Robert Tulip wrote:[”Monstrous selfish hypocrite” appears to me to be how Stowe views Shelby, which is a very painful judgment on those who would prefer to shift their own evil onto others. This becomes clearer once Tom has been shackled and dispatched, and the younger Shelby accosts the trader, in Chapter 10:
“Look here, now, Mister,” said George, with an air of great superiority, as he got out, “I shall let father and mother know how you treat Uncle Tom!” “You’re welcome,” said the trader. “I should think you’d be ashamed to spend all your life buying men and women, and chaining them, like cattle! I should think you’d feel mean!” said George. “So long as your grand folks wants to buy men and women, I’m as good as they is,” said Haley; “‘tan’t any meaner sellin’ on ‘em, that ‘t is buyin’!”
Stowe is here using the amoral trader to voice her view that the grand folks' who benefit from slavery are just as culpable as those who do their dirty work for them.
Yes, abstractly this is true, just as it would be true, although less harmful, that a northerner who bought cotton fabric made in a northern mill is abetting slavery, since virtually no cotton was grown by free labor. I'm focusing on the gradations of Stowe's opprobrium toward the characters who support the slave system. I think her writing clearly shades toward viewing Mr. Shelby as less personally responsible than Haley the trader. Although Stowe would say that Haley is correct that the demand for slaves makes his own business, she would not trust Haley to make a moral pronouncement because of his deep self-interest. He also spouts hypocrisy aplenty, with his claims of humane treatment and his pledges to care for his immortal soul by and by. There will be characters in the book for whom the word 'monstrous' reflects Stowe's view, but she doesn't paint Shelby in these colors. "Mr. Shelby was a fair average kind of man, good-natured and kindly, and disposed to easy indulgence of those around him, and there had never been a lack of anything which might contribute to the physical comfort of the negroes on his estate." Shelby, I think, is not even necessarily a hypocrite. Does he voice a view that Haley is a bad man because he buys and trades humans? Then the charge of hypocrisy doesn't fit. But the morality of our acts goes well beyond whether we speak of one thing and do another, so Shelby is still culpable. It's just that, on the scale of slave masters, Stowe places him on the upper level because the system allowed abuses in which he didn't indulge (though the main reason she cites is that slavery in Kentucky was milder in general than it the states with big plantations). This distinction is a necessary one from a dramatic and artistic standpoint even if we reject a moral base to it. Monsters in stories need to be rare in order to convince us of their reality. I should add that hypocrisy is extremely common and would not usually be the quality that makes a person monstrous.
I think she is going further and asking if a person’s self-perception as good and noble can be justified when their actions betoken hypocrisy. This is a core theme in the Bible, where Jesus condemns the religious leaders of his day as hypocrites for using a good appearance to conceal moral corruption.
Again, my inclination is to not go after hypocrisy with the same zeal that you do. Jesus perhaps had his own political ax to grind, and the pharisees as a class were unlikely to have been hypocritical by an objective standard.
I see hypocrisy as the core problem causing trauma among those who materially benefit from evil. Because in order to maintain a self-image as a good person, their evil action must somehow be rationalised, along the lines of Aristotle’s old view that slavery would exist until looms could spin themselves (which proved correct given the end of overt slavery due to the industrial revolution). Rationalising ones actions generally involves deception, and the construction of an imaginary fantasy self image, which serves to conceal the suffering caused by your decisions. Such delusion produces ideology which produces suffering and trauma.
Well I would agree that Mr. Shelby is deluded rather than hypocritical. He is deluded because he allows himself to believe that he can enjoy the benefits of low-maintenance labor while benefiting these slave laborers at the same time, through relatively kind treatment of them. He puts out of his thinking that the system itself gives the lie to his pretensions. The system may someday require him to disregard completely the welfare of his property if he wishes to maintain his social and economic standing--and the day comes when it does.
I use 'deluded' not in any clinical sense, of course, but as applying to beliefs that become unshakable through acculturation. I think you may assume that people like Shelby know, at some level, that they are rationalizing an abhorrent practice, and so the strain of of covering up exerts a psychic strain. I question whether this is indeed the case, when a person grows up in a culture where slavery is held up as, actually, a humane response to the fact of negro incapacity for self-governance. Being the master may involve little difficulty of conscience. Compare Huck Finn's certainty that he would go to hell for the moral failure of turning Jim over to authorities.
Perhaps the “painful” aspect here is the disjunction between modern values of equality and slave-era values where any assertion of equality between races was rank treason, social subversion, reckless indifference to law and order.
True, and abolitionism didn't hold strongly to the equality of races. Racial distinctions based on character and ability were firmly embedded.
Except that submission is a very ambiguous moral quality. Islam means submission, indicating the need to subordinate our rational faculties before the high eternal alleged wisdom of the Koran. But that has produced the squalor of Islamic backwardness.
I was suggesting that Stowe presents submission as innate to blacks, something they naturally incline to. Slavery thus takes unfair advantage of them. They are, however, better Christians than the Saxons who have been bred to dominate. Stowe apparently chooses to forget numerous slave uprisings, or perhaps she sees the need to make the idea of freeing blacks as unintimidating as possible.
Those are the central moral dilemmas that are still alive within Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I am particularly struck by the messages that relate to illegal immigration and the rights of refugees. These are not simple problems to be solved by indignation, and it is instructive to see Stowe’s effort to hold her own moral integrity in a way that can retain respect for the Saxon world while revolutionising its reliance on chattel labor.
I'd like to hear more about this, as I'm not sure I understand the point.