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erinlynum's review
4.0
I give the book 4 stars only because it's a documented perspective of life on a plantation during the period of slavery and it's important for people to read from that period, as annoying as the author may be. Of course, I am judging Fanny Kemble from a 2023 lens, but oof, her perspective was hard to read at times. She writes about the lives of the enslaved people and the white people on southern plantations, interspersed with cloying descriptions of the nature and the setting of the island. It made for grating reading at times, such as the time she told of encountering a child carrying a child on the road, only to share that the child was the other child's mother and then quickly moved on to a description of nature and the flowers in the surrounding area.
Her condescending manner toward the enslaved people on her family's plantation: her belief that the people couldn't keep clean homes, that mothers didn't know how to properly care for their children (children they were cruelly removed from after a few weeks postpartum to go work in the fields) or that they didn't know how to properly care for the sick and elderly, etc. There is one section where she lectures the cook on food that white people ate vs. the food that the enslaved people ate. When she finished speaking, she noted "profound pause of meditation on the part of Abraham, wound up by a considerate: "Well, missis, I suppose so"; after which he departed..." She sounded insufferable. Her descriptions are incredibly racist, going into detail with comparisons with apes and calling the people dirty and smelly. She seemed to either ignore the rape of enslaved women or brush past it so as to not deal with the uncomfortable topic. She describes the same rapist men as wise, even as far as the last sentence. She didn't draw the rape of enslaved women to the attention of the editor of the London Times or Charles Greville when she was correcting points in Uncle Tom's Cabin and in a previous writing in the appendixes on slavery in the American south.
I think I was struck by the enslaved people’s stories and the fact that their history was perhaps passed down orally through or lived on through generations but when they died, their stories often died with them in unmarked graves. This is especially likely given how prone plantation owners were to selling enslaved people, removing them from all they had known - all their family and friends. You feel this a lot when you read through the appendix of the list of persons referred to in the journal. All the white people have their histories noted with dates and names of relatives. None of the enslaved people’s names or histories are noted. It’s such a chasm of lost information and you feel this loss as the reader. Even when Fanny describes that Jack came north because he was ill and she had the chance to see him. He was shut away in a room so as not to get the idea to run away. She barely had the chance to see him and he passed away shortly after.
Interwoven in the book are Fanny’s rights or lack thereof as a woman, wife, and mother. She noted that she only had so much power in arguing for the requests of the enslaved people in front of her spouse. Many times, she seemed well aware that she profited off the hard labor and enslavement of these people. And yet, she noted she was helpless. While she claimed to try to do well by the enslaved people, I found her to be a problematic narrator because she only published her letters and observations when anti-slavery sentiment was more en vogue and when she was already divorced, so there was no danger of losing her status or threatening her husband's status. If she was truly anti-slavery, what took her so long to speak up? She didn’t have much to lose at that point as her children were in their father’s care by law. Her ex-husband sold the enslaved people from his land around 1859. She started to teach Aleck how to read just days before she knew she would be leaving. Fanny was also incredibly classist, speaking ill of the Irish and working class. She seemed to put the British on a pedestal when it came to their handling of slavery, but seems to quickly forget its longtime role in the slave trade.
I can’t help but see Fanny Kemble as the 1800’s version of the white person who puts BLM in their social media profile and dusts their hands off, proud of having “made their stand.” With her status, she could have done so much more but didn’t. As a foreigner from an elite class and formerly married to a plantation owner, she could have moved the needle on her own before Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published. She could have kickstarted the anti-slavery conversation even sooner just with her observations but she chose to stay in the shadows. She stepped forward but at a time when she could avoid any social or financial discomfort to herself or her loved ones.
Her condescending manner toward the enslaved people on her family's plantation: her belief that the people couldn't keep clean homes, that mothers didn't know how to properly care for their children (children they were cruelly removed from after a few weeks postpartum to go work in the fields) or that they didn't know how to properly care for the sick and elderly, etc. There is one section where she lectures the cook on food that white people ate vs. the food that the enslaved people ate. When she finished speaking, she noted "profound pause of meditation on the part of Abraham, wound up by a considerate: "Well, missis, I suppose so"; after which he departed..." She sounded insufferable. Her descriptions are incredibly racist, going into detail with comparisons with apes and calling the people dirty and smelly. She seemed to either ignore the rape of enslaved women or brush past it so as to not deal with the uncomfortable topic. She describes the same rapist men as wise, even as far as the last sentence. She didn't draw the rape of enslaved women to the attention of the editor of the London Times or Charles Greville when she was correcting points in Uncle Tom's Cabin and in a previous writing in the appendixes on slavery in the American south.
