ng wrong with going against gender and racial roles to free herself. It is wrong for a slave to run away just as it is wrong for a woman to be strong and independent and throw off the rules of society for the sake of freedom as she does. For Brent, as a woman, she uses her body in a sexual way to gain knowledge that will eventually drive her to freedom. Douglass takes on Covey, but Brent denies Flint. This denial works for Brent because she is a woman. As a female slave, she is supposed to be available to her master at all times. However, in her constant denial of Flint, she comes to realize that “[t]he slave woman . . . was forced to work like a man, and to breed like an animal, and thus was denied the ability to cultivate ‘feminine’ attributes” (Drake 100). This realization is apparent at the very end when she is trying to explain her story for the sake of her daughter. This is an attempt to reconstruct herself after years of being nothing but a body, using that body, exploiting that body. Like Douglass, her mind is free, but her body continues to suffer for a period of time in the crawl space before she is truly free.Although slave women were “[f]orced to adhere to the norms of the opposite gender under slavery, ex-slaves would attempt to re-create themselves in their narratives as true specimens of their gender role” (Drake 100). This is also apparent in the ending of the book when Brent comments on the fact that she is still not in the place in which she desires to be. Freedom, for Brent, means that she can sit with her children by her own fireplace in her own home and be free of serving anybody but herself and her children (207).Harriet Beecher Stowe allows Romantic Racialism to get in the way of writing realistic characters to achieve her supposed mission of overturning racial stereotypes. Lisa Watt MacFarlane stresses that George, like Jim in Huckleberry Finn is hopelessly literal ...
