Week 6

"He did not give  a  hang about the miscarriage.Not all  babies have the luck to be born!" Those were the words his heart beat out to him."(Machado de Asís, "Father verses Mother", pg. 96)

In his short story “Father verses Mother” Machado de Asís conveys the horrors of slavery through an ironic tone. He describes the grotesque treatment of slaves by their masters as well as the inhumane slave catchers. The end of the story shows the tragedy of slavery as a label. Candido Neves treats Arminda merely as a slave and fails to show compassion for a person who feels and desires the same exact thing he does. He does not care at all about her miscarriage because he does not see her as a person.

a mask similar to the one described by Machado de Asís in his story

Similarly in her novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe shows that slaves feel the same way other human beings do. The protagonist of the novel, Tom, is a compassionate man who loves others, cares for them, and shows devotion to his Christian faith. His selflessness is displayed when he speaks to his master, “Mas’r, if you was sick, or in trouble, or dying, and I could save ye, I’d give ye my heart’s blood; and, if taking every drop of blood in this poor old body would save your precious soul, I’d give ’em freely, as the Lord gave his for me. Oh, Mas’r! don’t bring this great sin on your soul! It will hurt you more than’t will me! Do the worst you can, my troubles’ll be over soon; but, if ye don’t repent, yours won’t never end!” Tom sees his master, the man who has been nothing but cruel to him, as a human being and does not want him to suffer in the endless torment of hell, but Legree cannot manage to show any understanding for Tom and sentences him to death.

Stowe's inspiring novel

Simon Legree, like Candido Neves sees slaves merely as objects to be acted upon and fails to realize their human cares and emotions. Trough their writings Stow and Machado  teach that when we fail to recognize that all humans experience the same basic emotions and ignore our capacity to understand and empathize with one another we are in peril of treating each other like slaves.