Author: Pippi Seider

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The white saviorism in Uncle Tom’s Cabin is abundant, beginning with the fact that Harriet Beecher Stowe, a white author, penned the novel. There are the “good” slave owners and excuses made for others. The slaves that escape are helped by pious white people. And most obviously, George is the ultimate white savior as Tom lays dying. While Tom’s martyrdom certainly parallels that of Jesus, there are also elements of George being the lord and savior. When George arrives, Tom says “Jesus can make a dying-bed/ Feel soft as downy pillows are” (425), implying that George is his savior. He then says

“Bless the Lord! it is,–it is,–it’s all I wanted! They haven’t forgot me. It warms my soul; it does my old heart good! Now I shall die content! Bless the Lord, oh my soul!” (426).

That George is seen as a divine blessing feels absurd to me, considering his family is at fault for Tom’s death. Yet as Tom is killed at the hands of white men, in the institution of slavery, a white man, and Christianity, are still portrayed as his savior.

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Harriet Beecher Stowe uses an appeal to class as much as basic humanity in her case for the abolition of slavery in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. While she includes many details of the horrific treatment of slaves, she also carefully (and frequently less subtly) highlights the socioeconomic status of her villains, positing them as vulgar parvenus. Beecher Stowe employs this strategy on the first page, when she describes the trader Haley:

He was much overdressed, in a gaudy vest of many colors, a blue neckerchief, bedropped gayly with yellow spots, and arranged with a flaunting tie, quite in keeping with the general air of the man. His hands, large and coarse, were plentifully bedecked with rings; and he wore a heavy gold watch-chain, with a bundle of seals of portentous size, and a great variety of colors attached to it,–which, in the ardor of conversation, he was in the habit of flourishing and jingling with evident satisfaction. His conversation was in free and easy defiance of Murray’s Grammar, and was garnished at convenient intervals with various profane expressions, which not even the desire to be graphic in our account shall induce us to transcribe. 

From this description, the reader can gather that Haley does not come from an aristocratic background and has made his fortune himself, by being a cold-hearted slave trader as we later learn. Beecher Stowe uses the word “coarse” frequently throughout the novel, and always to describe slave-owners. Another example of this is on page 112, when Beecher Stowe is describing a man who opposes all of the people in the tavern protesting the flier about George. She describes him as a “coarse-looking fellow” and says that he has a “coarse, unconscious obtuseness.” By describing those backing slavery as “coarse” and ignorant, Beecher Stowe makes an appeal to the white, northern elitist reader based on grounds other than the blatant wrongness of slavery.

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When I was first introduced to literary analysis of poems in high school, one of the first things that I was taught was to examine the form. Meaning was frequently extracted from meter, rhyme scheme, punctuation, etc. And so I sat down to read “Song of Myself” in the same way.

 However, try as I might, I wasn’t able to find many of the formal elements I would consider to be characteristic of poetry. Repetition certainly abounds, such as in Section 15, where almost every line begins with “the,” but what I found most interesting was the rhythm that Whitman creates within his free-verse poetry without the crutch of a formal structure or rhyme scheme. In Section Four he writes “The latest dates, discoveries, inventions, societies, authors old and new,\ My dinner, dress, associates, looks, compliments, dues,…” (69-70). What jumped out at me was the sound that “dates,” “discoveries,” “dinner,” and “dress” make. The hard consonant at the beginning adds emphasis, which then gives the lines a distinct beat. I find this unique, free-style rhythm that Whitman creates to be quite interesting, and I would love to hear him read it out loud. I found a recording of him reading four lines from “America,” but to my knowledge there is no recording of him reading “Song of Myself.”

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From the title onward, Melville juxtaposes unmarried men and unmarried women in “Paradise of Bachelors and Tartarus of Maids.” The structure of the story alone places these men and women in different physical spaces, both on the page and in locale. While the “paradise” of the bachelors is urban and luxurious, the hell that the women occupy is wild. The men reside in London, which would have been perceived as sophisticated and intellectual, while the women live in the mountains in New England. This comparison fits in with the concern about American identity and intellectualism in the nineteenth century. 

What I find most interesting about this story is that the narrator shares some opinions that are fairly progressive in terms of feminism. On page 1510 he says “[d]oes that thin cobweb there…does that never tear or break? It is marvelous fragile, and yet this machine it passes through is so mighty.” I cannot help but read this as a metaphor for women living in the nineteenth century. On the same page, the narrator responds to the women in the factory being called girls and asks “[w]hy is it, Sir, that in most factories, female operatives, of whatever age, are indiscriminately called girls, never women?” In this question, the narrator is pointing out the belittling manner in which the women are treated. Additionally, Melville makes what I believe is a clear statement on marriage by sending unmarried women to “hell” and unmarried men to “heaven,” highlighting the potentially oppressive nature of marriage for women. 

