In a class-antagonistic society, people’s relations become hostile to their essence, suppress, distort, and deform it. The spontaneous and antagonistic nature of these relations gives rise to forms of sociality, which are inherent in hostility to the comprehensive development of the individual. It is not a free choice but a socio-class status that determines a person’s lifestyle, the structure of needs, and value orientations. In the conditions of alienated forms of the social network, labor takes an inhumane form and becomes a means of suppression, oppression, and degradation of the individual. The ruling classes are withdrawing themselves from ordinary workers who are lower on the social ladder. The worker functions only as a tool and not as a universal, comprehensively, and harmoniously developed being. Public wealth in private property steals humanity from people, directly turning them into slaves and serving or, in the case of the bourgeoisie, indirectly.
The work “The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American slave” is one of the best examples of the genre of “slave narratives.” F. Douglass tells how, despite slavery, he managed to build and preserve his own identity, despite alienation. Since childhood, slaves have felt alienated: unlike most whites, they were deprived of many sources of self-identification since early childhood. Almost none of them knew the exact date of their birth. Not everyone knew about their blood relatives, significantly often it concerned the fathers. In many cases, white masters became the father of the children of slaves, who hid this fact in every possible way. In addition, children were already torn from their mothers in infancy to prevent the formation of kinship ties and attachments; such was the fate of Frederick himself (Douglass, 2016). The only thing he knew about himself and could use as a source of belonging to a social group was his name and race. His mother died when the boy was seven, his grandmother lived far enough away, and his sisters and brother were not very close to him.
Slaveholders deliberately deprived their slaves of any information about their origin; they had to know only one thing – the master’s order was law for them. By building a barrier of alienation between themselves and the slaves, they tried to equate all slaves with animals. In such a way, they forced the serves to identify themselves as dumb creatures and deprived them of human qualities. To do this, all possible sources of belonging were erased, even those that were given by nature, for example, gender and age. When assessing property, slaves of all ages and animals were lined up in one row. No differences were made between the different groups: women were subjected to the same humiliating examination as men.
Such an attitude towards slaves, the erasure of all human characteristics, began already in childhood, when slave children, regardless of gender, ran almost naked due to lack of clothing. When the slave children were fed, their food was dumped into a trough, as for pigs. During such feeding, neither the sex nor the child’s age was taken into account – only the jungle law applied: whoever is stronger gets more. As a result of such treatment, the slaves themselves got used to not paying attention to the characteristics of gender, age, and marital status. They just did what they had to do, and then all indiscriminately went to sleep on the cold floor.
Even the cultural sources of identity were not aimed at helping the slaves reveal their uniqueness and determine their belonging, but only to survive. The songs of the slaves, for example, became an expression of feelings and thus served as an outlet for the slaves. Therefore, slavery was such an extreme social situation that deprived slaves of belonging and alienated them from each other and from everything that was happening.
However, even in his early childhood, Frederick found differences between himself and other slaves and felt alienated (Douglass, 2016). He was sure that slavery would not be his permanent lot in life; the feeling of faith never left him. Therefore, even as a slave, he was deprived of understanding the slaves’ songs which testified to the ability of slavery to deny all human feelings of the black people.
Once in the Old family, Frederick found himself in a new social situation because the hostess began to treat him as a person and not as property. For the first time in the boy’s life, behavior determined by the alienated identity of a slave became inappropriate. Due to the lack of alienation from the hostess in his direction, Frederick began to identify himself with a person (Douglass, 2016). The white children treated him kindly as if he were a human being and not someone’s property: they helped him in his studies and sympathized with his fate.
Then at the behest of the former master, Frederick had to return from the city back to the plantation. The first immediately felt that the boy had changed and was not behaving as a slave should. So, he sent Frederick to Mr. Covey, known as a man who could tame and break anyone. Frederick again began to experience the alienation of whites from himself, which became a test of his spiritual strength and faith in himself (Douglass, 2016). An attempt was made to destroy all those genuinely human traits that he discovered in himself due to the new attitude of people from different environments. Such an inhuman life and alienated attitude began to demolish his human essence.
