Published in 1856 as her second anti-slavery novel, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred initially sold more than Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) but became less popular and almost forgotten by the public. It is thus not surprising that some critics labeled Dred as the text “in the shadow of Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (Whitney 552).¹ Not only Dred was in the shadow of her previous bestseller which “started great war” as Abraham Lincoln declared but it was also a “notably unsuccessful” (Yellin 685) text. After the immense success of her first anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe but had to confront harsh criticism from both white and black, southern and northern readers. Publishing A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853) was not enough but Stowe needed to create more powerful rhetoric to alert, influence, and persuade yet unawakened and blind Americans.

Enactment of the Kansas-Nebraska Act on May 1854 repealing Missouri Compromise of 1820 brought up violent sectional conflicts known as “Bleeding Kansas” that was “most intense between December 1855 and September 1856,” the period during which Stowe worked on her new novel Dred (Hedrick 258). As the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 initiated Stowe to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin, American legal system regarding the institution of slavery was heavily influencing the writer who was always alert to the possibility of further crisis in her country.² On perceiving that the abolition of slavery was not imminent, Dred was written “under the impulse of stormy times,” (qtd. in Hedrick 258) as Stowe writes in her letter to the Duchess of Argyle. Stowe’s biographer Joan Hedrick’s research reveals how fiercely Stowe worked on her new novel. Her husband Calvin Stowe “recommended that publication be delayed so that the ending “not be hurried or botched,” but Harriet plowed ahead” (qtd. in Hedrick 260). On Stowe’s letter to Ms. Phillips, it is once again indicated how avidly she worked on completing Dred : “I wrote 25 pages ms, yesterday & 20 days before & send herewith 45. Shall write fifty more to day & to morrow” (qtd. in Hedrick 260).

Rapid increase of the violence in the 1850s led Stowe to launch an appeal to public in haste and differently than before. Stowe’s new hero Dred is distinct from Uncle Tom who often has been criticized as a passive and submissive slave to his white masters. By creating the fictional character of Dred as the son of Denmark Vessey, a historical figure who was executed for his slave revolt in South Carolina in 1822, Dred reveals Stowe’s desire to “rethink, modify, and revise her view” (Levine x) from her previous work.³ As Robert Levine writes in his introduction to Dred in 2000, this work can be “read as Stowe’s thoughtful novelistic response to the changing political and cultural climate of the mid-1850s, and [also] as her own highly mediated “response” to Uncle Tom’s Cabin ” (Levine x).

Although Stowe was calling to the world with her ambition to create a good literary work as well as something powerful and influential, only few have responded positively to her new novel. George Eliot, who had a long-distance relationship with Stowe wrote a review of Dred in Westminster Review in October, 1856 and praised that Dred is a work “inspired by a rare genius – rare both in intensity and in range of power” and anticipated “in the meantime, “Dred” will be devoured by the million” (571) although her prediction turned out to be incorrect. Eliot further complimented Stowe’s “keen sense of humor” in Dred which “preserves her from extravagance and monotony” (572). Unlike Eliot’s, criticism on Dred in the nineteenth century was harsh. As Clare Cotugno points out, “reviewers in both Britain and America found the novel confusing and disappointing. They did not know what to make of the title character and his fearsome revolutionary rhetoric, the multiple plots, or the bleak ending, all of which amounted to a much less satisfying novel than Uncle Tom had been” (117). Even Hedrick, although she admits how fervently Stowe worked on her new novel, criticizes Dred as “neither an incendiary tract nor a good novel” which failed in its both artistic and political aims. Hedrick further writes that “Stowe rushed into print with insufficiently imagined character, stilted dialogue, and a novel much too long for the action it sustains” (259). And by the twentieth century, as Levine examines, “the novel had gone out of favor since many critics have judged it racist, overly long, and incoherent” (ix).

Compared to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, criticism of Dred is rare, negative, and almost always has been in the shadow of the previous work. However, as Levine declares, “it is time to restore Dred to a central place in Stowe’s canon” since Dred is the text that reveals Stowe’s attempts to try out “a number of different ways of addressing the problem of slavery, offers conflicting views on race.” In many ways, Dred is “Stowe’s most honest and vulnerable fiction” that reveals the author’s own ambivalence (Levine x). The author’s own ambivalence, “Stowe’s increasingly ambivalent approach to literary abolitionism” (DeLombard 104) in the wake of violent warfare is most uniquely and efficiently presented in her setting of the black swamp. The following pages will thus present the importance of the novel’s central setting – the Great Dismal Swamp. Often neglected or overlooked from previous criticism on Dred is its significance of the subtitle: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp. Although few critics have pointed out the importance of the swamp in Dred, no full length study has been produced on reading the thematic importance of this new setting Stowe presents.

