhaps because of this newfound focus on her writing,

Dickinson gradually withdrew from the world. However, she did not
become a total recluse. She entertained occasional visitors in her
home and maintained contact with friends and family by means of a
lively correspondence.

Poetic Legacy Early in 1886, Dickinson wrote a letter to her

cousins that simply read “Called back.” She seemed to have
EMILY DICKINSON realized that she was dying. Following her death, her sister
1830-1886 Vinnie discovered a box full of Dickinson’s poems bound into neat
booklets. As a result of Vinnie’s perseverance, the first volume
of Dickinson’s poetry appeared four years after the poet’s death.
Her poems—1,775 in all—finally revealed to the world the
passionate, witty woman who never flinched from the truth.
 Author’s style
Emily Dickinson’s style is as unique and personal as her
observations about the world. Here are some of the distinctive
stylistic elements you will find in Dickinson’s poetry:

➢ Dense quatrains, or four-line stanzas, that echo the simple

rhythms of church hymns,
➢ Slant rhymes, or words that do not exactly rhyme (“chill”/
“Tulle”),
➢ Inventive Punctuation and Sentence Structure, including the use
of dashes to highlight important words and break up the rhythm
of her poems ,
➢ Irregular capitalization and inverted syntax to emphasize words,
➢ Surprisingly unconventional figurative language, including
similes, metaphors, and personification.
.
 Of all human actions, none speaks so dramatically nor so violently as
war. Of all wars, civil war by its very nature divides a nation’s voice into
factions. Among the diverse literary voices heard during the Civil War, some
of the most powerful were African American.
Often at the urging of abolitionists, former slaves who escaped to the
North published slave narratives detailing their experiences. These tales of
suffering were immensely important to the cause of antislavery. Not simply
autobiography, they were testimony, giving lie to Southern claims that slaves
were happy and well-treated, that slavery was a “positive good” for both
master and slave, and that people of African descent were inferior to whites.
More than that, the narratives made readers care by showing that slaves were
real human beings who suffered and wept and longed for freedom
 Personal experience was central to
the literature of the time, because
everyday life now had great historical
significance. Writers—male and female,
white and black, from the highest
ranking general down to the common foot
soldier—shared “their” Civil War in
diaries and letters.

While these writers addressed their

words to friends and family (or even to
themselves), others, such as President
Abraham Lincoln, wrote for a larger
audience. Still, Lincoln underestimated the
reach of his words. “The world will little
note, nor long remember, what we say here,”
he proclaimed in his Gettysburg Address,
which in fact proved to be one of the most
enduring works of the Civil War era.
 Lincoln’s speech, with its inspiring message
and elevated language, represents the highest
ideals of the period. The fiction created after the
war by realistic writers such as Ambrose Bierce and
Stephen Crane, however, shows the period in a
harsher light. Their stories focus on the human
tragedy of a war that destroyed hundreds of
thousands of American lives, even as it freed many
more.
In the years to come, realism would grow and
refine itself to include the work of writers
countrywide, from the frozen arctic north of Jack
London to the plains of Willa Cather’s frontier. It
would develop to include the work of naturalist
writers who viewed human beings as passive victims
of their environment. Brought on by the brutalities
of the Civil War, realism would become the form
that to some extent still dominates American
literature today
 Known for his bold technique and
unsentimental style, Winslow Homer was one of the
most admired artists of the 19th century. He first
rose to acclaim during the Civil War.
Behind Union Lines When war broke out,
Harper’s Weekly sent Homer south, to draw
illustrations for the magazine. The young artist
camped out with the Union army and shared the
soldiers’ hardships, from meager rations to the
deadly threat of typhoid fever.
Prisoners from the Front (1866), Winslow Homer.
Oil on canvas, 24˝ × 38˝. The Metropolitan Museum
Homer rarely drew a battle scene, spurning
of Art, Gift of Mrs. Frank B. Porter, 1922
(22.207). Photo © 1995 The Metropolitan Museum of
the romantic elements of high drama and heroism.
Art, New York.
Instead, he recorded the reality of everyday life
in camp—the boredom and sadness of men far from
home. In 1863, a critic praised him as “the first
of our artists who has endeavored to tell us any
truth about the war.”

Prisoners from the Front (1866), Winslow Homer.
Oil on canvas, 24˝ × 38˝. The Metropolitan Museum
of Art, Gift of Mrs. Frank B. Porter, 1922
(22.207). Photo © 1995 The Metropolitan Museum of
Art, New York.
Civil War Masterpiece At first glance, the
painting shown here might seem like nothing
special, just soldiers standing in an empty field.
Yet Prisoners from the Front, painted just after
the war ended, won acclaim as the most powerful
painting of the war. Why?
For Americans, this work had a deep symbolic
meaning. In the soldiers, Homer conveys two
opposing worldviews: the romantic, long haired
Southern officer confronts his Northern
counterpart, who eyes him coolly. Behind them, the
devastated landscape of the South tells the story
of how the Civil War ends.
 Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave
Girl is one of the few slave narratives to recount the
anguish of slavery from a female point of view. The book
ranks as one of the most powerful and important examples
of the slave narrative genre

At this point in the narrative, Linda has spent

six weeks at the plantation of old Dr. Flint’s son, Mr.
Flint, making the house ready for his new bride, who is
now at the house. Mr. Flint has said openly that he
plans to break Linda’s willful spirit, as his father had
not been able to do. In addition, Linda has learned that
the next day, her children are to be brought from their
grandmother’s house, where they are loved, to the
plantation, where they will be put to work and used to
keep Linda in line. Be warned that this selection
contains a racial slur.
 This poem, written by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper in 1893,
is reminding the reader about slavery, how these events mustn’t
be forgotten. The author talks a lot about how her clothes don’t
make her feel “in its texture trace the agony of years.” She is
clearly pitiful for the slaves and the conditions they were
forced to live in.
The author wishes to emphasize the themes of discrimination
and gratitude, since the slaves are discriminated for being
African-American, thus Harper is gratified with their suffering
and is mourning their deaths. The reader can easily notice
slavery wasn’t for the oppressed’s actions; it was more about the
oppressor’s lack of humanity and greed for power. Harper uses
lots of slang (o’er it no toiling slave) and symbolism (the
weight of bondsmen’s tears). These literary devices and the
author’s African American heritage make “Free Labor” a reliable
source.