Danny Garrett

December 15, 2009

Dr. Schwartz

Romantic Cultures Research Project

 

The Beauty of Blakean Contraries in “The Little Black Boy”:

Why the Romantic Blake Opposed Slavery?

 

“Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence.”- William Blake

 

            Whenever a well-seasoned Romantic student hears “William Blake” and “slavery” paired together, the mind automatically envisions Blake’s provocative and gruesome slave-execution engravings published in John Stedman’s Narrative (1796).  The particular image of a young Samboe female leaves an indelible mark: against her precious will, both of her wrists are tightly tied to a tree; she would be fully naked were it not for a thin piece of cloth covering her genitalia; her facial expression is of pure fear; and lacerations cover her dark flesh from head to ankle. This engraving, along with 15 others (some of which were no less horrifying), awoke the British public out of a morally degraded slumber, a state-of-mind ignorant to the British slave trade’s horrors.

The slave trade of Great Britain, and those of other European countries, transformed the indigenous African and surpassed the Muslim trades. Exporting roughly “2.5 million out of 6.13 million slaves in 1701-1800,” in response to the expanding demand of British plantations and sugar colonies, Britain became the largest national trade (ORO). At the time, economic arguments in support of the system reigned supreme, attesting to the investment capital the trade brought, which contributed to Britain’s industrial revolution. Such arguments did not go unnoticed by abolitionists from William Wilberforce in Parliament to Thomas Clarkson in the pulpit. Charged with fervor, their anti-slavery arguments were intellectually influenced by religious revivalism and the secular Enlightenment. Religious thinkers opposed slavery based on religious egalitarianism; whereas, Enlightenment thinkers opposed slavery based on a basic Lockean concept that society was composed of distinct, self-governing individuals, where society’s primary function was to provide the optimum conditions for the individual pursuit of enlightened self-interests. This gave birth to concepts of freedom and equality. The abolitionist arguments eventually won out. So, by 1807 the British Parliament (through the Slave Trade Act) prohibited British vessels from participating in the trading of humans. And in 1833 (through the Slavery Abolition Act) slavery in all British territory was ended. But where do the Romantics, especially Blake, fit in this history? What is the relationship between Britain’s greatest artists and the epic violence of slavery, described so astutely by Coleridge in 1808 as “the wildest physical sufferings” combined with “the most atrocious moral depravity?” Or by Shelley as “the deepest stain upon civilized man.” What did raped African women; restrained and tortured male and female slaves by iron shackles, handcuffs, thumbscrews with torture keys, three-feet long muzzles, and collars; and lynched or burned-alive Africans—ultimately humans being treated as property and livestock—have anything to do with a Romantic writer’s peaceful reflection in a grove or sublime reactions to Mont Blanc or magical lands like Xandu?

The enslavement of Africans struck the dynamic, hopeful, and radical Romantic poets of England as the most blatant example of human oppression. Though their poetry and prose is blatantly anti-slavery in message—Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Byron, and Shelley—did not take quick political action. These writers, given the failed French Revolution, viewed political solutions as inevitable failures, and political poetry as philosophically vacuous, for it is unable to uncover deeper truths about the human condition. Also, a majority of English radicals likely viewed the oppression of the English working class and the hellish life of the laboring masses during the Industrial Revolution as more important. However, the Romantics were still vocal. In substance, they did not simply advocate Enlightenment ideas of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Rather, and quintessentially Romantic, the writers sought for a society of unfettered imaginative possibility. Slavery is diametrically opposed to the liberated imagination. For Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, as well as Byron, Shelley, and Keats, slavery was not only morally wrong and politically despotic but also psychologically destructive to the enslaver and to the enslaved. According to Romantic scholar Debbie Lee, the Romantic imagination is not “self-centered; it produces a decentralized self with extremely weak ego boundaries, which involves a denunciation of the self in order to understand, with compassion, nature” (Lee 3). In other words, imagination is empathy. Blake’s notion of “self-annihilation” and Keat’s claim that the poet has no “self” espouses this idea. This empathetic theory of imagination produces a powerful humanitarian sentiment and focus on the Foucaultian other, specifically the physical and mental suffering of African slaves. William Blake’s imagination does precisely this.