I think I was struck by the enslaved people’s stories and the fact that their history was perhaps passed down orally through or lived on through generations but when they died, their stories often died with them in unmarked graves. This is especially likely given how prone plantation owners were to selling enslaved people, removing them from all they had known - all their family and friends. You feel this a lot when you read through the appendix of the list of persons referred to in the journal. All the white people have their histories noted with dates and names of relatives. None of the enslaved people’s names or histories are noted. It’s such a chasm of lost information and you feel this loss as the reader. Even when Fanny describes that Jack came north because he was ill and she had the chance to see him. He was shut away in a room so as not to get the idea to run away. She barely had the chance to see him and he passed away shortly after.
Interwoven in the book are Fanny’s rights or lack thereof as a woman, wife, and mother. She noted that she only had so much power in arguing for the requests of the enslaved people in front of her spouse. Many times, she seemed well aware that she profited off the hard labor and enslavement of these people. And yet, she noted she was helpless. While she claimed to try to do well by the enslaved people, I found her to be a problematic narrator because she only published her letters and observations when anti-slavery sentiment was more en vogue and when she was already divorced, so there was no danger of losing her status or threatening her husband's status. If she was truly anti-slavery, what took her so long to speak up? She didn’t have much to lose at that point as her children were in their father’s care by law. Her ex-husband sold the enslaved people from his land around 1859. She started to teach Aleck how to read just days before she knew she would be leaving. Fanny was also incredibly classist, speaking ill of the Irish and working class. She seemed to put the British on a pedestal when it came to their handling of slavery, but seems to quickly forget its longtime role in the slave trade.
I can’t help but see Fanny Kemble as the 1800’s version of the white person who puts BLM in their social media profile and dusts their hands off, proud of having “made their stand.” With her status, she could have done so much more but didn’t. As a foreigner from an elite class and formerly married to a plantation owner, she could have moved the needle on her own before Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published. She could have kickstarted the anti-slavery conversation even sooner just with her observations but she chose to stay in the shadows. She stepped forward but at a time when she could avoid any social or financial discomfort to herself or her loved ones.
nwhyte's review against another edition
http://nhw.livejournal.com/588685.html[return][return]Published in 1863, this is a series of letters from Kemble to her friend E[lizabeth Sedgwick] describing her four months as the wife of a Georgian plantation owner, and going into considerable detail about the living conditions of the slaves. It is horrific stuff, an eloquent argument against slavery, published twenty-five years after the event in a deliberate attempt to undermine British sympathy for the Confederacy in the middle of the Civil War. I haven't read any of the editorials in the Times that she is reacting to, but I do remember the right-wing British press on apartheid, Northern Ireland, and (more dimly) Rhodesia. Sadly, I have little difficulty in imagining pompous British journalists of the day trying to reassure their readers that slavery was actually a very good deal for the slaves. (It is also a shameful fact, remembered by few, that Irish nationalists of the 1860s sympathised with the Confederacy too, as they sympathised with the Boers at the end of the century.)[return][return]Bearing in mind that the author was an actress, I was alert for clues that the letters might have been somewhat revised for publication to put her case in the best possible light. But I ended up doubting that this was the case - there are enough internal repetitions that a good editor would have taken out to ensure a better flow of the narrative. I am sure that she did delete certain more personal details about her husband and daughters, but I feel that otherwise this is pretty much the horrified account of a thirty-year-old woman trying (and ultimately failing) to come to terms with the society she had married into, rather then her fifty-five-year-old self retrospectively justifying it; a famous and glamorous English actress, who had married a rich and charming young American and only gradually come to a realisation of exactly how his family's fortunes were sustained.[return][return]Thank heavens there were people like her prepared to bear witness to what slavery actually meant.
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