Author: Mal Mixson

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While many of Dickinson’s poems stand out due to their overt religiosity, “598” struck me in particular. Much of it is dedicated to expounding upon the power and grandiosity of human imagination- represented here as the brain being “wider than the sky” and “deeper than the sea” (1679-1680), with the capacity to hold and absorb any information- but the last stanza specifically runs a comparison between the human mind and God himself. The brain is not more impressive than God, unlike its relationship with the sky and the sea, but it is “just the weight of God” (1680) and differs only as much as a syllable from a sound. 

Oddly, this reads almost like sacrilege. Most theological arguments don’t quite touch on a direct comparison between God and man which places them on the same level. Man might be made in God’s image, but he is not meant to exist as God does, nor should he think himself capable of encompassing everything that God is and can do. That would be an arrogance the likes of which got the Tower of Babel’s builders in such trouble. But Dickinson still draws that connection, and she does it out of love for God. Her dedication to poetry and to creation is akin to godliness; it is a spirituality in and of itself and because it is a product of her imagination, that imagination becomes holy. 

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The loss of motherhood- the forcible separation of mother and child through death or sale- is one of the most prevalent horrors in slave narratives. Uncle Tom’s Cabin started off with a fictionalized account of the common experience of a Black mother being forced to handle the imminent theft of her son, and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl ends the second chapter with a visceral description of a young enslaved girl and her newborn baby both dying in childbirth in front of the former’s mother and their mutual mistress. 

The juxtaposition of the three is utterly damning. “Seven children called [the mistress] mother,” while the dying girl and her own mother both lose the title within seconds of one another. Being enslaved deprives them of the right to any sort of ownership, any sort of identity, beyond their status as slaves. Motherhood is always understood to be something which can be forced on them through assault, as is heavily implied in the case of the young girl, and just as easily taken away by forces outside of their control. It is one of the major components of slavery’s dehumanization. 

A pervasive myth (and one perpetuated by the Shelbys in Uncle Tom’s Cabin) is that the wives of slaveowners were somehow less complicit in slavery than their husbands. What is also key here is the lack of empathy exhibited by the mistress in this situation. There is no attempt at kindness, or comfort. Neither the mistress through her actions nor the writing of the text itself put in any effort to soften her callous approach to the horrors to which she’s bearing witness. She is as much to blame for the outcome as her absent husband. 

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In George’s introductory chapter, “The Husband and Father,” religion (specifically Christianity) is presented as something which has been forcibly removed from his identity by his experiences with slavery. Christianity seems to be the belief system of the peaceful and obedient; Eliza declares that she “always thought [she] must obey [her] master and mistress, or [she] couldn’t be a Christian” (22), which George agrees with to a certain point given her positive experience with the Shelbys. He, however, openly states that he is not a Christian like her, as his “heart’s full of bitterness” and “[he] can’t trust in God” (23) because a true loving God would not have allowed him to undergo the brutality of his enslaved life. Eliza remains the moral heart of that conversation as she begs him not to toss God aside so quickly, but while it is not Stowe’s intention to actually discard Christianity as a religion of failure and complacency, this interaction serves to drive the point home about how utterly disenfranchised George has become. He is deprived of his own agency and humanity to the point that he has not only lost his hope for the future, but the actual matter of his faith.

It is later on, on their way to Canada, that George revisits the idea of Christianity. It is his intention to “try to act worthy of a free man [and] try to feel like a Christian” by putting away “every hard and bitter feeling” so he can read his Bible and “learn to be a good man” (193). His plans for himself and the eventual African nation he sets his mind to both involve religion, now that he’s able to access his humanity again. Instead of Christianity being tied to Eliza’s subservience, it becomes caught up in George’s honor and drive and desire to live a better life than the one he’s been trapped in. 

While Uncle Tom and Eliza both represent the idealized submission of Christianity, willing to martyr themselves and be obedient to whichever powers they consider greater than themselves, George is more of a holy warrior. Not a crusader with plans to overthrow and eviscerate the system and its perpetuators, but a man who is willing to fight for his freedom when acceptance simply will not get the job done. Stowe is generally anti-violence in her writing, and while George still aligns with that by never stooping to outright aggression, he still stands out as someone who does, rather than is done to. 

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The 33rd section of Whitman’s “Song of Myself” is the longest of the entire collection and, perhaps due to its verbosity, spans perhaps the largest range of emotion. He catalogues his vision of the world from the viewpoint of a hot air balloon, capable of accessing freedom from both gravity and the smaller perspective of someone more grounded. He is “a free companion” (1339) who never stays in one place for too long, forever tugged along by wanderlust and governed by his flights of poetic fancy. This far-off position allows him to practice a grand form of empathy, becoming each beast or person he sees, inhabiting the lives of those he witnesses and representing them through his own voice. He proclaims that he swallows all of it and “like[s] it well” to the extent that “it becomes [his]” (1339).

There is, of course, an inevitable price. That empathy and becoming extends not only to the birds and the bridegrooms, but to the martyrs and hounded slaves and breast-broken firemen, as “agonies are one of [his] changes of garments” (1340). To become a part of everything, through empathy and the written word, is to experience the sorrows as much as the pleasures. Whitman represents himself as someone who is able to occupy the role of anyone and “take part…see and hear the whole” (1340), stepping beyond any dispassionate position as a narrator or observer and instead becoming an active player in the narrative. The poet is as much a part of the world he writes as he is the creator of it. To watch, to describe, is to participate.

