There is something about "minority literature" that I am inherently adverse to. It's not that I have a problem with minorities making work; that would be insane. My problem is that most of the work qualified as "minority work" isn't terribly good; the fact that it must be prefaced with the disclaimer that it IS "minority work" to legitimize it should be warning enough. No one would ever be dumb enough to marginalize Emily Dickinson's work as "women's literature," because it stands perfectly well on its own. It is landmark work! Much unlike what was on the agenda for this week, which was devoid of powerful style and which never managed to say anything more than "slaves are humans, ergo slavery is a bad thing!" (well, I suppose I should except Margaret Fuller; she wasn't actually all that bad).
The problem with Stowe and Jacobs is that there work is DULL! It is moralizing, simpering and trite, yes, but these faults might be excusable if the writing wasn't so lifeless. There is no variety to the sentence structure, no enthusiasm in the work, just very boring, journalistic, matter-of-fact recounting of events that MIGHT sound interesting (a leap across a frozen river, a ride through the wilderness in the dead of night, hiding out in an attic for years) but are in execution forgettable. It is as if in their haste to write about the evils of slavery that Jacobs and Stowe forgot to care about their subject long enough to invest it with the proper energy. For all the life here, the stories may as well be covering the lives of rocks. What should anyone care about the evils of slavery when one cannot even begin to imagine these characters as REAL? And yet, everyone in Jacobs' autobiography DID exist; what does that say for her? Not much, I'd imagine; though one can hand wave this lack of stylistic power by pointing out her own history as a slave, that's a defense of the lowest order.
Douglas, for the obnoxious, self-righteous tone of his work, is a powerful speaker and writer, with just a dash of the mad prophet in his words. Too bad that he wastes so much time railing about injustice and inadequacy and the evils of slavery that he ever forgot to write anything interesting. Maybe this is just the literary snob in me, but quite frankly, I have grown very sick of writing that is blatantly political and written for "moral" reasons; such writings belong in the ethical field of philosophy (which seems to me the lowest discipline in the field) or in sociology, where questions of utilitarian good popular. Again, this is not to say that there AREN'T excellent works about race in the American tradition -- Invisible Man is a classic by anyone's standards -- but these works are not soapboxes and speaking platforms so much as they are an honest exploration of the subject; Invisible Man is actually, in the end, a story most concerned with identity, a theme of the most vital importance, while Douglas and his contemporaries are only interested in demanding there rights instead of actually securing them. Interesting as his words are, at the heart of it he is just demanding freedom, something that, sad to say, is not just a right, but something that must be taken by force.
At least Margaret Fuller has the grace to be not only eloquent but relevant. Instead of railing about how women should be entitled to the same rights as men, she charts out the differences between men and women and suggests how they work together. There is in her none of the feminazi that is so despicable, just a well-reasoned, well-written and very readable account of how men and women might make the most of their relationships with each other, in every sense of that phrase. Why she had to be shoved into the "minority" section with the rest of these writers, I do not know; her writings just as much address the plight of men as women, showcasing her multidimensional thinking, and she manages to remain immensely readable, despite how off-putting the subject matter might seem at first.
There's more to say about how despicable the label of "minority" writer is, but I won't waste my time ranting about it now; there is a topic that deserves a very radical, thorough treatment, one I am not equipped to give here.
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