本栏目提供的论文（或essay, paper等）资源可以免费试用，但这些资源并非按照您（或者某位客户）的写作要求定制，这些论文收集于网络，并不代表我们的代写服务质量，其中可能存在语法、用词或者其它错误和不足，请谨慎使用。同时，这些免费论文不应被用于需通过抄袭检测的任意提交程序，我们不保证该论文的唯一性，它很有可能（几乎肯定）无法通过Turnitin等抄袭检测系统的检测。
如果您需要一篇定制的Essay、Paper或其他类型的作业或者论文，请访问我们的“在线委托”页面立即提交订单。ESSAYZHIDAO作为美国和加拿大地区本土论文和作业代写服务机构，拥有超过300名经验丰富的Native Speaker写手，可以迅速为您提供一篇高质量的论文或者作业，并且我们代写的论文完全原创，可以通过任何抄袭检测系统的严格测试。
如果您已经写完了这篇论文但是有些瑕疵，您可以选择我们的论文润色修改服务作文润色修改服务，我们将会帮助您修改格式及语法错误和调整结构，帮您把论文美化到完美。有任何需要您都可以来ESSAYZHIDAO(微信号不分大小写)寻求我们帮助，乐意为您效劳。
“The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
With racism and slavery as norms during the Victorian era, for English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning to write “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” was considered as taboo during her time. Browning was a stark abolitionist, denouncing the treatment of slave-owners towards slaves and the act of slavery in general. When the Emancipation Act was signed in 1833, she rejoiced for the “virtual freedom” of the slaves. Despite the Emancipation Act beginning to take effect, Browning wrote “Runaway Slave” as a way of portraying the atrocities of systematized slavery and the vigor of the slave’s spirit towards freedom in an empathetic and compassionate depiction. The poem was published in 1843 in The Liberty Bell, an annual compilation of abolitionist literary works which ran from 1839 to 1858 and published by the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Fair at the time of the poem.
The persona of “Runaway Slave” is a female slave who escapes from her master to Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts, which was referred to in the poem as “Pilgrim’s Point.” She professes her sorrow and frustrations from the horrors that she experienced: her husband had been taken away from her; she had been raped by her master, and; she gave birth to a baby with a white skin. In much of the story, she asks for clarity in a world of absurdity – why is there, after all, slavery in “the land of the free”? Why does a loving God allow human beings to subject each other to cruelty? Why does it have to be the blacks who have to experience this cruelty?
One of the hallmarks of “Runaway Slave” is the development of the persona throughout the poem. Clearly, this is indicated by the persona herself. She was once an innocent village girl who fell in love with a fellow black. Come the slavers, who take away her lover and, with no sympathy, took advantage of her in her tearful grievance. Bearing a child who takes more after her masters with its skin that is “too white,” she curses her situation and questions God for permitting such evils to exist, that though black things and white things are made equally beautiful, black people are cursed to an existence of suffering while white people become white angels in their own stars.
O’er the face of the darkest night,
but we who are dark, we are dark!
Ah God, we have no stars!
Yet, despite her embittered outlook in life, the persona proceeded to make peace with her situation. While she still, ruefully, acknowledges the fatalistic situation of black slaves, she does not resort to cursing her own existence; instead, she indignantly proclaims and basks in her own identity as a person of black complexion. Whether she wishes to no longer be black is absent in the writing, subtly empowering her belief of being black as not a mere matter of skin tone and, even less so, a marker of inferiority, that no matter how much suffering that her white oppressors deal upon her, she will never utter a sound of weakness – she will never give them the satisfaction of superiority.
I see you staring in my face—
I know you staring, shrinking back,
Ye are born of the Washington-race,
And this land is the free America,
And this mark on my wrist—(I prove what I say)
tied me up here to the flogging-place.
[…]You think I shrieked then? Not a sound!
I hung, as a gourd hangs in the sun;
I only cursed them all around
At peak, she defies this marker of inferiority during a point in the poem that takes a dark turn. The persona commits infanticide on her own child. While it was gruesome in concept, its significance lies in its symbolism. Black slaves experienced horrible, excruciating pain and suffering from their captors; it follows that the persona would have wanted to inflict the same to the baby in vengeance. Instead, she makes the infant suffocate with a handkerchief on its face – a kind of peaceful death, juxtaposing the violent pain that black slaves face in reality. The infant does struggle for its own life, but Browning here shows how inflicting suffering on another is cruel regardless of severity. To inflict pain on another is never justified.
Browning ingeniously ends the poem with an ultimatum on the situation of slavery through the persona. Despite the evils that the whites subjected her to, she does not bear ill will to them. The demise of the white infant from her hands symbolizes her desire to end the overbearing reign of the whites who take advantage of the blacks and bear themselves children from their suffering–metaphorically and literally in the poem. It is not a violent end; she envisages not only liberty for her fellow blacks but also camaraderie with the whites. She takes her own life in the end not only as a way of achieving freedom in her death; she takes her own life as a way of ceasing the current oppression, as she herself is a product of it. The persona concludes with a call to her own people to continue what she did and a call to the whites that she dies:
in my broken heart’s disdain!
What may be brought into scrutiny about “Runaway Slave” is the authenticity of its substance. It was written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, an Englishwoman in the Victorian era. Though she empathizes with the slaves, she herself was not a slave. Browning created the poem through the eyes of an empathetic spectator, not those of a slave. This does, somewhat, detract from the focal value of the poem. Nonetheless, it still exudes a passionate empathy for the slaves and an understanding of their spirit to be free – both physically and spiritually.
“The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” is an invaluable read because it delves on experiences of discrimination on more than one level. As discussed, there is the suffering of black slaves during the tempest of slavery. On another level, there is the suffering of women, a phenomenon which permeated all classes of society and which manifested in the worst way to black woman slaves. Browning, in vigor and passion, wrote a dynamic character that encompasses – and defies – both aspects of discrimination. Most of all, Browning wrote “Runaway Slave” out of utmost compassion and empathy. While herself a woman, she did not experience the same violent, deplorable life as the black woman slave; she could only bear witness to it from a bird’s eye view, at best. Despite this difficulty, Browning took it as her own goal to descend from the safe, blue skies where she took comfortable refuge, to the rough, putrid grounds where discrimination and suffering are rife. Amid the ability to take flight returning to the skies whenever she wished, Browning chose to stay in the ground, to speak through the eyes of the discriminated, to empathize and to empower them.
