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revenge against Bella’s brother William, who has offended Blonay by calling her son “Goggle,” an insensitive nickname by which he is known owing to a defect of his eyes. In one of the novel’s more melodramatic incidents, Hastings attempts to compromise Bella’s chastity, and perhaps even rape her, but is prevented from doing so by the fortunate and timely intervention of her brother. The foundation of the social scale in Simms’s portrait of society are the slaves. A few years before the Revolution, the population of Dorchester was estimated at “500 white and 1300 black inhabitants” (see Explanatory Notes, 461). Although blacks greatly outnumbered whites in the South Carolina coastal region at the time of the Revolution, slaves, with a few notable exceptions, are nearly invisible in The Partisan. Emily Singleton does refer to her favorite gardener, Luke, and to her old black nurse, whom she calls “mauma,” a term of affection, as Simms points out in a footnote. What Emily does not know is that these two favorites were beaten and driven into the swamp with the rest of her family’s slaves, when loyalists sacked the Singleton plantation. In a later scene, when a British patrol arrives at “The Oaks” in an attempt to capture Robert Singleton, Katharine tells Major Proctor that her father’s slaves, at a word from her, “will rush upon your bayonets” in defense of the plantation (249). Only one slave in the novel is individually portrayed, and that is Tom, Porgy’s body servant and cook, who accompanies his master on the partisan campaign. Porgy and Tom constantly argue with each other, with Tom giving as good as he gets, like two old bachelors who, having lived together a long time, are thoroughly acquainted with each other’s quirks and foibles. But Porgy, while tormenting Tom goodnaturedly , holds him in benevolent bondage. He always makes sure Tom gets his share of the food they prepare for the troops, and on one occasion, he rushes to defend Tom from a beating by a soldier considerably larger than himself who has accused Tom’s dog, Slink, of stealing food. Simms contrasts these examples of the slaves of Emily, Katharine, and Porgy, with runaway slaves who, allied with Indians and thus with the British and loyalists, committed due to “their lighter sense of humanity, additional forms of terror” that were characteristic of “the fierce civil warfare of the South” (44). In making this unfavorable comparison, Simms is attempting to demonstrate that good masters treated their slaves well and were rewarded with a loyalty that they reciprocated. The lowest social class in The Partisan consists of undesirables, tory outlaws and poor whites with criminal tendencies, whom Simms xxvi INTRODUCTION would no doubt have wished to exclude altogether from his ideal society . Mother Blonay and her son Ned represent the poor white class with criminal tendencies. She has a local reputation as a witch, pretends to knowledge of the occult properties of various herbs, and wields a certain amount of power by claiming to be able to cast spells. Her son, Ned Blonay, or “Goggle,” though a brilliant scout well-versed in the skills of woodcraft, is corrupt and dominated by a vengeful nature that Simms attributes directly to his mother’s influence. Both seem driven by envy of the privileged aristocrats and continually attempt to betray them to the British. In a remarkable interview between mother and son in Chapter XVII, Ned, pressing his mother to reveal the truth of his paternity, forces her to reveal that his father was not her legal husband, but “an Indian of the Catawba nation” with whom she indulged in “criminal intercourse, provoked on her part by a diseased appetite, resulting, as it would seem, in punishment, in the birth of a monster like himself” (169). Ned, then, not only suffers the social disadvantage of his low class status, but he also bears the burden of having “mixed blood,” which Simms portrays as a threat “to the purity of white civilization ” (Schieck, 29). Throughout the novel, Simms constantly links Ned’s “moral deficiencies” (Schieck, 29) with the loyalists, and thus includes them also in his class of social undesirables. While Simms in The Partisan was experimenting with mixing romance and realism, laying out his scheme for an ideal society, and at the same time trying to write an interesting story enlivened with adventure that yet remained true to the history behind it, he was also...

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