The_Final_Embrace

The Final Embrace Kiera Williams Afro-American Lit. Closed Reading on Rhetoric 12/06/00 (Revisions) The Final Embrace They tear him from her circling arms, Her last and fond embrace. (Frances E. W. Harper) Frances E. W. Harper was a well-respected writer and activist. She was considered one of the most popular and scholarly African American writers during the nineteenth century. Although Harper was born to free parents’ her literature focused on slavery and the many effects that it had on African-American women. She is also known to have produced antebellum and militant literature. In Harper’s literature, she showed an increasingly large amount of interest in the African-American woman’s life and position in the United States as a slave. Harper visually captures the effects of slavery on African-American women in her work titled The Slave Mother. In this piece, Harper delves into the emotional and mental state of a woman subject to slavery. Her strategy is to use highly emotional terms to depict the painful effects of slavery on Black women. The first term chosen by Harper in this selection is “They”. This term is used to imply that it is more than one person involved. Harper also uses this term to imply that harper, term, reader, next, mother, word, slave, emotional, slavery, last, final, terms, sentence, literature, forcefully, fond, first, felt, embrace, child, american, women, tear, situation, heritage, end, effects, dictionary, chosen, arms, african-american, york, wholeness, starting, response