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.
Lila Belsher
Professor Curseen
Blackness and the Senses
8 February 2021
Taking of Child or Taking of Humanity?
The proposition of motherhood is brought to the story line consistently throughout the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. However, Stowe’s depiction of being a mother through the lens of a white woman, and being a mother through the lens of a black woman during the times of slavery, are obviosuly incredibly distant circumstances. Although I am not a mother, I do understand that once a person becomes a mother, their entire life is altered as their main duty in life becomes protecting and nourishing their child at all costs. During the times in which Uncle Tom’s Cabin takes place, however, this is not an option, and hence, left black mothers to believe they had no point to live anymore. Taking one’s child away, only to know that they will be subjected to a lifetime of harm, is equivalent to stripping one of their humanity. There is simply no other way to describe it; I can imagine nothing worse than being as helpless and vulnerable as a black woman with a child they love so dearly during this time.
Stowe does a tremendous job in depicting white mothers during this time. I do not think she is trying to put them down, but is in a way trying to show the reader just how brainwashed they truly are. She makes a point at the beginning of chapter twelve to show that these women do not have bad intentions, when the boy of a white mother explains how there are slaves on the ship that they are on.
“O, mamma,” said a boy, who had just come up from below, “there’s a negro trader on board, and he’s brought four or five slaves down there.”
“Poor creatures!” said the mother, in a tone between grief and indignation.
“What’s that?” said another lady.
“Some poor slaves below,” said the mother.
“And they’ve got chains on,” said the boy.
“What a shame to our country that such sights are to be seen!” said another lady.
Yes, the white mothers say they do not believe in slavery, but doing nothing is inexcusable. In modern day, people who face everyday prejudice use their voices to provoke action against racial inequality. If Martin Luther King Jr. had not had the courage to speak up, where would our country be now? Stowe does not completely condemn white women, but she does not glorify them either. Later in this scene, a white mother on the ship says “I’ve been south, and I must say I think the negroes are better off than they would be to be free.” This is an example of the brainwashing in which these women had accumulated over time. Although completely incorrect, Stowe is working to show just how helpless these women were in this time given the circumstances and how little say any woman had at all. I think Stowe is arguing that they were born with good intentions, but in being ill-advised their whole lives, were brainwashed into thinking life as they knew it was okay. However, this is no excuse for saying nothing as these cruel actions took place.
As Stowe continues with this chapter, the utterly grotesque action of the slave trader when he steals a black woman’s baby while both are sleeping is beyond anything humane. As this happens right after the conversation between the white mothers and their sons, it leaves the reader appalled at the differences in which these people, both of which are torn from the same cloth, live their lives. I do not think Stowe is working to condemn these mothers for their actions, but that she is moreso working to emphasize the differences in which black mothers and white mothers could go about their lives.
Works Cited
Stowe, Harriet Beecher. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” W. W. Norton & Company, 2018.