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Tituba, Black Witch Of Salem Term Paper

The Significance of the Book

The significance of the book is that it provides a personal account, albeit fictionalized, of the horrors of slavery, violent oppression, gender inequality that characterized Western civilization in the 17th century. The narrative illustrates the humanity and the personal experiences of slavery from the perspective of the slave instead of the usual historical perspective. It effectively highlights the state of injustice and fear that were the everyday reality of countless individuals who were ripped fro their families and societies, sold into slavery, and usually brutalized for the rest of their lives in servitude of those regarded as the founders of Western society in the New World.

In many respects, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem serves the same modern purpose as the writing of Frederick Douglass and of Olaudah Equiano's the Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself (1789).

The more than three centuries of human enslavement perpetrated by Colonial societies against foreign peoples and more recent atrocities such as the 20th century holocausts tend to be minimized if not entirely forgotten as they recede into the past of human history. Personalized works such as those of Conde, Douglass, Equiano, as well as the more recent works of Elie Wiesel and Dr. Martin Luther King (and many others) ensure that future generations studying the history of human societies do not lose perspective of their importance. The historical commentaries in the form of the novel supplement the formal study of History and help reduce the tendency to forget that historical events were experienced first-hand and in a very real way by the individuals whose misfortune it was to suffer from them.

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