A little bit of literature

“Legree looked stupefied and confounded; but at last burst forth,—‘What! ye blasted black beast! tell me ye don’t think it right to do what I tell ye! What have any of you cussed cattle to do with thinking what’s right? I’ll put a stop to it! Why, what do ye think ye are? May be ye think ye’r a gentleman, master Tom, to be a telling your master what’s right, and what an’t! So you pretend it’s wrong to flog the gal!’ 

‘I think so, Mas’r,’ said Tom; ‘the poor crittur’s sick and feeble; ’twould be downright cruel, and it’s what I never will do, nor begin to. Mas’r, if you mean to kill me, kill me; but, as to my raising my hand agin any one here, I never shall,—I’ll die first!’ 

Tom spoke in a mild voice, but with a decision that could not be mistaken. Legree shook with anger; his greenish eyes glared fiercely, and his very whiskers seemed to curl with passion; but, like some ferocious beast, that plays with its victim before he devours it, he kept back his strong impulse to proceed to immediate violence, and broke out into bitter raillery.”

Vocabulary build-up

The adjective blasted is an expletive used informally as intensifier, particularly in literary texts. In this context, it means “deserving a curse.” Close synonyms are “damned”, “bloody”, and “freaking”.

The noun raillery means “light-hearted satire or ridicule; banter.”

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In the third week of our Women’s History Month, we present “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, from Harriet Beecher Stowe, a white American woman who dedicated most of her life to end slavery in the United States. She was born in 1811, in a family of Calvinists and activists in the antislavery movement, who supported the Underground Railroad and housed several fugitive slaves in their home. In 1850, the American Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law, which prohibited assistance to fugitives. In response, Stowe was moved to present her objections on paper, and, in 1851, the first installment of Uncle Tom’s Cabin appeared in the antislavery journal National Era. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” met with mixed reviews when it appeared in book form, in 1852, but soon became an international bestseller. Some critics dismissed it as abolitionist propaganda, while others hailed it as a masterpiece, including the great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the first American novel to sell more than a million copies, and no book of any kind, except for the Bible, had ever sold so well. The novel describes what might be unfamiliar events, such as slave auctions and slave escapes, but it does so in ways that conform to what its readers already believed about the world, specifically about gender and race. But the fact that “Uncle Tom” was so ultimately influential points to the fact that the novel was seeking to transform the world it describes, to bring about unfamiliar ends through familiar means. Specifically, the novel sought to turn contemporary beliefs about gender inside out and to pursue contemporary beliefs about race to their logical, and often surprising, conclusions.