>>My Chosen Theme: Sexual Slavery
>>What I read: Harriet Jacobs' "The Trials of Girlhood”, pp.
439-441
The main point of the text was something that I
found hard to read. Not because of the way it was written, but because what it
wrote about. Jacobs wrote about her life as a slave girl, and how growing up,
the attention given to her shifted in nature. Living in the service of the
Flint family, as she reaches fifteen the attention Dr. Flint gives her becomes
markedly more 'foul', as she describes it. "My master began to whisper foul words in my ear. Young
as I was, I could not remain ignorant of their import." She
goes on to tell about how he crafted his ways carefully, going from
"stormy, terrific ways" to "a gentleness that he thought must
surely subdue". She was torn on the actions, frightened and
disturbed by them all. Jacobs talks about the reality of slave girls, how they
will grow into "a knowing [of] evil things"
that her master will probably force her into. "That which commands
admiration in the white woman only hastens the degradation of the female
slave."
Jacobs was hounded by her master and constantly reminded of his ownership
over her, and how she couldn't escape any of it. The other slaves are scared
into silence, even when they're aware of what Dr. Flint is doing to her;
Because their words wouldn't go unpunished, none speak up for her. She is
terrified to tell her grandmother about the happenings, partly from fear of Dr.
Flint's threats of her death, but also out of shame and guild. She feels that
her grandmother would be angry with her for such impure happenings, as she
seems to have a history of being. "Both pride and fear kept me
silent." Instead of confiding in her, Jacobs uses her presence to
occasionally help dodge Dr. Flint where she can, knowing that Flint does have
some fear for the woman. She speaks with the community extensively, and he
wouldn't want to be exposed like that. Jacobs goes on to say how she didn't
write it for sympathy, buts so the reader would experience compassion for those
still suffering (Which makes me think she may have written this after she was
freed, as she refers to them as “my sisters who are still in
bondage, suffering as I once suffered.’) She closes with a story
about two girls, one white and one black, and laments the fate of the little
slave girl, bound to suffer as she did. She speaks to the northern abolitionists,
particularly those who ‘advocate’ for the cause but don’t actually fight for
it. She pleads them to break their silence and fight back against the injustice
of slavery, for all those still enslaved.
Sexual slavery wasn’t something that was discussed very much in Uncle Tom’s
Cabin. Hinted at, maybe, but not overtly discussed. And it was a huge issue for
the entire stretch of slavery in the United States. Slave women would be forced
into sexual encounters with their owners, whether for more children of just
because they felt they could. Slave women would be bought for the express
purpose of turning out children to either be sold or to grow up and work their
plantations. And as Jacobs told us, not even the young were safe from the
disgusting acts. “I turned from him with disgust and hatred. But
he was my master. I was compelled to live under the same roof as him- where I
saw a man forty years my senior daily violating the most sacred commandments of
nature.” Jacobs, live every other slave girl, had no voice in what happened
to her. She had no ability to say no, no matter how she felt. Stowe didn’t
really give us a good look at what sexual slavery was like for these women,
especially the young ones. They didn’t have agency over their own bodies, no
more than the men did when it came to hard labour. I think that’s one of the
points where she falls especially flat. The articles that Dr. J posted about
sexual slavery and the rape of slave women- If you haven’t read it yet, I
highly recommend you do, they’re very interesting- is especially poignant, because
that all took place before this was written. It was a well known fact that
slave women were forced to have children with their masters. Just look at Eliza,
she’s so light she can almost pass as a white woman. She herself is the product
of encounters like this. And George successfully passed as Spanish. The
consequences of it are all over the narrative, and yet Stowe refuses to touch
on it at all beyond a few side mentions. it's almost like she purposefully skipped around a lot of it.
Obviously rape and sexual assault of any kind is a terrible, traumatic
experience. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. But the fact that I had to read a
second source, from a former slave herself, kind of drives home that Stowe didn’t
necessarily get it all right. She had the right idea, obviously, with abolition
and the fact that slavery was wrong and needed to be stopped. She was right on
all those accounts. Btu she was so, so very white when you pull back the text
to look at it. Obviously that’s not something she could have helped, but that
doesn’t really change it The entire narrative of Uncle Tom’s Cabin really only
scratches the surface of it all. It doesn’t get much deeper than “Yeah, slavery
is bad! Stop owning people!” And like I said, that’s a fine message, but it
didn’t go any deeper than that. Stowe appealed to human nature as best she
could, but it was almost in a watered down way. Maybe that’s just a produce of the
times, and I’m looking at it through the skewed lens of the 21st
century. But it just seems to me like she could have done so much more.Saying that 'that's how hit was back then' doesn't change the fact that she skirted around the entire issue.
No comments:
Post a Comment