Freneau and Guilt

Philip Freneau’s “To Sir Toby” and “The Indian Burying Ground” may represent an encouraging shift in views of race within the American tradition, but they also raise questions about the ways in which pity for the oppressed can compound the problem of oppression. I am confident that readers of these two poems will immediately recognize examples of Freneau’s sympathy for slaves and admiration for Natives, so my purpose here is to push some of these ideas a bit further by pointing out the ways in which both poems redefine racial hierarchy rather than eliminating it.

The slaves on Sir Toby’s plantation are in hell–that much is clear. They are “driven by a devil, whom men call overseer” and chafe under “the monster’s reign” (lines 34, 17). In the final two stanzas, Freneau associates the arrival of slaves in America with the arrival of the damned in Hades, a powerful redefinition of national identity designed to remind readers, and rightly so, that independence from Britain was merely a baby step toward freedom. Well and good.

However, the “black herd” (line 14) that Freneau describes (unfortunately reinforcing the association of minorities with animals) seems powerless to save itself, and if the slaves are in hell, then they are ostensibly in need of saviors. White abolitionists could thus take on the role of messiahs come to overthrow the diabolical slaveowner. The danger of metaphor is evident here in the ways that Freneau’s metaphor of hell suggests that slaves either serve the Christ-like master or the Satanic one, rather than saving themselves. Some readers may object that this is holding Freneau to an unfair standard of social justice, and such readers would likely consider our time to be more advanced than the era described in the poem. So it is. Yet, Freneau’s distorted vision remains with us.

Guilt allows us to overlook the annoying complexities of the race problem, because it encourages pity, and pity gives rise to the Messiah complex. A friend of mine repeated this pattern frequently in relationships. He sought out women who had baggage of some sort from a previous marriage or from emotional distress of some sort, and it gave him great pleasure to become a kind of caregiver. This, however, is a poor basis for love, because part of what he enjoyed was the sense of superiority that accompanied his position as caregiver. In every case, he would eventually grow frustrated by his inability to respect his partner, and the entire liaison would crumble.

Freneau’s hell metaphor is dangerous precisely for these reasons. The ghetto may well be a hell, a present-day version of the cotton field, but guilt and pity will not make it disappear. The oppressed must become their own saviors, and those more fortunate can facilitate this liberation without perpetuating the condescension implicit in Freneau’s otherwise well-meaning lines.

Much of “The Indian Burying Ground” similarly seeks to assuage guilt, only instead of pity Freneau relies on nostalgia, which is also a dangerous way of evading the root of the race problem. Freneau begins the poem by imagining the Indian released from life and “seated with his friends” in the spirit world, where he “shares again the joyous feast” (lines 6, 8). Native culture is conveniently celebrated in the present tense only in the afterlife, where the “fancies of a ruder race” live on (line 24). While the “hunter still the deer pursues,” they do not do so in the flesh and blood, but as “a shade,” or as “shadows and delusions” (lines 35, 36, 40). The lovely language in the poem paints a seductive picture, but the enticements of this romanticized view of Native tradition are significantly corrupted when one remembers that Native culture was still thriving on the Great Plains and in the American West when the poem was written. Freneau thus assuages his guilt by sighing over the relics of a lost culture that is, in fact, not lost at all and whose demise need not have been an inevitable outcome of western expansion.

It is thoroughly refreshing to read a counterpoint to Rowlandson’s caricature of the Narragansetts as “hell-hounds,” but the end result is ultimately the same. Scarcely ten years after “The Indian Burying Ground” was published, Lewis and Clark wrote their first journal entries on the long trek into the West, a journey that was touted as the same sort of discovery mission that the conquistadores of seventeenth-century Spain had undertaken. It would not be long before the U.S. Cavalry was sweeping across present-day Nebraska and South Dakota, working its way toward Little Bighorn, where Custer died as a result (surprise!) of his vision of conquest, as if America had learned nothing at all about the race problem since 1492.