The very first attempt to uncover this vast, fundamental problem of alienation, depriving people of humanity was the work of Rebecca Harding Davis. The story “Life in the Iron-Mills” was the first in American literature of the XIX century to depict the life of the industrial proletariat. The proletariat world inspires the writer with horror and compassion; the author strives to portray this world truthfully and honestly.
The story’s composition is straightforward; it is characterized by a deliberate rejection of cheap entertainment and intrigue. The most spectacular moment of the store – Wolf’s capture by the police – is omitted by Rebecca Davis; it is mentioned briefly. The author is indifferent to the sensation and misses the opportunity to develop a detective story on this material: she is interested in something else. The pathos of her story lies in a truthful and impressive demonstration of the terrible fate of the proletariat, deprived of all human feelings through the alienation of superiors.
Davis leads her imaginary opponent to the slums of Philadelphia, where workers live. She leads them to the workshops of factories, where they scurry like gnomes around hot stoves, and to pubs, where they drown out their despair with wine. The writer attempts to look into the soul of the worker. The reader sees rudeness, ignorance, and drunkenness caused by the alienation of the outside world. “Life in the Iron-Mills” is the story of steelworker Hugh Wolf, who works at a melting furnace; he is as lean and ragged as the other workers. In a working-class suburb, he lives in a basement, together with his father and his hunchbacked cousin Deborah (Davis, 2016). Wolf has a subtle soul of an artist and a massive talent as a sculptor. In his spare time, he constantly carves figures out of the baked slag. Once, he sculpted a colossal figure of a female worker; the sculpture expressed a passionate impulse toward something better and unknown. Wolf created a symbolic image of the proletariat, who is not ready to fight yet but is already looking for ways of salvation.
This sculpture is noticed by a group of bored idlers who have come to the plant. These are the son of the plant owner, young Kirby, and the breeder’s son-in-law Dr. May. Davies satirically draws the image of the philanthropist May and ridicules bourgeois liberalism (Davis, 2016). Dr. May praises Wolf’s talent and the need for its development, but he does not go further than these conversations. With tremendous force, Davis breaks the false idea of equal opportunities in America. Giving the doctor the right to rant on this subject, Kirby and Mitchell frankly admit that there is no equality of opportunities for everyone in America. They openly say that the proletariat should only occupy a place at the lowest rung of the social ladder. Moreover, Kirby cynically says that workers should be kept in the position of cattle, and Mitchell justifies this idea.
As if punished for showing a talent an ordinary worker is not supposed to have, Wolf tragically dies. After all, the alienation of superiors should kill all human feelings among the workers because, for the supervisors, workers are nothing but cattle. At the same time, alienating the workers, the representatives of the bourgeois world become devoid of human feelings themselves. The writer exposes liberals like May and cynical breeders like Kirby and Mitchell, showing that the workers they perceive as cattle are sometimes even more human.
The problem of social exclusion posed by the writer appeared at least half a century earlier than the conditions for its solution were ripe in America. Davis shows that alienation weakens both classes’ moral and intellectual image; she satirically ridicules May’s philanthropy (Davis, 2016). The psychological portrait of Mitchell, who did not save the talented Wolf but calmly sent him to hard labor, is also accurate. Davis does not try to reconcile the two classes; she convinces the reader that there is an irreconcilable enmity between them due to mutual alienation.
The topic of relations between social classes in the historical process of society’s development remains highly relevant and controversial. Despite significant progress in this issue, the social status of workers and other indicators of the community’s well-being, as before, remain far from ideal. First of all, this is caused by the alienation of people from each other. As a result, a person begins to consider other people and relationships with them, like any other element of purchase and sale, through the prism of market relations. Love, friendship, and other forms of human relationships lose their naturalness, turning into a state of exchange of services. A person no longer considers himself a person, a carrier of creative forces, feelings, and aspirations. Thus, alienation steals human emotions from people, turning into self-alienation – the worst and ultimate form of separation.
References
Davis, R. H. (2016). Life in the Iron-Mills. USA, Morrisville: Lulu Press.
Douglass, F. (2016). Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass. New York, USA: Dover Publications.