The Origin of Others

Samuel Cartwright (1793-1863) was a physician and slave owner who practiced in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. He is best known for his invention of “drapetomania,” a “mental illness” characterized as the desire of an enslaved person for freedom, and “dysaethesia aethiopica,” which described the perceived lack of work ethic in enslaved people. Cartwright figures in The Origin of Others because his medical practice and scientific literature provide a prime example of the use of scientific racism to define and control the Other. In Chapter 1, Morrison includes quotes from Cartwright’s article defining drapetomania and dysaethesia aethiopica (4-5). She returns to the role of scientific racism in Othering in Chapter 4 when she considers the impact of medically, socially, and politically defined Blackness on Black people themselves (58).

Thomas Thistlewood (1721-1786) was a British planter in colonial Jamaica. His diary is an important historical document detailing the history of Jamaica (and slavery in Jamaica) during the 18th century. As Morrison notes in Chapter 1, Thistlewood’s diary reveals a casual acceptance of and commitment to slavery. The documentation of the brutal treatment of enslaved people alongside notes on everyday activities like farming and receiving visitors demonstrates a lack of moral insight not only into the evils of slavery but also into his own condition. Thistlewood serves as a key figure in The Origin of Others because he exemplifies the degradation of the privileged that accompanies the process of Othering as well as the privileged’s ignorance of this degradation; those in power lose the capacity for self-reflection since they are the standard of belonging and acceptance.

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) was an American author and abolitionist. Her work includes novels, travel memoirs, and essay collections. She is most celebrated for her 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Due to its depiction of the brutal treatment of enslaved people, it galvanized antislavery movements in the US and Great Britain. Nevertheless, for Morrison it is an example of the romanticization of slavery—a romanticization that helps accommodate the degradation of slavery. Morrison discusses Stowe’s work in Chapter 1, demonstrating that Stowe romanticizes slavery by depicting happy, accepting slaves and idyllic scenes that suggest that “the slave’s natural instinct […] is towards kindness—an instinct that is disrupted only by vicious whites” (10). Furthermore, Morrison writes, “The sense of fear and disdain that white people may have, one that encourages brutality, is, [Stowe] implies, unwarranted” (10). Stowe’s depiction suggests that violence is not integral to the process of Othering—a suggestion that is wholly false, especially when one views the process from the perspective of the Other.

Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964) was an American author of novels, short stories, and essays. She is most known for her Southern Gothic style. In The Origin of Others Morrison examines O’Connor’s short story “The Artificial N*****” to illustrate the key components of Othering as well as the relational aspect of the process. In her analysis of O’Connor’s work, Morrison draws the following conclusion: “The education of the boy is complete: He has been successfully and artfully taught racism and believes he has acquired respectability, status. And the illusion of power through the process of inventing an Other” (24). O’Connor’s work, then, implies that the Other is an invention and that Othering is taught, two key points that Morrison makes in The Origin of Others.

Mary Prince (1788-1833) was born in Bermuda to enslaved parents. After escaping slavery and settling in London, England, she wrote her autobiography, The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, with the help of Thomas Pringle. It was the first autobiography by a Black woman to be published in the UK, and its depiction of the brutal realities of slavery was a galvanizing influence on the antislavery movement there. Morrison discusses Prince’s autobiography in Chapter 2 as an example of how slave narratives help us understand the process of Othering.

Harriet Jacobs (1813-1897) was enslaved from birth in Edenton, North Carolina and escaped to the North in 1842. She published her autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, under the pseudonym Linda Brent in 1861. Morrison discusses Jacobs’s autobiography in Chapter 2 as another example of the importance of slave narratives to understanding the process of Othering (particularly the way that the process degrades slave owners). Morrison includes an excerpt from Jacobs’s autobiography in which Jacobs writes, “I can testify, from my own experience and observation, that slavery is a curse to whites as well as to blacks” (29). Like Mary Prince’s History, Jacobs’s Incidents shows the massive amount of violence that white slave owners put into Othering enslaved people, all in an attempt to define themselves as superior. However, this effort only illuminated their own degradation.

William Faulkner (1897-1962) was an American writer of novels and short stories. He is known for the fictional setting of his stories, which he based on Lafayette County, Mississippi, the place where he grew up. As one of the most celebrated writers of American and Southern literature, he received both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Nobel Prize in Literature. Morrison examines his work in Chapter 3 to demonstrate white writers’ use of skin color to reveal character and drive narrative. Because of the prominent position he holds in American literature, Faulkner is key to one of Morrison’s main goals: to demonstrate the role that literature plays in conveying ideas about racism and race. Faulkner’s use of skin color as a narrative device implies the extent to which the political and social zeitgeist are presented as “truth” in artistic media.

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) was an American novelist, short story writer, and journalist. He was known for his understated style, which influenced successive writers, and many of his works are considered classics in American literature. Morrison discusses Hemingway and his work in Chapter 3 as another example of white writers' use of skin color to reveal character and drive narrative; his use of colorism in his novels is extensive. Like Faulkner, Hemingway is an exemplary figure with regards to his prominence and to the ideological narratives he conveys going largely unquestioned.

Isaac Woodard was a decorated World War II veteran born in 1919 in South Carolina. In 1946, South Carolina policemen attacked him on his return to his home in North Carolina. While then-President Harry S. Truman launched a federal investigation into the attack, an all-white jury acquitted the sheriff when the case was brought to federal court. In Chapter 4, Morrison relates Woodard’s story as an example of the racial terror prominent during the 20th century, which motivated the founding of Black towns in an attempt to insulate Black communities from such violence.

Margaret Garner was an enslaved woman who attempted to escape slavery in 1856. When US marshals apprehended her, she killing her daughter to prevent her child from having to return to slavery. Garner’s trial was an attempted challenge to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, and her story was circulated among abolitionists, adding a feminist component to antislavery rhetoric. Garner’s story, and in particular her apparent serenity after the infanticide, inspired Morrison’s novel Beloved, which Morrison discusses at length in Chapter 5.

Through Sethe, the fictional character based on Garner, Morrison encourages readers (and the character herself) to “think, even know, that she may be a valuable human in spite of what happened to her and her daughter” (86). This demonstrates Morrison’s use of narrative fiction as the “controlled wilderness” in which even the privileged can identify with the Other and understand them as human in their shared need for belonging (91). Furthermore, the novel suggests a certain understanding of the difficult and sometimes violent choices that Others make within and among themselves as a result of having been Othered.