"There shall be no more sea"

I think the approach to Dred as a whole is going to concentrate on two things: the space of the swamp as an interstitial place caught between land and sea, and Dred as a figure where both past and present insurrectionist figures. Stowe ties Dred to the marshy areas of the south, the coast and the sea in this really amazing moment towards the end of the novel when Clayton finally speaks to Dred.

"The Lord bade me go from the habitations of men, and to seek out the desolate places of the sea, and dwell in the wreck of a ship that was forsaken for a sign of desolation unto this people. So, I went and dwelt there, and the Lord called me Amraphal, because hidden things of judgment were made known to me. And the Lord showed unto me that even as a ship which is forsaken of the waters wherein all flesh have died so shall it be with the nation of the oppressor...Every day is full of labor, but the labor goeth back again into the seas. So that travail of all generations hath gone back, till the desire of all nations shall come, and He shall come with burning and with judgment, and with great shakings; but in the end thereof shall be peace. Wherefore, it is written that in the new heavens and the new earth there shall be no more sea."

Places like the hulk of the ship, the Everglades, and the shore provide the spiritual surrounds for one "destitute of the light of philosophy." In the quote above Dred cites the shipwreck both in terms of the past and the present, the past being the legacy of the Transatlantic slave trade-- the "a sign of desolation unto this people"--, and the present, probably both the dependence of the US economy on transatlantic trade of cotton, and the prevalence of Ship of State metaphors within debates between abolitionists and pro-slavery groups. The ship, an emblem of the initial site of bondage, is now the nation on the course for wreckage.

"There shall be no more sea," is taken from Revelation 21.1, but I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that Stowe also uses the sea to talk about slavery's persistent hold on the South. The empty hulks of the ships are specters of the past and warnings about the future. The shore and the swamp are transitory spaces where the boundaries between land and water are blurred and changeable. On the one hand there's the threat of being mired down and stuck. On the the other hand, the swamps are places of refuge. Dred, in being tied to those places also brings past and present together, in the invocations of Vesey, Turner, and the fainter echo of Brown, and the references to Toussaint( I need to look at Southerne's Oroonoko again to see if there are is anything useful there in Oroonoko's language).

Of course finding moments like these always reminds me of the overwhelming problem of this dissertation which is how to define a maritime imaginary. When I was first telling people about this project, several people immediately asked about Lacan's Imaginary. I've been resisting using Lacan because, for one, it's Lacan, and for another, I'm suspicious of letting a single theoretical application lead my work. I tend to work best when I'm working mostly from the primary material. But I've noticed some of my major keywords--fragmentation, subjectivity. and, to a certain extent, my concept of negative doppelgangers--are taking bits and pieces from Lacan. Today, I detoured into some introductory reading on the basics of the Mirror Stage thinking it might clarify things. I have a feeling I'll end up doing what I usually do. "I take my concept from Lacan's Imaginary in part by using X, Y, and Z. Where I depart is...."

Tomorrow I might start with a few close reading exercises using Lacan and see where it goes.

The White Insurrectionists

"I admit, Mr. Bradshaw, it's a very dangerous thing to get up steam, if you don't intend to let the boat go. But when the steam is high enough, let her go, say I."

"Yes, but, Miss Anne, other people don't want to say so. The fact is, we are not all of us ready to let the boat go. It's got all our property in it-- all we have to live on." (Stowe 316)

Yet another one of those great quotes that just begs to be made too much of. Dred is littered with maritime references. Slavery is akin to piracy, Clayton lacks ballast, etc. More on this stuff later.

Stowe seems to be exploring white complicity in abolition in a similar vein that she critiqued white complicity in slave-holding in Uncle Tom's Cabin. In the same way that "good" slave-holding households were ultimately no different from the Simon Legree's of the South, those who bend or ignore the law in teaching slaves to read are ultimately participating in the same kind opposition to slavery as Vesey and Turner. In both texts the law is the problem . It's a tricky tactic and one that I don't think is completely successful, but in creating Clayton a lawyer is who is bound by law to practice against his conscience Stowe reveals the way white southern moderates are also bound and potentially subject to the same laws as slaves.

Thinking about the way this book both evokes violence and suppresses it makes me how much of John Brown's ghost is haunting the text balong side the black insurrectionists. This presents an interesting point of attack regarding black and white doppelgangers in the texts I'm looking at. I mentioned earlier that Dred was an easy stand-in for black insurrectionists but he can also be a handy decoy from John Brown who was very much at large at the time of Dred's publication. One might be able to argue that at the same time that Stowe invokes the possibility for white insurrection she still makes Dred the scapegoat for anti-slavery violence.

Edited to add: John Brown invoke on page 499 of the Levine edition:

How stinging is it at such a moment to view the whole respectability of civilized society upholding and glorifying the murderer; calling his sin by soft names, and using for his defence every artifice of legal injustice! Some in our own nation have had bitter occasion to know this, for we have begun to drink the cup of trembling which for so many ages has been drank alone by the slave. Let the associates of Brown ask themselves if they cannot understand the midnight anguish of Harry!