Race and the American Novel Part 2: Synthesis

America

      One prevalent theme that I saw permeating throughout American Literature is inequality, the way it was distributed through classes, sex, and race, and I think non white women got the absolute worst of it.  During slavery, unless you were a heterosexual white man, you had virtually no power within society, women being just above slaves and immigrants.  If you were a woman you took care of the house, children, and piety; if you were a slave, you were as good as livestock; but if you were a slave woman, you had it worst of all.  I think slave women had to be thought of as something akin to a person, because they were often sold into sex slavery (which was surprisingly busy business considering peoples views towards African Americans of the time), bred like barn animals for more slaves, or sometimes kept for the private "use" of their owners.  Even our fore fathers, great leaders and defenders of democracy and freedom, owned people, many of them even having children with their slaves.  Now, I can't imagine many of these women were willing participants, and combined with a knowledge of the way slave families were discouraged and ripped apart, I don't know how any African American women made it out of slavery intact.  I think this kind abuse contributed greatly to the problems of race and gender inequality we face today.  By stealing every slaves identity and ripping apart their families, history was taken away from African Americans both during and after slavery.  They no longer had a past to reflect upon, a family to depend on, leaving them isolated and helpless.  For most of us, when we have a problem we look to the past for advise; which leads me to believe that this unintentional effect of slavery was one of the most debilitating.  These are problems that persist today and weren't even acknowledged or acted upon until the 1960's.  

          Falling into the cult of domesticity, certain things were expected (and still are) of women.  They should be pious, pure, submissive, and domestic.  This is prevalent throughout many of the stories we read this semester.  I thought Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin complicated this paradigm, because slaves kind of took on all of these roles within slave owning homes.  For the most part, the slaves in Stowe's novel are very religious, submissive to their masters will, pure and faithful to their master, and often times took on the domestic duties of the home, cooking, cleaning, child rearing.  If the cult of domesticity is a definition of women, where does Stowe leave women? White and black.  Sethe in Toni Morrison's Beloved is also an interesting note here, because she possesses two of these qualities, or rather doesn't possess piousness or purity, but "home" still seems to be the best and only place for Sethe, she even works in a kitchen.  What does this mean for women? Is Sethe or any of the women in UTC real women?  Was Uncle Tom a woman?

          The cult of true womanhood led to a breakdown of women across the country, who were all unhappy, depressed, and otherwise longing; and the men couldn't figure it out, what else besides a big home with all the latest gadgets, a husband, and healthy children could a woman possibly want?  Charlotte Perkins Gilman gives readers a glimpse into this torture/oppression in The Yellow Wallpaper, which was later re articulated by Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique as "the problem with no name.  Women needed more than a life provided for them, they wanted to choose, to decide whether or not to have a family, to get an education, a career, and to have these things be acceptable socially.

          But I think the largest problem faced in our country today is the way society would rather ignore or repress our problems and history.  I think we have made leaps and bounds since the days of slavery, and are continuing to make progress towards humanity.  But we still have a ways to go as evidenced by the current race riots, police brutality, and gender inequality that are going on today.  I think the first step on the road to recovery is society learning to accept people as people, not judging them by their race, sex, or preferences.  We are all people, men, women, black, white, and everyone in between, we all eat, breathe, love, cry, bleed, and live in this country.  I think we need to start focusing on our similarities instead of our differences.  

Works Cited:

Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique / by Betty Friedan. 20th Anniversary ed. New York: Norton, 1983. Print.

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. "The Yellow Wallpaper." 1892. 1865-Present. Ed. Nina 
     Baym. 8th ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2013. 485-97. Print. 
     Vol. 2 of The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 2 vols.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. 1st Vintage Intl ed. New York: Vintage Book, 2004. 
     Print. 

Stowe, Harriet Beecher, Ammons, Elizabeth, and Cairns Collection of American Women Writers. Uncle Tom's  Cabin : Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism / Harriet Beecher Stowe ; Edited by Elizabeth  Ammons. 2nd ed. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2010. Print. Norton Critical Edition.