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Runaway slave at Pilgrims point
The early Victorian period marks a time when the society had various injustices including human rights. Poets often conveyed messages to address these vices. Elizabeth Browning writes ‘Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s point’ to protest the bondage exhibited towards African Americans. An oppressive law during this period indicated that if a female slave bore a child with a fellow slave or her master, they would not be exempt from racial injustice and harsh labor (Breen, 125). In this piece, a female slave kills her newborn child and flees to Pilgrim’s Point where she talks about how her feelings lead to the present moment. This essay will identify the poem’s central concerns at its time of publication.
In line 120- 154, the slave describes the awful feeling when she looked into the child’s face. Keeping him meant that it experienced the ills of slavery where no freedom was accorded (Thomas,373). This makes her commit infanticide by suffocating her son. While her choice may seem uninhibited, every slave faces limited options. In this dramatic monologue, the female servant has been separated from her lover and is raped by a group of white slaves. The poem emphasizes the sexual exploitation of women suggesting that this pushed women too into violence.
The poem also acts as a mouthpiece to women’s liberation, gender equality, and rights. The Victorian period marked an era where women would not indulge in politics (Johnson,47). In the same way, there was equality between males and females in all aspects of the society including the right to voting and education. The narrator reveals how women lost dignity in the face of slavery. While rape may be the physical aspect of representation the woman is not permitted to express her protest in public. She suffers in silence eventually killing her child. This was partly because the masters did not respect her social status as well as her gender.
Lines 71-77 reflect the woman’s love of a fellow slave. However, the relationship is terminated when White men murder her lover. The brutality of the slave system is evident in such acts as it showed the low position in which blacks were placed. Additionally, the narrator continually uses the phrase “we were black”. This shows they were not treated at the same level as the White people. Consequently, they would face persecution as a result of the color of their skin.
A black woman becoming pregnant is depicted as a shameful act in the poem. The narrator shows this in lines 126-128 where the reader is brought to attention about the anguish of the situation. The woman barely looks into her child’s face as she claims “it was too white, too white to bear”. Since the course of bringing the child was as a result of rape the woman expresses suffering. Even if the child was to live he would suffer from slavery. For this reason, killing him would be seen to be the better option. This ultimately shows the greediness of the slavery practitioners and what was considered a shameful behavior of delivering a child as a woman servant at the time.
Imperialism can be observed to be one of the central ideas in the poem. It depicts the suffering of the slaves and shows how their life turned out to be frugal in the hands of the Whites. In the same way, the mother seems to suffer racial tension as a result of bearing a child with a white man. The narrator observes that once she looked at the child’s face she grew mad. This is partly because she did not want to look into her master’s face anymore. The mother lets the black and white dichotomy get hold of her resulting in the killing of the child. In the poem the woman observes the child’s struggle as she suffocates him “he moaned and beat his head with his feet”. This act shows that she is portraying an imperialist attitude towards a white child making her no different from her captors.
Oppression is a societal injustice widely depicted in the poem. The narrator has been suffering in silence as her lover was killed by her masters. She has no right to love as she claims on page 92-98 “we were black, we were black, and we had no right to love and bliss”. As a result, Barrett Browning wishes to see the oppressed overcome their captivity. In the last stanza, the narrator observes that she is also waiting bravely for her death “I have floated along as if I should die of liberty’s exquisite pain. In the name of the white child waiting for me in the death dark where we may kiss and agree.” In this way, she declares to defend her position and suggests dying honorably. By including a jovial mood in her demise, she shows that the oppressed can take actions into their hands by robbing oppressors their satisfaction. In this way, fighting against the injustice is seen to be an honorable act.
Throughout the ordeal, the narrator considers the relationship between God and slaves. While the narrator observes everybody to be a child of God, she experiences difficulty reconciling with slavery. In the same way, Pilgrim’s Point is a symbolic sign of the hypocrisy that exists within its founders who were seeking for freedom from oppression but instead allowed slavery establishment in the United States ( Johnson,48). The speaker says “I am black yet God made me, they say”. However, the abuse and cruelty she faces are inconsistent with such belief. She feels that the creator has abandoned them to be crushed beneath “His White creatures”. However, with all the injustice around her the narrator expresses hope as she notes that whether black we are all equal under one supreme being saying that “still God’s sunshine and His frost, they make us hot, they make us cold”. Ironically, it is evident that the pilgrims who left England to obtain the freedom of religion and who among their principles lay liberty are the same that would engage in exploitation of a fellow human.
Conclusion
Elizabeth Browning cultivates an efficient way by using poetry as a tool for social mobilization. In this way, she contracts the experiences of a slave mother who results in desperate actions to show the ramifications of human bondage (Breen, 126). The narrator confronts the social injustices of slavery by depicting that she would be ready to die for a course. The experiences of the poem show the wide gap brought along by white domination and the reflection of suffering and anger as a result of slavery. The audience can thus draw knowledge to protest and make the possible change to amend such suffering.
References
Elizabeth Browning. Runaway slave at pilgrim’s Point
Breen, Timothy Hall, and Timothy D. Hall. Colonial America in an Atlantic World. Pearson, 2016.
Thomas, Helen. “20 The Slave Narrative.” Handbook of Transatlantic North American Studies 3 (2016): 373.
Johnson, Krista. “The Womanist Christology of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point”.” WHEATON WRITING: A Journal of Academic Essays 2 (2017): 43-48.
Greenblatt, Stephen, and Carol T. Christ, eds. The Norton anthology of English literature. WW Norton & Company, 2012.
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