Social Classes Effecting Cruelty Douglass’s “Narrative of...

SOCIAL CLASSES EFFECTING CRUELTY DOUGLASS’S NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS A. Introduction To know about social classes in a prose (Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass), it is a duty knowing about what sociological criticism is firstly. Sociological Criticism is one of the family literary criticisms that directed to analyze literary work in a larger social context. It codifies the literary strategies that are employed to reflect social constructs through a sociological methodology. Sociological criticism analyzes both how the social functions in literature and how literature works in a society. In the other simplicity words a literary work or any other art work has a function as systematic reflections of society and†¦show more content†¦Analysis Douglass’s Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass is a biographical novel of his life as slave. He expresses and reflects the social life of America in slavery era, the journey of his struggling and witnessing of cruelty that showed at that time. That era is an era of capitalism where the capitalist (white people) rules everything as the ruler or rich businessman that has plantation and the worker without payment or slave (black people) as their property tools to make them more rich with their business. They rule their business (plantation) and the workers (slaves) under the care of their cruel overseer. But not seldom they do cruel punish to the slave by her/him self. It reflects in Douglass’s Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass: Reflecting of capitalist and his cruel overseer: â€Å"My first master’s name was Anthony. I do not remember his first name. He was generally called Captain Anthony—a title which, I presume, he acquired by sailing a craft on the Chesapeake Bay. He was not considered a rich slaveholder. He owned two or three farms, and about thirty slaves. His farms and slaves were under the care of an overseer. The overseer’s name was Plummer. Mr. Plummer was a miserable drunkard, a profane swearer, and a savage monster. He always went armed with a cowskin and a heavy cudgel. I have known him to cut and slash the women’s heads so horribly, that even master would be enraged at his cruelty, and would threaten to whip him if he did not mind