crossing the river simply by caryl phillips
Research from Dissertation or Thesis complete:
Crossing the River, Simply by Caryl Philips
Multiplicities of voices, multiplicities of points of views:
Caryl Phillips’ novel Traversing the Water
Caryl Phillips’ novel Crossing the River utilizes multiple perspectives to illustrate the horrors of yankee slavery. Instead of condemning the institution from a contemporary perspective, Phillips imagines himself inside the minds and hearts of varied figures that represent different factors of the institution, such as slaveholders, slaves, and children of masters and slaves. A common theme that develops and reoccurs in the new is the question of understanding and misunderstanding. Slaves happen to be continually ‘mis-read’ by experts, and even well-meaning whites are not able to understand the point of view of people in bondage. The worldview of slavery dominates the thoughts and culture of whites and blacks to such a degree that not even African-Americans can accept themselves. As opposed to novels describing the plight of slaves inside the south, Phillips’ western placing acutely features the essential paradoxon of the notion of freedom since embodied in frontier ideology. The frontier was designed to embody possibility and choice, but for slaves, going West meant possibly less of your chance to escape Eastward in order to Canada.
The inability of slaves to articulate their unique perspective of the world is definitely revealed inside the story of Martha, a slave girl who endeavors to escape to freedom. Martha, because of her age and fragile well being, dies in her quest for freedom, although a woman does voluntarily give Martha shelter upon Martha’s last night on the planet. However , though Martha would not believe in God, the white woman buries her in a religious service, illustrating the woman inability to understand the degree to which slavery offers eroded Martha’s faith in the goodness worldwide and humankind. Martha’s tone of voice is articulate, and Phillips allows her to raise her voice in prose, while society offers taken away her life and does not listen to her while the girl with alive or perhaps dead.
The prejudiced look at of African-Americans and Africans held by whites is very all-encompassing at the outset of the book that actually whites who feel that captivity is incorrect seem powerless to avoid its pushes. James Hamilton, a slave-trader, hates the institution and cannot morally justify his profession in letters house to his ‘dearest’ partner. According to his Christian worldview, most men are equal, however James has the capacity to hold this belief system while methodically oppressing his fellow humans. His ‘log notes’ catalogued in the story are great and clinical, and teach his personnel to get rid of the sickly slaves who have are not good to him, yet his letters to his wife do not actually speak of the horrors he is perpetrating, as if he is numbing or impaired to the murders he is enabling. Hamilton will not seem to realize how to behave in a fashion that is not really exploitative since it has become a a part of his lifestyle, his daily actions – it is a incorporation he despises, yet it really is his convocation.
The plantation owner Edward Williams furthermore is able to say he abhors slavery, however profits by institution because it is socially allowed. His wife Amelia Williams is silent upon the subject, like most white-colored women, in spite of her partner’s infidelities with slave women. Edward’s his half-black kid Nash appears infected by the concept of black inferiority like his daddy. Nash tries to convert the