The novel was initially called as Nina Gordon, a heroine character in Dred or as Canema, which is the name of Gordon’s plantation, but Stowe changed it to Dred and subtitled it as A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp. Unlike domestic settings such as Shelby’s dining parlor, Rachel and Dinah’s kitchen spaces represented in Uncle Tom’s Cabin that reveal Stowe’s advocacy for “domesticity and a matrifocal emphasis,” (Karafilis 27) Stowe in this new novel expands her setting into the Great Dismal Swamp.⁴ Thus, examining the significance of Dred ’s swamp images and its symbolism and their impact on her heroic character Dred will lead a way to follow Stowe’s departure from her first success and help to analyze the author’s desire to attempt a new “project of cross-racial conversation and social transformation that attends to multiple perspectives” (Levine xxx).

Swamp is part of wetland that has woody plants while a marsh is covered mostly with grasses. Geographically, the Great Dismal Swamp is “identified as one of the largest swamps remaining in the eastern United States . . . equally divided between the states of Virginia and North Carolina, it once covered nearly 2,200 square miles; [though] today the Dismal is approximately the one-third that size” (Pettie 29). Often overlooked but highly significant passage presented by Stowe in Dred is a quote from Thomas Moore’s 1806 ballad “The Lake of the Dismal Swamp” in the epigraph. Having traveled to Norfolk, Virginia as a guest of British counsel John Hamilton, Moore heard the legendary story of the region of a man who lost his lover and went into the dismal swamp believing the existence of the deceased in the wild wasteland. Moore’s ballad reflects the conventional notion of interpreting swamp as the site of mysterious figures such as ghosts, madness, and wilderness but also as the reserving site of eternal love.

Historically, swamp represented a place of wilderness and wasteland. As Rod Giblett examines, “the marshy side of the lake is figured as a kind of Eden-after-the-Fall in which a satanic serpent lurks” (5) and is presented in Dante and Milton’s literary works as “hell as a slimy Stygian marsh” and Satan as “a monstrous swamp serpent” (5). Vision of swamps in American culture is not distinct from seeing it as horrific and “desert places from the earliest years of English settlement in North America” (Miller 1). Often regarded as a “deserted” region, “uninhabited and uncultivated tract of country,”⁵ swamp was “the domain of sin, death, and decay; the stage for witchcraft; the habitat of weird and ferocious creatures” (Miller 3). Moreover, swamps have been seen “as places of darkness . . . horror and the uncanny, melancholy and the monstrous – in short, as black waters ” (Giblett xi, emphasis mine).

However, in the nineteenth century America, “the immersion in the unknown that desert places had always represented,” as Miller writes, “came to be embraced by many as not only a dangerous but also an exhilarating and self-renewing experience. At the deeper levels of the culture, the swamp emerged as a metaphor of newly awakened unconscious mental processes” (3). Swamp became a popular motif for the nineteenth century artists. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “The Slave in the Dismal Swamp” (1842) or, an 1847 epic poem “Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie,” Porte Crayon’s stories of an adventurous journey into the center of the swamp serialized in Harper’s Monthly in 1856, Henry David Thoreau’s writings especially “Walking” which was published posthumously in 1862, and Martine Johnson Heade’s oil paintings, all recount various readings of swamp in their artistic works. They contributed to the suggestion of “new ways of envisioning backyard swamp and marsh landscapes as spiritually significant” (Vileisis 98). As Ann Vileisis points out, the nineteenth century literate people had begun to question “whether it was always so clear that some things were unequivocally bad and others good. Was it not possible and exciting to consider alternative perspectives? With an increasing secularism and greater willingness to abandon old-fashioned puritanical values, topics long held as taboo were open for consideration” (96). Consequently, during the 1850s, “the swamp overcame, in the minds of many thoughtful Americans, its age-old stigma” (Miller 3) although the traditional ways of understanding still prevailed among the public. It is thus an important task to examine how Stowe as an influential 19th century American writer interprets this swampy space in her literary creation. Furthermore, it is not exaggerating to say that Stowe was in many ways following the trend of her time in setting her novel in somewhat foreign and wild place compared to her previous domestic ones. The fact that Stowe had never traveled to the South at the time when she was writing Dred, but had relied heavily on descriptions “given by her friend Frederick Law Olmsted, who traveled through the South in 1852” (Vileisis 103) reflects how eagerly Stowe wanted this swampy land to be the major setting in her new novel.

