This might sound a little goofy but did the character of Dr. Flint in Incidents of the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet S. Jacobs remind anyone else of the Terminator?
I guess it was his relentless pursuit of Linda that really brought the connection home to me. He just would not stop going after her no matter how long it took. His search dragged on for years with him acting as an even more insane version of Capt. Ahab.
There are other incidents, such as when Jacobs writes, "Dr. Flint and his family repeatedly tried to coax and bribe my children to tell something they had heard about me", that really hammer home this notion of him being not just a representation of the callous slaveowner but of the very force of enslavement itself (117). He does not seem to tire of the chase and will resort to any lengths, trickery or bribery for example, to retrieve what he feels is his property and what we all know is the life and liberty of a human being.
So I guess my comparison to the Terminator isn't far off because, to me, Dr. Flint is a figure of cold, almost mechanical cruelty. Sure, he's able to wear the skin of a man in the sense that we often see him act kindly in the story but deep down we can see the gears of corruption and greed clicking away below the surface and we know that all his kind words are only to benefit his own sense of entitlement and self-worth and to allow him to get what he wants.
- Jozef Helms.
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