Cather's Sapphira and the Slave Girl Women's Anger

The separation of the male and female point of view in Sapphira and the Slave Girl provides a touchstone for the emotional content of the novel as well as a starting point for the placement of women's anger in the scheme of action. Additionally, this separation has the effect, ultimately, of commenting on a few realities of the world regarding women's place in it. This occurs not only in a way that shows that men and women see things differently, but also in a way that offers the author's evident judgment of the things that are seen.

The most obvious way in which Cather explicates the differences between the male and female point of view is in the portrayal of the marriage of Sapphira and Henry Colbert. It is plain from the opening pages of the novel that the Colbert marriage is not one of the great love affairs of the nineteenth century. Aside from the fact that Sapphira Dodderidge appears to have married into a social class beneath her is the even more apparent fact that

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is careless of reprisal and of the possibility of falling in position; this is why she achieves stature. The costs to her are not social but psychological and emotional. Cather appears to realize the complexities that inform women's anger in a particular society, and she explicates the expression of this anger through the narrative. In the first conversation of the story, Sapphira mentions in a toocasual way that "of course" a lady of quality such as she would not sell her darkies but that now that she may oblige a fellow aristocrat and now she comes to think of it, "There is my Nancy, now. I could spare her quite well to oblige Mrs. Grimwood, and she could hardly find a better place. It would be a fine opportunity for her" (Cather 7). Sapphira appears to be behaving as Freud expects women to behave, disrupting a perfectly sensible situation in order to settle things in the marriage bed. But as a matter of fact Sapphira is experiencing a complete integration with the slaveholding civilization and attempting to reintegrate the facts of her existence with her idea of what that civilization ought to be. Although she seeks to conceal it, Sapphira's rage is directed against the unwitting agent of disruption of that given of exis
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Approximate Word count = 7319
Approximate Pages = 29 (250 words per page)

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