Dred begins with a story of Nina Gordon, an eighteen-year-old mistress of the plantation Canema in North Carolina and she is about to choose her life companion among three suitors. As Levine observes, “ Dred at first glance can seem oddly indebted to the plantation novel tradition” (xvii) since the first seventeen chapters focus on various characters around the planation belle in Canema: Nina’s brother Tom Gordon, Nina and Tom’s half-brother Harry and his wife Lisette, slaves in Canema who are “stock characters” such as Old Mammy in the typical plantation novel, Nina’s suitor Edward Clayton and his sister Anne from South Carolina, etc. Unlike Uncle Tom, who appeared in the early chapter of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, readers must wait patiently until Dred appears somewhat unexpectedly in chapter eighteen titled as “Dred.”

With a crackling sound from the swamp, a tall, masculine, and distinctly black figure Dred greets Harry who is torn apart from the threat of Tom Gordon to take his wife away. A son of Denmark Vessey who has survived from the execution, Dred “made his escape to the swamps, and was never afterward heard of in civilized life” (Stowe 209). Dred inhabits the “immense belt of swampy land” not far from Canema, “to which the name of Dismal has been given” (Stowe 196). With Olmsted and other contemporary figures’ aid, Stowe’s literary imagination presents the Great Dismal Swamp in her own uniquely descriptive way. To recall the fact that Stowe’s first book was Primary Geography for Children (1833) which was revised in 1855 and retitled as First Geography for Children, a year before the publication of Dred, makes it more understandable to see Dred ’s narrator performing as a geography teacher for her readers. On describing the swamp, Stowe writes as follows:

The reader who consults the map will discover that the whole eastern shore of the Southern States, with slight interruptions, is belted by an immense chain of swamps, regions of hopeless disorder, where the abundant growth and vegetation of nature, sucking up its forces from the humid soil, seems to rejoice in a savage exuberance, and bid defiance to all human efforts either to penetrate or subdue. (Stowe 209)

The initial description of swamp image Stowe presents follows the conventional understating of it in Western culture. Described as the “regions of hopeless disorder” and “savage exuberance,” “Stowe’s southern swamp landscape represented indolence and uncontrolledness” (Vileisis 103). Visiting the Great Dismal Swamp in 1763, George Washington – back then, a Virginia planter and not yet the “Father” of his country – described in his diary of the region as a ““glorious paradise” and noted the abundance of wildfowl and game” (Pettie 30). To transform the wild land into a cultivated, useful, and profitable one, Washington formed two syndicates called “Adventures for Draining the Great Dismal Swamp” and “Dismal Swamp Land Company.” Washington originally planned to “drain the swamp and cultivate the land for cotton and rice.” However, it turned out that “the rich peat soil proved to be unsuited for this purpose and [his] interest turned to lumbering” (Pettie 30). Although the company made some profits with Atlantic white cedar and cypress trees, Washington became disappointed with his business and gave it up and prepared for upcoming American Revolutionary War.

The Great Dismal Swamp defied “all human efforts to penetrate or subdue” (Stowe 209). It is not an easy place for human beings to tame or control although it is the habitat for “evergreen trees,” the region of “exuberance growth.” Swamp also provides “the homes of the alligator, the moccasin, and the rattle-snake” (Stowe 209) which arouse fear and fright. However, due to its uncontrollable wildness, swamp served as a refuge for fugitive slaves. Solomon Northup, for example, recounts his escape through the “Great Pacoudrie Swamp” in Louisiana.⁶ Fearing every instant, Northup narrates the “dreadful sting of moccasin, or be crushed within the jaws of some disturbed alligator, the dread of them now almost equaled the fear of the pursuing hounds” (Northup 96). However, as he proceeds, Northup’s anxiety shifts and he confesses “it was difficult to determine which I had most reason to fear – dogs, alligators or men!” (Northup 97). After midnight, on seeing “innumerable ducks” and imagining that no other “human footstep had never before so far penetrated the recesses of the swamp” (Northup 97) but only him, Northup praises God thanking him for providing “a refuge and a dwelling place” even in the heart of that Dismal Swamp (Northup 98).⁷ The swamp functions as the “uncanny” place of ambivalence in Northup’s narrative, a place of life and death, fear and hope, and suffocation and exhilaration.

