The Representation of the slaves in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind and Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave

Abstract

Margaret Mitchell’s plantation novel Gone With The Wind and   Solomon Northup’s autobiography Twelve Years a Slave are built upon a common foundation and explore the operations of the institution of slavery, a dark and dehumanizing part of American history, in the American south. Both the novels hold an account of the experience of the thraldom and forced labour imposed on the African Americans on the American soil, instantiating immense atrocity on the mind and body of the people belonging to a particular race. Despite being inspired by the same institution, and attempting at portraying the interracial relationship between the slave owners and the victims of slavery in the American Southern plantations, the novels differ considerably from one another in their treatment of the experience and consequence of slavery and the representation of the blacks. The paper seeks to explore the nature and extent of this variation in representation, functioning in the narratives and how the two contrasting description spring from the ethnic difference of the authors of the respective texts.