mmutability of their world and attempt to alter it. Indeed, as Cather spins the tale, Sapphira and the Slave Girl suggests that women's anger is a fundamental human reaction to the milieu in which they are forced to operate. But Cather does not see women's anger as any more uniform than women themselves. Sapphira's is a white hot, irrational rage against the threat she perceives to her position of power and settled way of life. Rachel's anger is against the injustice that that very way of life imposes on black people. Cather explores the various motives for and consequences of women's actions that proceed from their anger toward their circumstances.
The situations of marriage, family, and culture in which the characters operate provide a touchstone for the emotional content of the novel as well as the placement of women's anger, especially Sapphira's, in the scheme of action. 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. Henry and Sapphira have come to a cordial accommodation in which he takes tea with her and sometimes sleeps with her; that is all. Aside from the fact that Sapphira Dodderidge has married into a social class beneath her is the even more apparent fact that she has developed a contempt for and resentment of Henry as such. The feeling is on the whole returned, with the result that the Colbert relationship is a portrait of a marriage of disappointed, if intermittent, lovers. At the same time, Sapphira benefits from her position as doyenne of a leading family and fulfills the social role, which includes a strong sense of noblesse oblige to the slaves she sees as her inferiors, to perfection.
Although the marriage was from the first an alliance of convenience rather than of love, coming as it did on the death of Sapphira's father and the impending possibility that Sapphira would die as the old maid of the family, this h...