Journal 7: Abolitionist Poetry

I am choosing to focus on the imagery of the poem by Frances Harper named “The Slave Mother”. She invokes a sense of woe in the reader in telling how a young boy is taken from his mother. Her imagery of how the mother clings to her son, terrified that he will e taken away is sad and almost brings the reader to tears. “She is a mother, pale with fear, / Her boy clings to her side,/ And in her kirtle vainly tries/ His trembling form to hide.” This is very moving to mothers because the thought of someone tearing your child away from you is terrifying. Also it is terrifying for the child because the child has no knowledge of where he/she is going to be sent. The last stanza in this poem, to me, is the most saddening. “No marvel, then, these bitter shrieks/ Disturb the listening air: / She is a mother, and her heart / Is breaking in despair.” The mother is crying out in agony for her child who is being dragged away by the slave owners. This sad story drives women, both black and white, free or enslaved to fight for these mothers and their children to maintain the family unit.

Journal #6: Race and Culture

            The main characters in the stories Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs and “The Quadroon” by Lydia Maria Child both suffer from not being fully white. In The Life of a Slave Girl the main character Linda was a daughter of a well known black carpenter and so didn’t realize she was a slave until she was six years old. Also, she wasn’t fully black, she was what they called back then “Mulatteos”. “In complexion my parents were a light shade of brownish yellow and were termed mulattoes” But that did not have any difference she was still a slave. The problem of race and culture is more prevalent in the story or “The Quadroon”. The story starts out explaining how a little girl named Xarifa, comes to be. The mother who is a black woman falls in love with a white man and they marry, but not legally. The have a little girl together, whom they name Xarifa. So Xarifa is half black half white and her skin is an almost golden brown and deemed really beautiful, but she still isn’t accepted by the “white world” After bother her mother and father die she is sold into slavery were she becomes really depressed and is eventually killed by her owner.

            Both of these stories are really sad in that both Linda and Xarifa where white in part, but were still sold into slavery and not treated as equals. They were still treated as lowly as regular whole blacks were. Reading these stories I realized how bad it was back then. Now a days we just kind of shrug off the whole slavery thing and not really think it was a big deal, but it was. People who had even 1 past relative who was black, if people knew about it, then you would be old into slavery because you weren’t as good as whole whites and that’s just wrong. Obviously they just wanted to fit in and I know that all people should be treated equally, but if we are going off what the morals of the whites were back then, then at least the people with some white blood in them should be treated better.

Journal #5: Societal Reform

Both Lydia Sigourney’s “Indian Names” and William Apess’ “An Indian’s Looking-Glass for The White Man” exhibit an overall theme for societal reform, specifically to that of the treatment of the Native Americans. However, the two authors go at the issue differently. Sigourney seems to be more aggressive in her poem, while Apess’ work is more mild, but still gets his point across.

Lydia Sigourney’s “Indian Names” addresses the issue of how can the Native Americans be forgotten when many of their names are names for our land features? “but their memory liveth on your hills their baptisms on your shore,” How can we forget these people when their names are present in our daily lives? In a way, she is almost mocking the United States saying that if you really wanted to completely wipe out these people you wouldn’t use their names at all. “Your mountains build their monument, though ye destroy their dust,” Instead you raise up their names even though you’re destroying their very lives.

I can very much relate to this. I spent most of my life in a town called Okemos near Lansing, MI. The town was actually named after a chief of the Saginaw Chippewa tribe named John Okemos. We also have a middle school called Chippewa and a river called the Saginaw River. However I did not learn all of these names were after Native Americans until about the seventh or eigth grade.

William Apess takes a very different approach to try to bring this issue of societal reform to the “white man’s” attention. Being raised in a white family’s home, Apess takes an approach that is more of an “I want to say something, but I don’t want you to get angry,” tone. Almost like he wants to give his opinion, but is almost too shy to. He wants more to be accepted by the white people than stand up for his own race. However, he does get his point of treating the Native Americans equally, across and he does it in a rather biblical way. He uses the example of how Jesus Christ was born a Jew so he was of color. However, he did not judge on color, but on “the hearts” of men. Apess devotes a whole paragraph and a half to different scripture backing up his point of “love thy neighbor as thyself.” This is very significant because the major religion in that day and age was Christianity.

Even though Lydia Sigourney and William Apess had different means of getting to the point of treating the American Indians as everyone else, the point is that they got there. All people, no matter their color, should be treated equally.

The American Beauty

Beauty is a major part of the American Dream. Money and the aspect of getting money are concepts that drive the American Dream. When you look at it, all the millionaires, and billionaires are either marvelously, hot movie stars or insanely, ingenius geeks who have had things done so they look better for the public. You’ve never seen a Barbie doll that does not look anorexic or a Bratz doll without some kind of make-up on. This is what the “ideal” woman should look like and what the world sets the standards as for the women of America. This is why the whole make-up business is booming and why there are thousands of dietary books and plans out there, so that you can better fit the standard of the “American Woman”. This goes the same for men. A ken doll has a six pack, but does the average man have a six pack? Not with what the fast food franchise is feeding us. This world is driven by not only what you look like, but what everyone else thinks of you and what everyone thinks of you affects what you think of yourself. Asenath was a classic example of that. People thought she was ugly and wasn’t good enough to be married and didn’t hold back in telling her so. In turn, she grew to think these things were true and beat herself up about it daily. She grew to think she wasn’t good enough for her fiancé and died thinking it.

Journal #3: The Wife

Irving is very optimistic when it comes to the societal issues of early America. In “The Wife” He recognizes that being married is better than being single. He exclaims that women are remarkable creatures who “had been all weakness and dependence, and alive to every trivial roughness while treading the prosperous life” (p. 526) and then turn around and be supportive and strong for her husband in times of misfortune. He also goes into detail about how married men who go into misfortune come out a whole lot better than the single man, because they don’t have anyone to support him in his time of need. She is his rock when it comes to horrible times in fortune. All of this is also stating his thoughts about marriage. The husband is the supporter of the family and the woman is the supporter of the husband through hard times. He is also explaining here about what the ideal woman would be. She should be supportive of her husband no matter what happens and be happy no matter the circumstances and be strong for him when he needs strength and dependent on him when he needs her to be. In a way, I guess you could put it as; she needs to be what he needs her to be at times that he needs her to be it. Irving could be both belittling the woman and  uplifting her, depending on the way you read his story.