Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, Harriet Beecher Stowe - Richard Boyd (essay date spring 1991)
Richard Boyd (essay date spring 1991)
SOURCE: Boyd, Richard. “Models of Power in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Dred.” Studies in American Fiction 19, no. 1 (spring 1991): 15-29.
[In the following essay, Boyd maintains that Stowe's novel is profoundly pessimistic regarding the possibility of abolishing slavery in a nonviolent way.]
Near the conclusion of Harriet Beecher Stowe's second anti-slavery novel, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856), the cynical Frank Russel propounds a view of personal freedom that seems entirely in keeping with his bleak and, according to the narrator, typically male view of the world: “‘After all, what is liberty, that people make such a breeze about? It's only a pretty name. We are all slaves to one thing or another; nobody is absolutely free, except Robinson Crusoe in the desolate island, and he tears all his shirts to pieces, and hangs them up as signals of distress, in his...
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