Abolitionist Poetry

In the poem “The Farewell of a Virginia Slave Mother to Her Daughters Sold Into Southern Bondage,” John Greenleaf Whittier does an excellent job using the “speaker” element of poetry to portray the image of a saddened black woman telling her story. “Writing About Literature” explains that “sometimes the voice is that of the poet him- or herself, but frequently a poem speaks from a different perspective, just as a short story might be from a point of view very different from the author’s” (Gardner).

This is very much so the case in this poem. The author is a male, but the speaker of the poem is that of an African American woman, who is suffering the hardship of losing her daughters to slavery and won’t be able to live with them or take care of them anymore. The woman is actually speaking to her daughters in the poem. The author does a good job of sharing the woman’s sorrow with the reader, because you really feel a sense of sadness for the mother when you read “There no mother’s eye is near them, There no mother’s ear can hear them; Never, when the torturing lash seams their back with many a gash, Shall a mother’s kindness bless them, Or a mother’s arms caress them…Woe is me, my stolen daughters!” (lines 15-24).

I think any reader of this poem would feel a sense of deep sadness, because nobody in today’s world could ever handle having their children taken away from them, much less to know that they were going off to be slaves and get beaten, and there’s nothing they can do about it to save them. This poem greatly succeeds at portraying the image of what many mothers had to endure in these earlier times.

Race & Culture

Regarding race and culture, the characters in “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” by Harriet Jacobs, and “The Quadroons,” by Lydia Maria Child both face a lifetime of despair and misery trying to fight against how society thought they should be treated. It’s hard for us to believe there was ever a time where all people weren’t treated equal with rights to freedom, but it was very much a reality for many lost souls of earlier times in history.

Along with the enslavement and trading of African Americans in earlier times, there were also very strict laws against what blacks were allowed to do and how they were supposed to conduct their social lives. One major look down from society was interracial marriages. It was simply unheard of an unaccepted. Both main characters from the readings face turmoil in their fight for freedom and happiness, but the one that struck me the most was Rosalie from “The Quadroons.” There were many evident examples in this text of how colored people were treated back in the day and frowned upon for living their lives outside of the norm that was accepted by society.

Child writes that “The tenderness of Rosalie’s conscience required an outward form of marriage; though she well knew that a union with her proscribed race was unrecognized by law, and therefore the ceremony gave her no legal hold of Edward’s constancy” (Child 117). This brought deep sorrow to my heart. I can’t imagine being in love with someone and not even being able to celebrate it due to the fact that it was unheard of in the world around you. Due to this fact, Rosalie’s love, Edward, was socially obligated to marry a woman of his race to be socially accepted, although deep down he knew he really wanted to be with Rosalie. “It was a marriage sanctioned by Heaven, though unrecognized on earth” (Child 118).

Of a slight contrast, in “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” Harriet Jacobs, known in the story as Linda, never really experienced the feeling of true love with a man like Rosalie did. Her life consisted of a constant struggle to maintain her kids under her watch and she was in constant agony over trying to keep them in her life and out of harms way. This is another unthinkable idea to people of our time, because we couldn’t imagine a life of a woman that didn’t have rights to her children, and was seen more as property than a free human being.

Equality For All

A central theme that appears in "An Indian's Looking Glass for the White Man," "The American Muse: Poetry at Midcentury," and "Indian Names" is a desire for equality among the races. We have studied many pieces that portray the American Indian as defeated, overlooked, and taken advantage of. We have realized through many works that they were walked all over and seen as “lesser than” the white man. We have a lot of accomplishments and advancements to thank the Indians for, and we needn’t forget that throughout history, and for years to come.

Throughout the story “An Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man,” William Apess seems to struggle to figure out why the Indians aren’t equivalent to the white man. He states “Having a desire to place a few things before my fellow creatures who are traveling with me to the grave, and to that God who is the maker and preserver both of the white man and the Indian, whose abilities are the same and who are to be judged by one God, who will show no favor to outward appearances but will judge righteousness” (Belasco 640). Apess makes a very good point. God made every man, which is why one colored man shouldn’t be any less significant than a man of another color. Because of this, one man should not act superior to another type of man or treat him with disrespect, just as the white man made Indians feel unimportant and weak.

Apess even refers to the bible, saying “But we find that Jesus Christ and his Apostles never looked at the outward appearances. Jesus in particular looked at the hearts, and his Apostles through him, being discerners of the spirit, looked at their fruit without any regard to the skin, color, or nation…” (Belasco 643). I think it definitely goes without saying that all of these pieces of writing convey a central theme of a desire and necessity for equality. It helps the reader see how truly unfair the Native Americans were treated, and helps us understand the wrong in discriminating against color, which is still a problem we face today with the struggle to have equality every where among all people.

The Tenth of January

While reading “The Tenth of January” by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, the first thing that jumped out at me was all of the instances that symbolism was used. Gardner describes symbolism as “Careful writers choose their words and images for maximum impact, filling them with as much meaning as possible and inviting their readers to interpret them” (Gardner 59). I completely agree with this interpretation of what symbolism is, because what stood out to me in this story as “symbolism” might not have occurred to someone else the same way that read this story. Symbolism is very much so how you personally see something relating to something else in the story with tied meanings.

The symbolism that stuck out the most to me was towards the beginning of the story, the author referenced “the broken fence” in multiple instances. From my point of view, a broken fence makes me think of how broken Asenath and her life were. Instead of just referring to the fence as being broken once, the author describes the fence as broken three different times in the story, seeming to purposely put emphasis on the fact that it was broken.

The author first said “It was a damps unwholesome place, the street in which she lived, cut short by a broken fence, a sudden steep, and the water; filled with children,—they ran from the gutters after her, as she passed,—and filled to the brim; it tipped now and then, like an over-full soup-plate, and spilled out two or three through the break in the fence” (Phelps 2). She then followed up with “One night there was a knocking at the door, and a hideous, sodden thing borne in upon a plank. The crowded street, tired of tipping out little children, had tipped her mother staggering through the broken fence” (Phelps 3). In these excerpts, the author refers to the fence being broken twice in one sentence describing the girl’s house. This also symbolizes how broken the poor girl’s life was. She not only had a broken life, by the fact that she would wander searching for food some nights hungry, and had a mother whose hand scarred her face, but she also had a broken image. The scar accentuating her face and her humpback covered by a cape gave the other children way to constantly tease her and make fun of her. She was seen as ugly by many, and broken to the audience.