DWill wrote:As an external judgment, Robert, your sentence on Mr. Shelby is no doubt correct. Do you feel, though, that the author means to condemn him as strongly as you do?
”Monstrous selfish hypocrite” appears to me to be how Stowe views Shelby, which is a very painful judgment on those who would prefer to shift their own evil onto others. This becomes clearer once Tom has been shackled and dispatched, and the younger Shelby accosts the trader, in Chapter 10:
“Look here, now, Mister,” said George, with an air of great superiority, as he got out, “I shall let father and mother know how you treat Uncle Tom!” “You’re welcome,” said the trader. “I should think you’d be ashamed to spend all your life buying men and women, and chaining them, like cattle! I should think you’d feel mean!” said George. “So long as your grand folks wants to buy men and women, I’m as good as they is,” said Haley; “‘tan’t any meaner sellin’ on ‘em, that ‘t is buyin’!”
Stowe is here using the amoral trader to voice her view that the grand folks' who benefit from slavery are just as culpable as those who do their dirty work for them. This is a helpful insight into the actions of the senatorial imperial class going back to the Roman Empire, when Senators wore togas to prevent them from performing manual work, to indicate their moral superiority to those who lived by trade and toil. Meanwhile the Senators were making the decisions for their vast slave estates that cast multitudes into miserable hopeless drudgery, and washing their hands like Pilate.
DWill wrote: There is a laudable awareness on Stowe's part that the social acceptance of slavery does compromise even good people, entangling them in moral crime.
I think she is going further and asking if a person’s self-perception as good and noble can be justified when their actions betoken hypocrisy. This is a core theme in the Bible, where Jesus condemns the religious leaders of his day as hypocrites for using a good appearance to conceal moral corruption.
DWill wrote:I think this is a somewhat different phenomenon from the traumatizing of the slaveholders that you speak of.
I see hypocrisy as the core problem causing trauma among those who materially benefit from evil. Because in order to maintain a self-image as a good person, their evil action must somehow be rationalised, along the lines of Aristotle’s old view that slavery would exist until looms could spin themselves (which proved correct given the end of overt slavery due to the industrial revolution). Rationalising ones actions generally involves deception, and the construction of an imaginary fantasy self image, which serves to conceal the suffering caused by your decisions. Such delusion produces ideology which produces suffering and trauma.
Jane Austen discussed this problem in
Mansfield Park, exploring how the genteel classes of England acquired their money for leisure through the mechanism of the whip on the sugar estates of Antigua, discussed at
https://consideringausten.wordpress.com ... -her-time/ “Did not you hear me ask him about the slave-trade last night?” “I did – and was in hopes the question would be followed up by others. It would have pleased your uncle to be inquired of farther.” “I longed to do it – but there was such a dead silence!” –
DWill wrote:But no question, it's painful to see the younger Mr. Shelby calling Tom "my boy," regardless of the genuine feeling he may have for Tom.
Perhaps the “painful” aspect here is the disjunction between modern values of equality and slave-era values where any assertion of equality between races was rank treason, social subversion, reckless indifference to law and order.
DWill wrote:Tom certainly extols Mr. Shelby as a humane master, with perfect Christian meekness.
You would recall DWill in our recent discussion of the autobiography of Booker T Washington,
Up from Slavery, the problem of Uncle Tom’s submissiveness came up as a major critique of blacks who accept the existing social order of the south. Again it illustrates a core problem of morality, the dilemma of evolution and revolution.
Is the position of integrity found in the effort to improve and reform existing systems, such as Tom’s deference to the young white master, or in the revolutionary action to abolish an evil system? Clearly with slavery, abolition had a momentum before the civil war, partly thanks to
Uncle Tom's Cabin and its stark presentation of the moral dilemmas involved.
Lincoln’s revolutionary demand for abolition came to make all previous efforts to improve the lot of slaves without abolition appear as craven appeasement. But that is a stark extreme, and the unfortunate thing is that before a revolution it can be impossible for those living within an older system to imagine its abolition.
DWill wrote: For Stowe, apparently, the Negro race excelled in the submissive and spiritual qualities that made one a perfect Christian, putting the Saxon-blooded ruling class to shame.
Except that submission is a very ambiguous moral quality. Islam means submission, indicating the need to subordinate our rational faculties before the high eternal alleged wisdom of the Koran. But that has produced the squalor of Islamic backwardness.
There is a strong conflict in Christian interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount, with the old ‘lord in castle and beggar at the gate’ theology of stability reading Jesus as commanding Christians to be meek. But liberation theologians note that the first slap is a backhander, an expression of disrespect by the noble to the commoner, and turning the other cheek is an act of defiance, not submission.
DWill wrote: Here we come up against the reasons for some of the anti-Tom sentiment that animated politically active African-Americans at the dawn of the civil rights era. Tom's refusal to curse his enslavement was anything but admirable.
Those are the central moral dilemmas that are still alive within
Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I am particularly struck by the messages that relate to illegal immigration and the rights of refugees. These are not simple problems to be solved by indignation, and it is instructive to see Stowe’s effort to hold her own moral integrity in a way that can retain respect for the Saxon world while revolutionising its reliance on chattel labor.