On _The Crucible_

I’ve appreciated the many thoughtful comments to the discussion forum. Some have written impassioned justifications for the use of poetic license; others have pointed out that the film may be less useful as a learning tool in discerning causes and effects. Here are some additional thoughts on the matter.1) One post argued that we don’t really know what happened historically with Richard II or any of Shakespeare’s other historical figures. This is misinformed–there is a very large body of historical scholarship devoted to tracing the exactness of his representations of characters. However, the spirit of this comment was interesting, because it suggested that literature is not identical to factual history, but rather more of an interpretation of history and perhaps even an exaggeration of the essential details to reinforce their meaning. One might conclude that literature is essentially mythological at its core and that its purpose has nearly always been more symbolic than literal. Metaphors and fictional scenarios all breathe life into inanimate facts. But, lest we forget, even histories that claim to stick to the bare bones of the facts, such as Mather’s discussion of Salem, are at work on their own mythologies. I find the relationship between myth and history to be extremely fluid–both are forms of storytelling and both are concerned with different approximations of truth.

2) Some argued that the love interest between Proctor and Williams clouds the true causes and effects of the Salem event. I agree with this view, in part. Abigail Williams becomes a kind of caricature in the film, particularly when she is shouting at Judge Danforth. In a society that perceived Jewish law as a basis for theocratic social order, it would not be unthinkable to stone a child for dishonoring his/her parents, so the insolence that Williams shows in the film, as well as her open contentiousness with Elizabeth Proctor is, I think, an unnecessary historical gloss on Salem. Compare this with the extremely effective dramatization of land disputes as a catalyst for witchcraft accusations. This plays out extremely well as a story and is also very consistent with the documentation of the period. Giles Corey was, indeed, pressed to death in the fashion depicted. His arguments with Thomas Putnam are both gripping and historically authentic. Likewise, Miller does an excellent job of showing how contraversial something like dancing might be and how linked this may be to suspicion.

Where the love interest gains the most power as a literary exaggeration is in its symbolic power for the fraudulence of the court. Miller gives John Proctor some extremely weighty lines, such as his claim that the accusations amount to “a whore’s vengeance” and that by believing Abigail Williams the court is “pulling down heaven and raising up a whore.” Through the despicable manipulation of spiritual literalism that Abigail Williams enacts in the film (highly exaggerated from her historical prototype, who may have been dramatic and disturbed, but could hardly have been as bold as Wynona Ryder’s character and so willfully exploitative of adults), we get a more metaphorical representation of Puritan hypocrisy.

Miller tries to drive this point home when Judge Danforth says, of those about to hang, ”Who weeps for these weeps for corruption.” The irony, of course, is that the court is most corrupt. Danforth’s insistence in the film on “legal proof” of Proctor’s confession indicates that his concern is less with truthfulness and more with legal ass covering in order to preserve the integrity of the proceedings. Admitting error would be admitting to spiritual relativism, and the literalistic Puritan mind was so convinced of its uprightness that it could not budge, even when faced with overwhelming evidence.

The message of the film, as I see it, is summed up well in John Hale’s admonition to Elizabeth Proctor before she speaks alone with her husband about whether or not to confess to what he has not done. Hale suggests something to the effect that “no principle, however weighty, can justify the taking of [life].” Throughout the film, we watch Hale’s transformation from a fundamentalist Puritan (who believed that the marks of witchcraft were as “definite as stone,” when he first arrived in Salem) into a rational thinker who can see the human motivations leading up deliberate falsehoods and can distinguish between these falsehoods and devilry. Hale gains a more metaphorical view of the world. He becomes something much more like a Deist, like those who were influenced by the Enlightenment, and that transformation from conservative stubbornness to a more fluid understanding of human nature is, perhaps, a change that Arthur Miller hoped to see in the American culture of the 1950s. He got the 1960s as an answer, but that is another subject.

Letter to Anne Bradstreet

Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, Summer 2005 

My crewmates

snore in their tents,

two young men

 

full of lentils and rice.

The day’s work

echoes in my legs.

 

Soon I, too, will sleep. 

A breeze washes down

the bare back of the ridgeline

 

like a memory

of the one I love

beside a lifeless fire,

 

where all is at rest but one hand

on the page, the whisper of paper

and skin, the faint hiss of heat.