Tomas Kirklin. English 260. Paul Acosta. 5/9/17. Paper

Tomas Kirklin English 260 Paul Acosta 5/9/17 Paper 3: Representing the body in Slavery Central to the experience to slavery is the body. Every tale, every Movie, and every story you have ever heard has concentrated on the slave and their body either with detail of how scared it is or what color and features it represents. And this is one mode of stripping a human being of their humanity, to reduce their existence to only their body and give them nothing else to look at or look forward to. Only having your body to look forward to, or only knowing that you are you because of your body makes you nothing less than an animal some might say. And this consequently has brought tensions that emerge between the literal and symbolic experience and†¦show more content†¦His first Epiphany is when he realizes what slavery is. He realizes that he is different from most of the other kids in his life, the white kids when asked can tell him their age but him being a slave and having a different color body, he doesn’t get the pri vilege of knowing his own age, he says â€Å"The white children could tell their ages. I could not tell why I ought to be deprived of the same privilege.† (942). And Frederick Douglass in the beginning also saw what it meant to be in the body of a slave, he got to see firsthand what it meant to literally be a slave when his aunt was getting wiped, and although he wasn’t suffering by physical pain he was still suffering he says â€Å"It was a most terrible spectacle. I wish I could commit to paper the feelings with which I beheld it† (944). So we can tell in this part of the story that he understand at least what it means to be a slave in the literal form, what he is yet to understand is what it means to be a slave in the symbolic way, what it means to not have any freedom yet. But that shortly changes after in the story. The second epiphany that shows him what it means symbolically to be a slave is when later in the book he is sent to Baltimore to serve under ne w masters and that is where he learn the power of information and education. His new master’s wife started to teach him how to read and write, and that gets the master’s wife the woman in big trouble. But by that time, he had