Contraries or contradictions are usually frowned upon. In logic, they are an incompatibility between two or more propositions. Contraries plague the thoughtful metaphysician and the pensive epistemologist in their cramped university offices. But in Blake’s “Little Black Boy,” published in the Songs of Innocence (1789), contraries deserve a poetic royal seat from ideas and ideology, propaganda and poetry, white and black, civilization and savagery, good and evil, enlightenment and darkness, to Christian and heathen. For Blake, Man is a source of contraries, institutionalized religion, socially imposed forces, and alterable perception—a sense-imprisoned being that only sees imitations, never originals. This description includes all of humanity, even the well-to-do, upper-class English parliamentarian. If someone of this privileged status has such a atrocious, innate nature, what exactly is the African slave, which on top of this innate, negative nature is physically and mentally tortured and colonized? Recent studies have not done justice to the anti-slavery ideological context in “The Little Black Boy,” perhaps because this poem in appearance seems to reflect the racist assumptions underlying much of anti-slavery writing during Blake’s time. In actuality, Blake addresses the racist attitudes informing most anti-slavery literature of the period by opposing it with subtle abolitionist messages in the poem.

Blake’s “Marriage of Heaven and Hell” is a perfect compass to guide one through the philosophical underpinnings and textual dubiousness of “The Little Black Boy,” as both poems possess thoroughly ironic vocabulary and innate trickery. In Blake’s “Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” children possess ever-expanding energy, imagination, unfettered innocence, and a malleable mind. Not yet a sense-imprisoned being, the child is the main image for Blake, an essential role model for Man. In the late eighteenth century, The Religious Tract Society and its offshoot, the British and Foreign Bible Society, distributed small religious treatises in foreign countries as well as throughout British society. In 1814, they published a series of children’s books to indoctrinate the poor British children into believing basic religious principles and the perfection of the present societal order for the English working class and non-white people. The children of Blake’s time were the “subject of an internal colonization program unprecedented in British history, designed to contain the threat of an educated reading public through programs of mass education” (Richardson 239). It was also a popular tract industry aimed at silencing intellectual radicals. As an added discomfort, children were viewed as primitive and uncivilized humans that needed to be properly trained and educated if they were to fit into the industrialized society. For Blake, this was mental colonization of the child’s mind. This explains why Blake situates “The Little Black Boy” in the tradition of children’s religious poetry, representative of such writers as Watts, Smart, Wesley, and Barbauld, using didactic characters and mass distribution for publication.

The anti-slavery literature of Blake’s time reached its peak, in terms of publication, in 1788. It heavily relied on the constant description of Africa and Africans as culturally “benighted,” savage, uncivilized or “untutored,” unenlightened, and dark. The image of Africa as the “dark” continent metonymically extended the blackness of African skin to African culture. In Anne Yearsley’s “Inhumanity of the Slave Trade,” an enslaved African father is described as “horrid,” “dark,” and “unenlightened” (qtd. in Richardson 247). In Leigh Richmond’s “The Negro Servant,” a children’s book distributed by the Religious Tract Society, the African servant changes from “the once dark, perverse, and ignorant heathen” to a “now convinced, enlightened, humble and believing Christian (qtd. in Richardson 247). Exemplifying the “simplicity and sincerity of real Christianity, he testifies: “God let me be made slave by white men to do me good… He take me from the land of darkness, and bring me to the land of light” (qtd. in Richardson 247). European condescension plagues these works.

The first stanza of  “The Little Black Boy” should shock the reader, for it seems to confirm the racist stereotypes propagated by contemporary anti-slavery and slavery literature, describing Africans as born in a savage “southern wild,” with a negative, evil black skin color “bereaved of light” opposed to an angelic, innocent white skin pigment, which happens to be the color of souls. The African child’s own speech confirms the Eurocentric attitude pervading anti-slavery discourse of Blake’s time. Cleverly, Blake is setting up the opposing forces between racism and non-racism, as he does with Heaven and Hell in the “Marriage” to make a larger point. It is only in the second stanza where one begins to sense Blake’s true ideas on Africans. During Blake’s period, the phrase “untutored savage” held currency in the poetic world to describe Africans, so Blake’s emphasis on the African mother’s teaching “underneath a tree” is extremely significant, dispelling European myths about Africans. Even David Hume believed that Africans were untaught and uncivilized, according to his infamous remark: “no ingenious manufactures among them, no arts, no sciences” (qtd. in Baum 6). The great empiricist must have never experienced Hausa’s intricately designed mosques and palaces, Igbo masks and sculptures, Mbari architecture, Atilogwn dance troops, or Nri Kingdom bronze castings. Hume’s views were not uncommon among Europeans in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Africans were frequently portrayed as a people without a civilization, language, law, tradition, and rationality; they were culturally backwards and mentally defective.