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The progression of Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener depends on the nameless narrator’s willingness to keep the titular Bartleby employed despite his escalating incidents of “passive resistance” (1478). The narrator frequently cites his own compassion as the reason he allows Bartleby to continue to work for him, such as when he worries that a different employer might lead to Bartleby being “rudely treated, and perhaps driven forth miserably to starve” (1478), or when he laments that Bartleby’s taken to living in the office and feels for them as they are both “sons of Adam” (1481). These instances are bookended by visits to Trinity Church, lending them a particularly Christian flavor. The narrator goes to the church regularly, and in his faith he finds some degree of humanity to extend time and again to his increasingly strange employee.

When the narrator becomes revolted with Bartleby after deciding that the “scrivener [is] the victim of innate and incurable disorder” (1482), his faith lapses. He outright states that the “things [he] had seen disqualified him from church-going” (1482) as he continues on with the intention of excising the scrivener from his office. The more frustrated he grows, the more disconnected the narrative gets from the repeated inclusion of his Christianity and the tolerance the faith would expect him to practice.

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Mistreatment is a constant in Douglass’ narrative. This is, of course, a staple of any story involving slavery, and the brutality is always to be expected. But it is the description of his first six months with Mr. Covey which stands out to me in particular. Douglass writes that “Mr. Covey succeeded in breaking [him],” that he was “broken in body, soul, and spirit.” (1199) Crushed beneath the heel of cruelty, Douglass experiences something akin to a severing of his humanity, where his interests and identity are washed away and he becomes “a man transformed into a brute.” (1199) What follows on the next page is his plaintive speech as he watches the ships leaving the bay and begs to understand the state of his life, how he could be abandoned to the “hottest hell of unending slavery” (1200) and deprived of his personhood so ceaselessly.

Here, let us take a moment to consider the frequent use of animalistic descriptions for the Native Americans in The Last of the Mohicans. Here, let us consider the similar zoomorphism projected onto Black people, both free and otherwise. These passages present both a counter and an explanation. The dehumanization wrought upon Douglass is explicitly done by the hands of his oppressors. It is not a natural state of being for him, whatever his contemporary white readers may have originally assumed. He sets the degradation of his personhood in direct contrast with what he has before and after it: humanity. By describing the process of losing and regaining that identity, he disproves the notion of its absence as an inherent trait. 

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Part of how Poe managed to amass such an audience with his work is by exploiting themes of paranoia and sensory deception. What better way is there  to grip a reader, keep them invested, than to make them doubt the sanity of the narrator and the stability of the narrative? One of his most aggressive examples is, of course, “The Tell-Tale Heart”- which opens with the narrator desperately trying to convince the reader that he is not, in fact, mad, and that the disease has “sharpened [his] senses,” not dulled them- but the theme manifests in almost every one of his texts. Not just depressions which mirrored his own documented condition, but psychoses, hallucinations, senses of unreality realized through something supernatural or mundane. 

“Ligeia” follows a narrator who struggles with the madness of unexplained death and psychological torment through loss of loved ones. “William Wilson” depends on the paranoia produced by its narrative, as it is only due to the narrator’s increasing lack of connection to the world that he resorts to slaughtering his doppelganger, condemning himself due to his inability to approach his situation rationally. “The Masque of the Red Death” is perhaps less obvious, but if it were not for the partygoers’ drunkenness and mad revelry, events would not have unfolded as they did. Their fervor grants the Red Death entrance to the event as, once again, a severing from reality drives the plot forward. The titular fall in “The Fall of the House of Usher” comes about due to the characters’ utter dependency on the house itself. Their hysteria and in-fighting cause their relationships and home to crumble around them. And, of course, “The Man in the Crowd” is driven by the narrator’s desperation to figure out the one man he can’t manage to read, something which verges into an obsessive paranoia by the end of it.

Poe used the matter of senses and sanity to maintain suspense. Are his narrators unreliable due to their mental health? Are the torments they experience real in the world of fiction, or is everything explainable as a result of their deterioration? I’m curious as to how cognizant Poe was of his own health and how that fed into his use of mental instability as a horror device. Perhaps he recognized it enough to fear it. Or perhaps it was genuinely just that his writing was filtered through his understanding of the world, which would naturally be steeped in his own psychological state.

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In chapter XXIV of Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, the audience is presented with a slightly more intimate insight into Cooper’s understanding of Native American culture as Heyward, in a way, infiltrates a Native American camp by falsely claiming to be a medicine man. It is in this camp that we witness a father disown his executed son and tearfully exit, while Cooper notes that “the Indians, who believe in the hereditary transmission of virtues and defects in character, suffered him to depart in silence.” (Cooper, 280)

This claim is presented as though it is a belief unique to Native Americans, or, at the very least, unique to the Hurons. But much of the novel is dependent on the fact that the central (white) characters also hold to that logic. Perhaps less in terms of personal missteps and sins, although white Christianity has its own history with that concept, but certainly when it comes to the nature of someone’s parents making them more or lesser. Hawkeye holds himself up as a “man without a cross” because the “purity” of his breeding is important to his strength of character: to add color to his blood would be to change him. European racism both in and outside of the book is built on the bones of believing that non-white races are inherently defective and that they are separate from white people on a deeply biological level. The scientific influence of phrenology in the early half of the 19th century speaks to the idea’s popularity. Cooper’s own racist depictions of Native Americans falls in line with that thinking perfectly.

The notion of the father’s sins reflecting in the child are dissociated from the common white American/European idea of inherent racial qualities. The “hereditary transmission of virtues and defects” stands separate and becomes a Native American creation.