![]() ![]() ![]() The purpose of my paper is to examine the role of the sea in Blake and clarify how the sea connects to the notion of gender roles of the main character, Blake. Both as a route or means of escape from slavery and also as a signature element of the brutal Atlantic slave trade, the sea is described in many various and often conflicting ways in 19th-century slave narratives and novels written by African American authors such as Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs. This duality of the sea becomes more conspicuous in African American literature because of the history of the Atlantic slave trade and the Middle Passage. At the same time, however, it also symbolizes restraint, order, fettered states, limitedness, discipline, and confinement due to its connection with ships. Because of its literal fluidity and mobility, it sometimes represents freedom, chaos, unfettered states, limitlessness, and the power to overthrow hierarchy. As critics such as Elizabeth Schultz and John Watford DeStafney point out, the sea holds a duality in its nature. Martin Delany's Blake or The Huts of America (1859-1862) is one of the traditional sea narratives in 19th-century black Atlantic literature. ![]()
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