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I am unsure how to even begin analyzing Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Written by Himself because Douglass had so much more at stake than any author we’ve read. Emerson wrote for notoriety, Poe for money, and Douglass for freedom. That being said, I found Douglass hard to read in the sense that the content was so devastating, but also easy to read in the sense that his sentences flowed well. It’s interesting to consider that his writing style is perhaps most authentic because he did not have access to literature growing up so in many ways his voice as a writer was not as heavily influenced as someone who came from a privileged background and grew up reading both ancient and contemporary literature (for example, Emerson). The way that Douglass writes about how he taught himself to read and write is truly remarkable, and I feel like I don’t have any literary analysis because I’m so in awe of how he was able to write about something so horrific and traumatic in such a composed manner. 

I would also be really interested in reading Douglass’s later re-publications, because the introduction mentions that he writes differently about his mother and grandmother in them. One of the most heart-wrenching parts of Douglass’s story is his separation from his family, and I would be really interested in learning more about his familial relations. 

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As I was trying to find meaning in “Ligeia,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “William Wilson. A Tale,” “A Man of the Crowd,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” and “The Tell-Tale Heart,” I was confounded with the issue of an unreliable narrator. While this makes perfect sense with what we’ve discussed about Poe and his genre, it left me with a bit of a conundrum. His stories are fantastical, suspenseful and yet not suspenseful (he usually tells you what’s going to happen in the first paragraph), and yet always leave me wondering if any of it is “real.” Perfect for selling magazines. 

However, one of the stories that was the most clear to me and of which I was able to make some meaning was “William Wilson. A Tale.” It became clear to me fairly early on in the story what the other William Wilson is sort of a physical manifestation of conscience. However, it also seemed as if there was almost a sexual tension between William Wilson and the other William Wilson. This potential homoeroticism is also seen in “The Fall of the House of Usher” and perhaps in the violence of “The Tell-Tale Heart.” There is limited scholarship on these themes in Poe’s stories, because it seems that the prevailing belief is that he was straight, but I did find a master’s thesis exploring this (linked below).

https://fau.digital.flvc.org/islandora/object/fau%3A9933

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When I made my first post comparing Last of the Mohicans to a Shakespearean Comedy, I was wary of using the label until I read the ending. I can now confidently say that it is not a Shakespearean Comedy, because it lacks a definitive characteristic of such a work: a happy ending. As a reader, I was rooting for Uncas and Cora to end up together (and not in the dead sense). They’re my two favorite characters due to their skill, intellect, and courage, and they seemed an even and great match. Recoiling from their violent deaths, I tried to parse out what Cooper was trying to accomplish in killing off two characters who are so likable, and doing so in such a violent manner. 

The manner of Uncas and Cora’s death is easy to understand because they both died in a noble, brave, and resistive way, becoming of characters in a frontier adventure novel. However, I think beyond their deaths for the sake of plot, Cooper is continuing his racist commentary. In Cooper’s world, Uncas and Cora cannot end up together alive and he is perhaps using their deaths as a cautionary tale against interracial romances. While Hawkeye understands when the Delawares are discussing the romance of Cora and Uncas during the funeral, the narrator points out that it is best that Munro, Heyward, and Alice don’t understand. Additionally, it is of note that Alice, whose blood “bears no cross,” will live and presumably have children, unlike Cora whose bloodline will end with her. This fits into the narrative that Cooper paints of the inevitable death of the indigenous people in a way that is in no way caused by white settlers; afterall, Uncas and Cora both die at the hands of Hurons, despite the attempt of Gamut (representative of Christianity) to save them.

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Of the many characters that Cooper deftly creates, David is the most puzzling to me. I can’t tell if Cooper intends for him to provide comic relief or not. His lack of awareness, and any sense of self-preservation, is highlighted by his actions that lead to his being shot in Chapter 7 and consequently his losing consciousness. When David is in this state, Hawkeye notes that “[t]he longer his [David’s] nap lasts the better it will be for him…” (63). His lack of any common sense makes David amusing, as I can’t help but wonder how someone could be so oblivious. 

While at this point I don’t know how The Last of the Mohicans ends, and so I can only speculate, in many ways it reminds me (in a loose sense) of a Shakespearean comedy. Specifically, Cooper’s novel makes me think of Shakespeare’s As You Like It. The snarling Adirondack landscape is to some degree romanticized as country-living would be in a pastoral comedy, although there is certainly much more danger in the woods. The strongest parallel to me is between the cunning Rosalind and her gentler cousin Celia in As You Like It and sisters Cora and Alice in The Last of the Mohicans. I am curious if Cooper was just an admirer of Shakespeare (as the epigraphs in The Last of the Mohicans suggest) or if he intentionally used Shakespeare (and other British authors) as an attempt to appeal to the sense of British intellectualism that we discussed in class.