Mother Imagery

         

The feeling of loss is not one to be easily dismissed. When one loses a relative to death, a friend to college, or even a book they were very fond of, that sense of emptiness is never completely filled again. In “The Farewell of a Virginia Slave Mother to her Daughters Sold into Southern Bondage,” John Greenleaf Whittier depicts the void of a mournful Southern slave mother through his employment of painstaking imagery.

Each of the six stanzas begins with the same vivid couplet: “Gone, gone, -- sold and gone, To the rice-swamp dank and lone…” (1220-1222). Whittier also ends the stanzas with that same couplet, in addition to the lines “From Virginia’s hills and waters; Woe is me, my stolen daughters!” (1220-1222). This piece of imagery is used so often in the poem that the reader feels imposed and repeatedly attacked by the burdensome statement of the mother. Now that this slave mother has been separated from her daughters, all of her days will be greeted and closed with the constant haunting of her departed daughters. This constant haunting has replaced the physical presence of her daughters, and the mother’s mind will always be filled with the possible whereabouts of her daughters, as seen in the imagery that Whittier uses to compose the centers of the stanzas.        

Bonus Blog: Incidents

         During the era of legal bondage in the United States, slaves were viewed with a very distinct and general stigma. This stigma was most often seen in the form of inferiority, especially unintelligence. In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs combats this stigma with eloquent diction and vivid adjectives. When describing her master, she uses words such as, “contrived,” “blandest,” and “blighted” (776). When depicting the painful effects of slavery in her everyday life, Jacobs employed “constrained,” “abyss,” and “deliberate” (776-777). With certainty, many college students might not know the meanings of these words, let alone utilize them in their quotidian speech. Reading articulate designations such as these would have been surprising even to abolitionists and former slaves, in addition to shocking and almost unbelievable to slaves and slaveholders. What a rude awakening it would have been, to Jacobs’ former owners, to read her graphic and direct illustrations of them.

            Jacob’s also dedicates several sections reflecting upon her mental state at that time. After her master told her that he would build her a secluded home of her own, Jacobs firmly stated that she would “rather toil on the plantation from dawn till dark; I had rather live and die in jail, than drag on, from day to day, through such a living death” (776). Through her earnest and painstaking descriptions, Jacobs’ was able to show that she was more than just a toiling slave, lacking the brainpower to understand what she was suffering through and act to challenge it.

Quadoomed

            In Lydia Maria Child’s, “The Quadroons,” a character, Rosalie, is born with curse. As seen in the title, Rosalie is a quadroon: a person whose parents are a mulatto and a white person and who is therefore one-quarter black by descent. Amidst a time when multi-ethnicity was neither valued nor evidently common, Rosalie is suspended in an unshakeable web of multi-ethnicity. Her formative years are marked by ignorance of her place in society, due to the secluded cottage in which she was raised, out of reach of the walls “The edicts of society had built…of separation between her and them; for she was a quadroon” (Child 116).  This “separation” gets the best of Rosalie and her lover, when he leaves her for a woman of less ethnic diversity. After dying of a broken-hearted loneliness, Rosalie passes on her curse to her daughter Xarifa. Neither she, nor her mother could achieve complete happiness with their lovers because of their “proscribed race” (117). They were both doomed to the same fate, that which could only be broken by death.

            Rosalie and Xarifa represent the relationship between whites and slaves at this point in American history. The two races could not live side by side as equals, until there was a death to them both. This death could have been Child’s hope that in the future, as in death, everyone would be claimed by a power greater than themselves, which sees all humans as equals. 

The Wife

            Washington Irving’s “The Wife” would be considered unique and rare if it had been written centuries earlier, or in any of the centuries following its production. His view of women was quite radical at that time, and possibly even more extensive in the present.

When I think of an American married couple in the 19^th century, I usually imagine a marriage of convenience: they were of age, their families would benefit from their conjoining, and the husband needed an extra farmhand or maid. Obviously, this recipe is completely void of love.

Reading the writing of Irving, a man, whose words are a narration of the infectious love of another married couple, is quite striking when brought to my attention. So how significant must it have been at the time for women and marriage and America, to have an American man portraying his country and the people of his country in this light? In the perspective of Irving, America was a place of success and hardships. These trials were onerous if endured by one, but when in the company of a fellow American, one was encouraged to persevere.  Irving’s picture of marriage was a partnership of comfort and support, especially during the formidable days. And women, they were the epitome of balance: meek, yet strong, serious and spirited, firm and loving. This piece of literature would have been a great advertisement in England, targeted at people who were feeling oppressed, unloved, and weary of their lives and relationships.

            With his contemporary narrative, displaying marriage and America at their best angle, Irving solidified not only his place in literature, but also a place for women, marriage, and America in a world that was struggling to recognize their potency. 

Fast Times at American History

           Reading about America’s brief history that is so densely concentrated with excitement reminds me of the invigorating times that are occurring right now. Just in my lifetime that spans a brief twenty years, I have seen the creation and domination of the internet, the infiltration of computers at home, women assuming very prestigious positions in the government, the spread of mobile phones, the invention and influence of social networking sites, and the election of an African American president, just to name a select few. Who could have foreseen any of this a mere one hundred years ago?

            If there was some sort of blip in spacetime, and Thomas Jefferson was thrown into 2011, I wonder what he would think of these times. He would probably be surprised to see so few horses, none of which would be pulling wagons or carts, but even more surprised to see how dependent we have become on our inventions. Yes, technology allows us more time to do less laborious and menial activities, but most of the things we do with that extra time require less brain or physical effort than if we were completing those tasks. Every free moment we get, we are found checking facebook, our e-mails, our text messages, instead of reading a book or newspaper, two entities that were revolutionizing the time of Thomas Jefferson. I also imagine him saying something along the lines of, “China? Really? The next leading world power? Dang, America is probably doomed to linger in that shadow for a long time.”

            Everything around us is constantly growing and changing and reinventing itself. This is something that I love about America. From the prime of its history, America has never ceased to thrive nationally and germinate its seeds of development all over the planet, even beyond into outer space! I could attempt and make predictions about what will come for this country, but I know that any expectation I have will always be exceeded (in one way or another).