In stanzas three through five, the mother’s religious ideas seem to reflect a natural theism, juxtaposing a single God with the “sun,” “flowers,” “trees,” “clouds,” and “groves.” Teaching that God lives in the “rising sun,” though, may link to pagan sun worship, a conventional attribute of the “noble savage.” Once again, Blake may be experimenting with contraries. In this line, Blake could be surreptitiously comparing Christianity to Mithraism, a Persian sun-god religion. Assuming this is so, would not that fact make the Europeans “savages” in their attempt to Christianize the Africans? Still running with the “sun” as God and His Kingdom metaphor, the mother’s description of Africans having “black bodies” and “sunburnt faces” implies that black people are closer to God, for these bodily characteristics develop when exposed to the sun’s rays. To protect Africans from this divine, excessive light, black skin acts as a “shady grove.” Though the child quotes his mother’s African teaching, he still has Christianity ingrained in his mind, which he probably learned from missionaries, slave masters, plantation mission schools, or in England by way of previous enslavement in the West Indies. Displaced from the “southern wild” to a region where he is exposed to European racist ideas, the black child fortunately retains his mother’s African teaching--which did not present blackness as a negation or “bereaved of light” but as a “shady grove.”

In typical Blake fashion, “The Little Black Boy” is structured as a Hegelian dialectic, composed of a thesis, antithesis, and synthesis: the thesis is the child’s iteration of the eighteenth-century racist stereotypes alive in Europe in the first stanza; the antithesis is the mother’s African teaching, as quoted by the child; and the synthesis is the child’s ability to create a culturally, autonomous mixture of African and Christian teachings without the colonialist chains in the last two stanzas. The poem’s two concluding stanzas move beyond the missionary propaganda in the first stanza and the mother’s African teaching in the middle stanzas by collapsing blackness and whiteness together as twin attributes of “cloud,” which annihilates the hierarchical relation of the black and white child. As is apparent, these notions were not received through Sunday school or plantation missionary efforts. In typical Blake fashion, the whole picture is inverted, similar to when Hell writes Proverbs in the “Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” The African child is now an instructor and authority to the English child: “And that I say to little English boy.” At this point, the African boy synthesizes pro-slavery colonialist ideology and his mother’s African teachings to produce a self-affirming discourse or autonomous perspective of his own. In this synthesis, the imposed hegemonic Christian beliefs are emptied of its content, and supplanted by the African religious doctrine taught by his mother. As a result, the African boy is no longer inferior to the English boy. The black boy’s protective, brotherly shading of the English boy from the heat implies that the English boy’s pale skin is not used to the divine heat from “God’s love,” as a consequence of the English’s cruel treatment to Africans. However, the synthesis becomes a message of transcendental, spiritual freedom where humanity is united “when I from black cloud, and he from white cloud are free." In this transcendent synthesis, white and black skin are equally opaque since the physical human body does not exist, and ideology, whether pro-slavery or anti-slavery, does not exist since the physical mind does not exist.

Given this analysis, it is no secret that Blake is harshly criticizing the hypocrisy of the anti-slavery movement with its colonialist language and pathetic religious tracts in this poem. In “The Little Black Boy” the African child is treated as an equal human being. Blake’s job, as the poetic genius, in the “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” was to bring Man out of existential confusion and reveal what is hidden beneath through intellectual reform. He did so by playing with contraries. Blake does the same thing in “The Little Black Boy.” Blake’s Romantic imagination, which is the essence of empathy, allowed him to see past the frivolous pro-slavery arguments during his time, and see human oppression at its worst. Not wearing mind-forg’d manacles, he pushed for the end of slavery once and for all.  

Works Cited

Baum, Joan. Mind-Forg’d Manacles: Slavery and the English Romantic Poets.

     Connecticut: Archon Book, 1994.

Lee, Debbie. Slavery and the Romantic Imagination. Pennsylvania: University of

     Pennsylvania Press, 2002.

Oxford Reference Online. British Slave-trade. 12 Jan. 2008 <http://www.oxfordreference.com.ezproxy.loyno.edu/views/ENTRY.html?entry=t43.e31           81&srn=2&ssid=887100897#FIRSTHIT>.

Richardson, Alan. “Colonialism, Race, and Lyric Irony.” Literary Reference Center

(2002).     <http://web.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.loyno.edu/lrc/detail?vid=5&hid=107&sid=7d35a732-c385-4b14-b4ce 2557e15d4c9e%40sessionmgr113&bdata=JnNpdGU9bHJjLWxpdmU%3d#AN9610220150-10>.