The Narrative Life of Frederick Douglass and Beloved both use a unique storytelling device - constructing a present from the unspeakable stories of the past. They take the psychic scars of slavery, scars that cover an entire nation, and shrink them down to a very personal level. However, their individual accounts of slavery are quite different. One major difference is how each defines the relationship between a slave mother and her child.

Frederick Douglass writes of being separated from his mother when he was an infant. He states this was a common practice. His only guess for the separation was "to hinder the development of the child's affection toward its mother, and to blunt and destroy the natural affection of the mother for the child." (Page 2). Douglass only saw his mother a few times. She usually visited him at bedtime and left before he woke up. So removed was he from her life

It is important to take into account the differences between film and a book. Film by definition is a visual art; an art that was not around before the civil war in the capacity it is today. The written and spoken word at the time of slavery was as powerful then as film is today.

We have to trust that in reality being separated from a parent at a young age must hinder a bond from at least the child's point of view. How can a child be expected to love a parent that hasn't raised it? Douglass points out that his family were the other slaves with whom he had lived. Separation from his surrogate family was more upsetting to him than his own mother's death.

The audience for each piece was also different. The Narrative Life of Frederick Douglass was written at the time of slavery for a specific purpose: to spread the awareness of slaves' conditions and to help bring about the end slavery in America. Beloved was made in the twentieth century to teach its audiences about slavery in the hope of preventing similar occurrences in modern times.

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Approximate Word count = 724
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)