Olaudah Equiano Analysis

The 19th century was a time characterized by rapid development and change. Coming on the heels of the American and French revolutions, the world seemed a different place. A place where the power lay in the hands of not monarchs, but everyday people. This provided for other groups that had long been overlooked and misused to look to find equality in their own respective revolutions. Such was the case for Olaudah Equiano, an african man originally from what is today considered to be modern day Nigeria, who was taken from his homeland at the age of 10 and forced into slavery. He was able to save up enough money to purchase his own freedom and moved around for a while before finally settling down in England, where he worked with Evangelicals on
While the abolition movement grew, so did others, such as women’s rights activists. Women like Mary Wollstonecraft advocated for women to have equal education to men, however, progress was slow moving, fast forward to the 1830’s and women are still viewed as lesser to men. Elizabeth Barrett Browning didn’t that stop her from learning and writing, however, and she became so wildly popular that after William Wordsworth, the poet laureate at the time died, many people suggested Barrett Browning be given the title. To succeed on this level as women in the time, was a radical step forward for women. Barrett Browning’s influential novel Aurora Leigh is autobiographical in nature and chronicles her struggles as an artist, and more specifically as a woman artist.While Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Olaudah Equiano may seemingly have very little in common, the roads they take to gaining freedom are strikingly
Both narratives start with the protagonists moving from their childhood homes to a foreign land, which presents them as fish out of water. Equiano is taken from what is now known as modern day Nigeria, and Aurora Leigh moves from Florence to England of which she speaks “Could I find a home / Among those mean red houses through the fog? / And when I heard my father’s language first / From alien lips which had no kiss for mine” (Barrett Browning ll. 251-255). This ties into how both suffer a sort of loss of childhood innocence, due to traumas in their lives. Barrett Browning suffers from survivors guilt due to the death of her mother, who died when she was four. She is forever haunted by the face of her mother, the portrait hangs over her and is formative in the beginnings of her artistry “With still that face … which did not therefore change, / But kept the mystic level of all forms” (Barrett Browning ll. 151-152). Throughout the entirety of Aurora Leigh this theme of motherhood chases Aurora until she achieves her own sense of motherhood as the poet mother of the age (ll. 213-222). This discovery and growing into of self reliance stems from these childhood traumas, it is because of the portrait that Aurora Leigh develops an artists spirit, which allows her inner life and individuality to blossom, and it is this