Dred (1856)

AUTHOR: Stowe, Harriet Beecher

KEYWORDS: Abolition, animals, gender, slavery

SUMMARY (Aïcha Bouchelaghem, edited Deborah Madsen)

The novel’s Abolitionist argument draws on the trope of wilderness versus culture/cultivation, untamed versus tame, instinct versus instruction, sentiment versus reason. The text uses this set of binaries to critique the hypocrisy of slaveholders (both religious and not) and of their religious training of enslaved people. This rhetorical context, at times, results in statements that expose the objectification of other-than-human animals as well as women. Importantly, Dred picks up the discursive strategy by which texts equate kindness to animals with a good (and thus Abolitionist) moral framework.

Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp is Harriet Beecher Stowe’s second novel. Like Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853), it is an Abolitionist text. The action takes place in North Carolina, near the swamp belt referred to as the “Great Dismal Swamp.” This is where the eponymous Dred, an enslaved man who freed himself by escaping from his owner, has settled with other enslaved refugees to plot an insurrection. Stowe’s narrator describes the “Great Dismal Swamp” as defying human domestication: the swamps are “regions of hopeless disorder, where the abundant growth and vegetation of nature, sucking up its forces from the humid soil, seems to rejoice in a savage exuberance, and bid defiance to all human efforts either to penetrate or subdue” (Vol. I 255).

The novel invokes untamability to promote anti-slavery sentiments, both in the diegetic space of the swamp and at the level of characterization. Among the novel’s white protagonists is Nina Gordon, a young New-York-educated plantation heiress who does not believe in slavery. Nina compares her epistemological self-reliance to the occasional unruliness of domesticated animals, for example when she tells her enslaved house servant (who is also her half-brother): “Do you know, Harry, I think I’m just like my pony? You know, she likes to have you come and offer her corn, and stroke her neck; and she likes to make you believe she’s going to let you catch her; but when it comes to putting a bridle on her, she’s off in a minute. Now, that’s the way with me” (94). Nina’s simile recalls that the captivity of farmed animals is not consensual and compares their subjugation to the way in which pro-slavery ideology is imposed upon young Southerners, especially through (religious) instruction.

Elsewhere, Nina aligns young women with nonhuman animals insofar both are denied legitimacy: “don’t you know that girls and dogs, and other inferior creatures, have the gift of seeing what’s in people? It doesn’t belong to highly cultivated folks like you, but to us poor creatures, who have to trust our instincts” (186). She trusts her instincts without subjecting them to mental refinement, recalling Ralph Waldo Emerson's claim, in “The Comic” (1876), that nonhuman animals have an “unerring good-sense” (140). In its positive valuation of instinct, Dred also gestures to Emerson's idea, in “The Transcendentalist” (1849), that the reliance of nonhuman animals on instinct as opposed to rationality enables them to avoid selfish behavior: they provide for themselves “without selfishness or disgrace” (328). Nina’s Abolitionist views are connected to claims that she, unlike pro-slavery characters, is not “selfish” (I, 84, 175).

Nina is further aligned with non-human animals via her inherent knowledge of the natural environment. The narrator explains that “[t]here was scarce an eligible tree which she could not climb, or a thicket she had not explored. She was familiar with every flower, every bird, every butterfly, of the vicinity[.] She knew precisely when every kind of fruit would ripen, and flower would blossom; and was so au fait in the language of birds and squirrels, that she might almost have been considered one of the fraternity” (II, 80). The novel outlines a rhetorical logic in which intimacy with nonhuman worlds and communities or species entails high morality, represented by the Bible which is “distinguished above all other literature for its intense sympathy with nature” (214), and thus the rejection of chattel slavery. Stowe’s narrator says of the eponymous Dred: “that part of the head which phrenologists attribute to the moral and intellectual sentiments, rose like an ample dome above them [Dred’s eyes]” (I, 240-241). By connecting cranial anatomy specifically with cross-species sympathy, Stowe implicitly draws on the phrenological anatomical concept of "philoprogenetiveness," which Lydia Folger Fowler defines as the part of the brain which informs love of offspring and of nonhuman animals (Familiar Lessons on Physiology and Phrenology, 1847, 31). Echoing Abolitionist authors such as Frederick Douglass, Stowe associates empathy with nonhuman animals with anti-slavery convictions and with high moral character.

Last updated on July 22nd, 2024

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