In the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe depicts how, for the enslaved woman, motherhood and despair are inextricable. Furthermore, Stowe shows how misery can be most palpable in silence, without the burdens of twisted language and logic. Stowe describes an enslaved woman on a south-bound boat with an infant child in her arms, a child a trader unhesitatingly sells during the night. Stowe does not give this enslaved mother a name, indicating instead that her identity lies in her physicality. To the men who took her child, she does not need a name; she is a thing to beget children, a thing to be sold and violated. When the woman realizes that the men snatched her sleeping infant, she does not respond with hysterics, subverting the trader’s expectations of overt emotion. Hysterics, howls, bawling, he can deal with; numb misery is “beyond his style of operation” (Stowe 128). For this enslaved mother, who lives a life defined by pain, she centers and defines herself in her child. With her child in her arms, she can pin her aspirations on protection of another and hope for another. Without her child, the world becomes numb and lifeless; the only future she envisions now is one of misery.
The “noise and hum” around this woman, the “groaning of the machinery,” fades away (128). The loud world quiets. Stowe chooses the word “machinery” carefully – in the eyes of the trader and the government, this woman deserves no more than machinery. Stowe describes her as having “neither cry nor tear” to show for her “utter misery;” instead, “she was quite calm” (128). This short, declarative sentence, taken in isolation, might be mistaken for apathy. This mother, however, has buried her numbness deep inside herself, as her own self is the only thing the world cannot take from her. The trader attempts to talk to her, to rationalize the situation and dull the sharp edges of her pain. She responds not with anger, but with true misery: “O! Mas’r, if you only won’t talk to me now” (128). In her desolation, she still must call this man Master, but she stops him from forcing his twisted logic upon her. In “a voice of such quick and living anguish,” she silences him. The enslaved mother’s experience – to have her entire world emptied, by a man she must still defer to – is singular and exceptional. Her motherhood is inherently painful, as she gives birth to children she knows will suffer the same pain she has.
Discussion question:
Stowe in this passage describes the experienced of black enslaved mothers, putting white motherhood in sharp contrast. In this narrative, do you think Stowe condemns white women, glorifies them, both, or neither?
Works Cited:
Stowe, Harriet Beecher. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” W. W. Norton & Company, 2018.