Implications

From the equations we can usually already start to make some analysis of the text, though there is more information to come. The way values, events, and characters are put together can always tell us something about how that world is constructed and contains implicit directives. For example, if someone is called evil, the implicit directive for good people is to kill or subdue that person. If the same person is labeled as mistaken, the directive is different. One is now obligated to show that person where they are mistaken.

 

What we get a good look into with these equations is the rhetoric of Harriet Beecher Stowe. We have a terrible tragedy causing Lucy (a feeling, living, bleeding, yet immortal thing) "anguish, despair, mortal anguish, clenched hands, suffocating breathings" and making her like a "crushed reed." Yet these atrocities are tolerated and seen as "necessary incidents of trade" because the "civilized" Americans have, through "effort and cultivation," overcome their human weaknesses and prejudices which would otherwise make them have compassion. They have learned to "generalize" and have "enlarged views" which give them "comfort and solace" and allows them to classify Lucy "with the bundles, and bales, and boxes, among which she is lying." Tom, who does not have this decadent knowledge sees slavery as it is through his natural human sympathies: as something " unutterably horrible and cruel."

 

The directive is clear: Don't think! Feel! That is where you know the truth about slavery. Don't listen to the learned men, for they have distanced themselves from their feelings and have achieved a perverse "Christian and political perfection" which makes them blind for "the glory of the Union."  What is lawful is NOT the same as what is RIGHT.

 

Now we can see how the concepts are connected in a network, but how are they connected in a hierarchy?

Click here to go on to verbal pyramids