Solitude And Loneliness In Frederick Douglass' Narrative Of The Life Of Frederick Douglass And Harriet Jacobs' Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl

📄 Project Abstract

This study is a psychoanalytic interpretation of Frederick Douglass' Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl in relation to solitude and loneliness. This is born out of the fact that previous studies in Slave Narratives have focused more on sociological aspect of slavery. This study examines solitary and lonely African American slave characters under trauma in the two texts and reveals how they psychologically cope and react in solitude and loneliness in their daily experiences. The specific objectives of the research are to demonstrate that slave narrative is an apt literary discourse for examining African American slaves' experience and that although solitude relieves the slave characters from social anxiety, it however, brings to the fore psychological conflicts in the slave characters. In the case of loneliness, a psychologically painful experience, it results into the loss of self, social fragmentation and despair. The ...