Models of Power in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Dred

MODELS OF POWER IN HARRIET BEECHER STOWE'S DRED Richard Boyd University of California-Riverside Near the conclusion of Harriet Beecher Stowe's second antislavery novel, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856), the cynical Frank Rüssel propounds a view of personal freedom that seems entirely in keeping with his bleak and, according to the narrator, typically male view of the world: " 'After all, what is liberty, that people make such a breeze about? It's only a pretty name. We are all slaves to one thing or another; nobody is absolutely free, except Robinson Crusoe in the desolate island, and he tears all his shirts to pieces, and hangs them up as signals of distress, in his distracted desire to get back into slavery.' "' Not surprisingly, these pessimistic sentiments elicit a spirited rejoinder from Anne Clayton, the sympathetically drawn mistress of a South Carolina plantation and the sister of the white hero: " 'That is a heartless, unbelieving way of talking,' said Anne, with tears in her eyes; 'but I know better. I know there have been some right, true, noble souls, in whom the love of liberty has meant the love of right, and the desire that every human brother should have what rightly belongs to him' " (II, 338—39). Although their dispute ends before either party is willing to concede the other's argument, the resolution of this conflict is nevertheless all-important, for Frank's position is one that must be conclusively answered by Anne—and by Stowe—if the novel is to succeed in its declared intention to further the "triumphant vindication of Liberty and Right in America" (I, x). Frank's denial of any meaningful alternative to the universality of servitude directly challenges a vision initially set forth in Uncle Tom's Cabin, wherein the Christianized power of motherhood might serve to counteract patriarchal forms of oppression and thereby bring forth a new society based on the female values of self-sacrificing love and nurturing non-competitiveness.2 Now, four years after her landmark first novel, Stowe again takes up the pen to compose a didactic novel that aims, according to the preface, to incite public sentiment against the pernicious effects of slavery upon all parts of American economic and communal life. But just as Frank's cynicism persists in the face of Anne's appeal to the elevated feelings of "sentimental humanity" (I, iv), his deterministic thoughts on slavery continue to cast a shadow over even the most idealized scenes of familial love and matriarchal harmony that Stowe includes in her 16Richard Boyd text. The unresolved debate between Frank and Anne thus reflects the central dilemma in the novel as a whole, that of whether Stowe's protagonists ever manage to escape completely the evils of the system they so vigorously condemn. The answer to this question must begin with the assault in the novel on the "peculiar institution" of the South, for although Stowe recapitulates much of the anti-slavery argument present in Uncle Tom's Cabin, her creation of the insurrectionist slave Dred, whose violent resistance to slavery is not easily condemned by the narrator, suggests that Stowe experienced the intervening four years as a time of heightening tensions between North and South. The preface to Dred refers explicitly to an increasingly acrimonious state of affairs and national discord epitomized by the brutal attack on Stowe's friend Charles Sumner by South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks. This event occurred during the composition of Dred, and several critics have blamed it for the novel's radical tone shifts and lack of overall unity.3 But this view should not be allowed to obscure an underlying unity in the novel that emerges from its attempt "to show the general effect of slavery on society" (I, v). The issue of violence, and particularly the systemic origins of that violence, runs throughout the revelation of the workings of Southern slavery, and it can be found within all relationships shaped by a system that is shown to enthrall both black and white.4 Thus, while Dred echoes Uncle Tom's Cabin in its indictment of slavery for destroying family life (the 1856 novel features...