By Eunice Masunungure
NARRATIVES that expose and attack enslavement of Africans in America faced opposition from those who intended to misrepresent slavery by painting it as good for both the slaves and the owners.
The slave masters were enraged by narratives aimed at ending slavery and one example of such is Mary H. Eastman’s (1852) Aunt Phillis’ s Cabin, also titled Southern Life As It Is.
Eastman’s Aunt Phillis’ Cabin fosters the hegemony of Western scholarship by discrediting Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a text which negated slavery and fomented outrage.
As an antithesis to Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published earlier that year, Aunt Phillis’ Cabin attempts to “…annihilate the memory of slavery… by projecting a story that disregards slavery.”
Professor Victor Verb (2003), in Anti-Slavery Arguments in Selected Narratives, argues that narratives of slavery image misery and dehumanising qualities of the day-to-day lives of slaves in the Old South.
According to Hall (2007), representation is the process through which meanings are created and transformed into material reality.
Representation is also classifying, ‘stereotyping’ and ‘naming’ as Lippman (1992:119) argues.
By writing the story of the enslaved Africans and their agency, anti-resistance narrators like Easton normalised slavery and classified it as the order of the day — they sanitised ‘master-subordinate’ relationship of power.
Slavery sustained the economic development of the United States, helped to clear the American wilderness and built important canals, railroads, and roads, or provided America’s most valuable export, paid for a major portion of American imports as well as expanded America during the early and mid-1800.
Based on her elitist birth, Eastman portrays plantation owners and slaves as mutually respectful, kind and happy beings while painting slavery as a natural institution.
Eastman portrays white plantation owners who behaved benignly toward their slaves and this is endorsed by Stephen Railton’s (2012) Uncle Tom’s Cabin & American Culture as “…(the) essential happiness of slaves in the South as compared to the inevitable sufferings of free blacks and the working classes in the North.”
Aunt Phillis’ Cabin discuses virtues of slavery and pointedly contrasts them with the drudgery of life of free blacks and labouring class of whites in the North.
Aunt Phillis’ Cabin is an anti-Tom text whose characters are happy, singing and childlike stereotypes, obviously content to maintain the status quo.
For example, the pious, temperate and proud Aunt Phillis, a 50-year-old slave living on a Virginia cotton plantation, is likened to a Nubian queen comfortably living her golden days in America.
Eastman concludes:
“I have no wish to uphold slavery.
I would that every human being that God has made were free, were it in accordance with His will …
Neither do I desire to deny the evils of slavery, any more than I would deny the evils of the factory system in England, or the factory and apprenticeship system in our own country.
I only assert the necessity of the existence of slavery at present in our southern States, and that, as a general thing, the slaves are comfortable and contented, and their owners humane and kind” (Eastman 1852:280).
Another character, Uncle Bacchus, the enslaved husband of Phillis. is sociable, which goes against the general disposition of enslaved African men.
He has three children with Phillis; a son, William, and two daughters, Lydia and Esther, giving an impression that families were intact during slavery.
Against narratives that project slave masters as hard to please, the text also presents Mr Weston as a kind master, who treats his slaves Phillis and Bacchus, with kindness.
Presenting slave masters, who treat slaves in a kinder, peaceful manner, maintain balance and negates narratives that have been compiled in this foregoing text about slavery.
Miss Janet, an elderly friend of Mr Weston, who resides with him on the plantation, acts as an instructor to the women slaves in the arts of sewing, embroidery and other domestic tasks and this is intended to render useless all the annals about the atrocities the black race faced in the West as slaves.
Were these white women acting as aunt-figures to slaves as Janet does to Alice in Eastman’s Aunt Phillis’ Cabin or it is one of the Western lies swaddled in narratives?
What a highlight to the idea that it matters who writes your story!
Eastman seems to favour neutrality with regards to slavery narratives because the author presents character Abel Johnson, a friend of Arthur, studying at Yale College, preferring to remain neutral in abolition discussions.
Another character, Captain William Moore, an army captain living in New England with his wife, Emmy Moore, is a military officer assigned to work against abolitionists or ‘…rescuing runaway slaves…,’ but it is clear that their intention is not rescuing but enslaving them for their own ends.
One slave, brought back, Susan, eventually becomes a maid to the Moores after being rescued from abolitionist masters.
This opens avenues to the argument that the West is oppressive through and through, for all that the slave masters saw was that Africans were only fit to remain their servants.
Another character, Aunt Polly, was an ex-slave and servant of the Moores.
It then suffices to read Easton’s Aunt Phillis’ Cabin as a text that countered resistance narratives about slavery with an intention to perpetuate slavery.
Of course, linking to history; war in America broke out anyway because the slaves were conscious beings too.
Matthew R. Cook (2015: 290-308) in Counter-Narratives of Slavery in the Deep South: the Politics of Empathy Along and Beyond River Road argues:
“The historical institution of slavery is unevenly memorialised across the US’s cultural landscape.”
The slavery counter-narratives accused narratives that were against human enslavement of distorting the institution of slavery.
In the preface to Aunt Phillis’s Cabin, Eastman quoted a variety of sources from The Bible, which she claimed supported slavery as an institution:.
“Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling” (Ephesians 6:5)
Anti-slavery: “Whoever steals a man and sells him, and anyone found in possession of him, shall be put to death” (Exodus 21:16).
These same quotes, typical of those used by Southern religious ministers, were used in another anti-Tom novel, The Black Gauntlet: A Tale of Plantation Life in South Carolina by Mary Howard Schoolcraft, published four years later in 1860.
Therefore, Aunt Phillis’s Cabin is a good example of narratives that are skewed.
Mere misrepresentations!
This means that it had big effect in countering the narratives which were against slavery in America.
Remember what Homi K. Bhabha (1990) said in Introduction: Narrating the Nation, that: “Nations, like narratives, lose their origins in the myths of time and only fully realize their horizons in the mind’s eye.
Such an image of the nation or narration might seem impossibly romantic and excessively metaphorical, but it is from those traditions of political thought and literary language that the nation emerges as a powerful historical idea in the West.”
Slavery narratives must not run parallel to the lives of those who experienced them.
Baym, Nina (1993) in Women’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820-1870, argues: “The kick against Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) was fierce, desperate, smearing on the grease of self-justification with a shovel.”
Southern Quarterly Review (April 1853:523) also argues as follows:
“To Eastman slavery was empowering, enlightening, a partnership between needy, simple-minded blacks and needed.
“Aunt Phillis’ Cabin is truthful, which cannot be said of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which lies like a dragon…”
“Throughout American history, artists have continued to revisit the history of slavery in their works because people need to confront it, understand it,” said Tawil (2016).
Eastman naturally defends South America and the institution of slavery.
However, the truth of the matter is that there was nothing beautiful or romantic about slavery.