O the Humanity(s)

As we've been going through our Civil War monuments unit in my writing seminar, I've started thinking about how we’re secretly being taught history and literature at the same time. For one thing, this is multitasking I can handle. For another, in some high schools, instead of taking English and history separately, students take a combined class called humanities. The high school that I attended started giving freshmen an option to do this during my sophomore or junior year.

Thinking back, I’m wondering if I would have liked that better than doing English and history on their own. Somehow things make so much more sense in context. Like knowing who Robert Gould Shaw was makes poetry about him understandable, plus I now know about the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth (some of which may come from the movie Glory).

To go with all this I decided to read Uncle Tom’s Cabin while home for spring break. (Side note: Who needs Caribbean cruises and Florida beaches when you can enjoy fresh New England snow instead? Not me, apparently.) I liked the book, and it provided another perspective on slavery, abolition, and some of the racial interactions going on in the mid 1800s. Lots of interesting characters, although most of them were pretty clearly defined to be good or bad.

Still not as bad as Hawthorne’s characterizations in The Scarlet Letter. First off, some background – Hester Prynne has committed adultery, has a daughter named Pearl, and is forced to live as an outcast in a hut on the outskirts of town. Throughout the book, Hester is supposed to be viewed negatively for having committed adultery while Pearl is the innocent result of her actions.

A slightly paraphrased scene:

Pearl is playing in the sun in the forest. “Mama, come play with me,” she says.

Hester walks toward Pearl. As soon as her foot touches the sun-covered ground, a dark rain cloud sprouts up over her head and thunder sounds. Hester looks up and sees lightning forming above her head. “Uh, I’m kind of hot in the sun, Pearl. Maybe we can go play under that thorn bush?”

Yeah, symbolism much?

One final note about Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and it’s a comment/complaint about the introduction, mostly pertaining to non-author written introductions:

Dear famous authors who are asked to write introductions to books,

It would be nice if you didn't tell me that the main character dies on page 117. You may think I've read the book, but in the case that I haven’t, I may have been hoping to find that out for myself. I thought I’d read the introduction for some background information so I’d understand the book better, but apparently I didn't notice any of your nonexistent spoiler tags. Next time I might as well read the last page of the book first.

Sincerely, your sadly uninformed reader who in fact did not know that the main character dies on page 117