Dred and the Swamp Sublime

Finally got around to reading Monique Allewaert's essay "Swamp Sublime: Ecologies of Resistance in the American Plantation Zone" which is incredibly suggestive in terms of thinking about Stowe's positioning of Dred, and through him Vesey and Turner, as heirs to the white American revolutionaries. Contact with the swamp produces subjects capable of resistance through interaction with "non-human forces" (Allewaert 341). The swamp zone in opposition with the plantation zone becomes not simply a place a refuge but a way of creating resistance.

Earlier I pointed to the swamp as Dred's swamp community as "a brief failed attempt at revolution." Reading the Allewaert essay I'm wondering if part of Stowe's dilemna lies in the way she attempts to "domesticate" the swamp. Granted, she is working from knowledge of the way these maroon communities operated but she also represents the ultimate demise of Dred's little utopia as white destruction on a fledgling black republic. In this reading Dred seems less a revolutionary and more of a colonist of a terrain viewed as un-colonizable by white settlers (343). This begs the question: does Dred's failure in part lie in the semi-permanence of the community? Stowe depicts of the population of the Great Dismal Swamp as seeming to have fewer revolutionaries than refugees, Tiff, Henry's wife, the wounded Clayton. In depicting the swamp she seems unable to imagine it as something other than an outdoor domestic space.

This reading also really emblematizes Stowe's transition from being pro-emigration to pro-assimilation. On the one hand she needs to recognize slaves as potential revolutionary subjects. On the other she also needs to recognize the ways in which the fit into recognizable societal norms. This is an extension of what she did in Uncle Tom's Cabin in depicting slavery as bound up in the fabric of white domestic space. In Dred she demolishes the plantation house and displaces the population to the swamp to show the possibilities of a free community of blacks interacting if not fully assimilating with whites. This makes the swamp an even more interesting metaphor of interstiality. Not only in terms of the state of slavery in the 1850s being bound up in the history of the transatlantic slave trade, but also in terms of the changing face of abolition in the years leading up to the Civil War.

I'm returning to Dred because I need start laying down the groundwork for the real writing (as opposed to the "fake" writing I'm doing here) and while I've been thinking of the shape of the chapter I really need to start thinking of how the article is going to be. Dred still seems like a good place to start and going back over some of these idea I've only glossed over before.

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!

Is Dred the antebellum Boogey Man?

I'm rereading Stowe's Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp and thinking about the problem of the figure of the slave in abolitionist literature a post-revolutionary context. It's a problem I outlined in my first chapter and still haven't quite figured out how to flesh it out fully.

One of the things that has always fascinated me about Dred is the say that it displays Stowe's own evolving thought processes regarding both abolition. On the one hand she writes with an eye towards addressing critiques of the figure of Uncle Tom, allowing some space for black rage in an abolitionist text. On the other, she can't quite bring herself to imagine the revolt itself, let alone the possible success of such a revolt. I'm alternating my re-reading of Dred with Bob Levine's book Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the politics of Representative Identity. In chapter 4 he notes that Stowe in her appendix containing Thomas Gray's Confessions of Nat Turner she excises any mention of the fate of Turner's accomplices. In suggesting that the hammer has yet to definitively fall on the Turner Insurrection, Levine sees Stowe as "rhetorically participating in the political terror inspired by the heroic tradition of the black heroic deliverer as embodied both by [Nat] Turner and her fictional creation Dred" (Levine 174). I've never really thought of the text in this way, although if one is looking at the text as something of a corrective for Uncle Tom's Cabin it makes a certain amount of sense.

Yet I can't quite let go of this nagging feeling that there still something squeamish in Stowe's treatment of violence. Part of it is that Dred isn't just an combination of real-life conspirators Vesey and Turner, but an amalgamation of both literary and real-life figures of slave insurrection going all the way back to Behn's Oroonoko. Turner and Vesey themselves are already imbued with a certain kind of spectral dread (no pun intended) because of this longer history, both in terms of slavery, insurrection and the Haitian Revolution and the literature that accompanies them. This makes Dred almost a comfortably familiar figure upon which to foist white American anxieties regarding insurrection. Part of Melville's genius in Benito Cereno was taking this image of that tall Coramantee-like warrior and making him the decoy for the real leader, wee Babo.

Violence is probably not the thing that Stowe is squeamish about but rather the dislocation of it from familiar sites be they these maroon swamp communities or in threatening slave figures. What if Old Tiff suddenly snapped and massacred the Cripps?

These are mostly older thoughts but I'm revisiting them both as way of recapturing some of the questions that initially drew to this text. I think in the same way that Grainger struggled to reconcile the virtue of production with the evils of slavery, Stowe struggles to deal with the violence of insurrection in a way that both embraces the rights of black to rebel and yet keeps it at a distance.