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.

Fragments

It's been a disjointed couple of days. I've been simultaneously trying to get a handle on Dred reception history and dabbling into Lacan (or rather Eagleton's interpretation of Lacan) which makes for kind of muddled reading. The Dred stuff is useful just in terms of nuts and bolts research. Of course it gives me things that seem like they should fit in somewhere but where isn't completely obvious. One of the places it's led me is to her memoir of her travels to Europe after the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin and before writing Dred, Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands in Two Volumes (1854). In it, she devotes a whole chapter about her sojourn at Playford Hall, formerly the residence of the late Thomas Clarkson. The purpose of the chapter does little except give a brief history of Clarkson's early career lifting heavily from Clarkson's own memoirs. In terms of what it might mean for the chapter, at this point, not much save that Stowe's own awareness of the British legacies of transatlantic slavery and the early abolitionist movement. If Stowe herself is haunted by Clarkson's slave ships than the presence of empty hulks of ships makes sense.


A more interesting tidbit courtesy of Audrey Fisch is that shortly after the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin in England and in response to its immense popularity an anonymous text appeared called Uncle Tom in England or Proof that Black is White. This book appeared in 1852 and according to Fisch was written out alarm that Stowe's original was gaining in popularity amongst the lower classes. I'm trying to decide if it's worth it add this to my already teetering tower of reading.

The Lacan readings are interesting but I need to read more, and read slowly. My brain has never readily absorbed this kind of thing and time hasn't done me any favors. Strangely it's leading me into Althusser's work ideology. Or maybe not strangely since I've been playing fast and loose with the term in Chapter 1. But I think both in terms of the problem of literary representation and positing that something about language changes with the rise in Transatlantic trade both approaches will end up framing my thinking well. If the definition of self transforms in the wake of the Glorious Revolution and with the implementation of race slavery what you have is both the illusion on the part of the British that this vast colonial empire constitutes a whole even if they can only see it in parts, and the misrecognition of that whole for something that it is not, colonists as subjects and not as potential revolutionaries. With regards to the slave the opposite thing happens. Self becomes fragmented into parts and use-value. This makes Equiano's work all the more interesting in that he needs to reconstitute the fragmented self into a whole. A maritime imaginary is perhaps one in which both ideologies and subjectivities are reflected and refracted by oceanic crossings.

A clumsy thought experiment but better to try it out now than a month from now when I'm trying to write coherently. I also don't want to end up doing an awkward psychoanalytic reading of texts like this throughout the whole dissertation.

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!

Dred cont'd

Eureka quote of the day: 

There is always something awful in the voice of the multitude. It would seem that if the breath that a crowd breathed out together, in moments of enthusiasm, carried with it a portion of the dread and mystery of their own immortal natures. The whole area before the pulpit, and in the distant aisles of the forest, became one vast surging sea of sound, as negroes and whites, slaves and freemen, saints and sinners, slave-holders, slave-hunters, slave-traders, ministers, elders, and laymen, alike joined in the pulses of that mighty song. A flood of electrical excitement seemed to rise with it, as, with a voice of many waters the rude chant went on...(Stowe 322-323)

I really like this idea of the collective voice of the people transforming into a sea, the dark side of democracy being this enthusiasm potentially capsizing the ship of state a la Heimert. The potential of connections between these disparate groups is undermined by this enthusiasm. The shared experience eradicates differences but not in the way that would open them up veiwing commonalities. Instead all we have is this "rude chant," this blind surrender to their noise and no knowledge that their noise is just noise. 

This also highlights a problem I keep running into with this project in that sometimes the maritime imaginary is about sailor and slave narratives, sometimes it's about the space of the ship, and sometimes it's about the sea and I either need to deal with each part distinctly or push the others aside and concentrate on one. 

The more I read the more I'm thinking that this chapter should focus mainly on Dred and talk about "The Heroic Slave" and Blake less centrally which doesn't make total sense considering that Dred is the one work that doesn't deal directly with insurrection at sea. However it is a good way to test my theory that texts aren't about transatlantic slave trade nevertheless contain within them an awareness of the Middle Passage. I first thought about doing this with Uncle Tom's Cabin and talking about Tom's trip down the Mississippi as operating as an inland Middle Passage. And with Dred the constant movement of slaves, the awareness of always being in danger of sold away speak to the way in which that inter-state slave trade is forever connected to the Middle Passage. 

Of course this might all change when I'm gathering notes for Blake and "The Heroic Slave." Hopefully I'll settle on something soon.