Similarly, “it would seem impossible that human foot could penetrate the wild, impervious jungle” (Stowe 239) but only Dred and his companions. The swamp, as Maria Karafilis analyzes, is “a literal and figurative “no man’s land.”” Figured as unfit for human habitation, a ““desert space,” it goes unclaimed as private property and paradoxically offers the men and women settling it a nurturing space of freedom” (38). Thus, exclaiming that he is a free man, “free by the Lord of hosts,” Dred insists that swamp is the place of freedom rather than a region of “hopeless disorder.” On confronting Harry, Dred says, ““You sleep in a curtained bed. – I sleep on the ground, in the swamps! You eat the fat of the land. I have what the ravens bring me! But no man whips me! – no man touches my wife! – no man says to me, ‘Why do ye so?’ Go! you are a slave! – I am free!”” (Stowe 199-200, emphasis original). For Dred, the swamp is the place of freedom of the soul, while it is the site of black pollution and miasmic diseases in the dominant white discourses. Dred’s proclamation awakens Harry and he finally cries out ““Dred, I will – I will – I’ll do as you tell me – I will not be a slave!”” (Stowe 200). Swamp functions as the place of awakening and transformation for Harry as it does for Dred. Unlike Washington who failed in his first attempt to cultivate the waste land, “a mind of the most passionate energy and vehemence, thus awakened, for years made the wild solitudes of the swamp its home” (Stowe 211). Rather than destroying or fearing deserted place he inhabits, Stowe presents Dred’s harmonious coexistence within nature:

So completely had he come into sympathy and communion with nature, and with those forms of it which more particularly surrounded him in the swamps, that he moved about among them with as much ease as a lady treads her Turkey carpet. What would seem to us in recital to be incredible hardship, was to him but an ordinary condition of existence. To walk knee-deep in the spongy soil of the swamp, to force his way through thickets, to lie all night sinking in the porous soil, or to crouch, like the alligator, among reeds and rushes, were to him situations of as much comfort as well-curtained beds and pillows are to us. (Stowe 274)

Not only coexisting with nature, but “the negroes lying out in the swamps are not so wholly cut off from society as might at first be imagined.” The slaves in neighboring plantations, “readily perceive that, in the event of any difficulty occurring to themselves, it might be quite necessary to have a friend and protector in the swamp; and therefore they do not hesitate to supply these fugitives, so far as they are able, with anything which they may desire” (Stowe 211). Also, interestingly, the poor whites in the vicinity will “willingly supply necessary wares in exchange for game, with which the swamp abounds” (Stowe 212). In order to secure secrecy, fugitive safety, and economic comfort, not only colored slaves but also poor whites assist runaway slaves in the swamp. In that way, they become conspirators who defy the slave system. Swamp is thus represented in the novel as the zone of encounter and sympathy between poor whites and colored people in the South.

Although swamp carried “a promise of freedom for escaped slaves,” “poorer farmers, Native Americans, free mulattoes, and swamp Maroons,” it also delivered “a threat to social order for the plantation aristocracy” (Wilson xv). In the mid-nineteenth century America, “the imaginative linking of fugitive slaves with swamps had become common in the aftermath of 1831 Nat Turner rebellion, when Turner and his cohorts retreated to the Great Dismal Swamp after their violent revolt” (104) as Vileisis points out.⁸ The increase of runaway slaves escaping and congregating into the swamp aroused fear of potential slave uprisings among Southerners. In Dred, the existence of fugitives in the dismal swamp is also known to the white slave masters as well. The family lawyer of the Gordons, Mr. Jekyl’s comment indicates this clearly:

Our plantations in this vicinity are very unfortunate in their proximity to the swamp. It’s a great expense of time and money. Why, sir, it’s inconceivable, the amount of property that’s lost in that swamp! I have heard it estimated at something like three millions of dollars! We follow them up with laws, you see. They are outlawed regularly, after a certain time, and then the hunters go in and chase them down; sometimes kill two or three a day, or something like that. But, on the whole, they don’t effect much . . . There’s a fellow that’s been lurking about this swamp, off and on, for years and years. Sometimes he isn’t to be seen for months; and then again he is seen or heard of, but never so that anybody can get hold of him. I have no doubt the niggers on the plantation know him; but, then, you can never get anything out of them. O, they are deep! They are a dreadfully corrupt set. (Stowe 437-38)

As a figure of mysterious rumor, Dred is an uncatchable and also an intractable subject as like the ghost in the swamp. In a chapter titled as “The Desert,” Stowe highlights the importance of swamp in order to fully understand her black characters. To estimate “the feelings and reasoning of the slave,” Stowe remarks that “the reader must follow again to the fastness in the Dismal Swamp” (445, emphasis mine). The word “fastness” which is a synonym for a “stronghold,” or a “fortress” is considered as “a place not easily forced.” And thus, it is a safe place “secured from invasion, difficulty of access.”⁹ Accordingly, the Great Dismal Swamp in which Dred inhabits does not remain as a deserted place of “sneaking varmins” (Stowe 507) as Tom Gordon’s racist and conventional interpretation perceives. Dred’s swamp does not “conform to conventional representations . . . enshrined by American republican traditions,” but rather as “a powerful and potentially revolutionary space” (Karafilis 40) in which Stowe creates a safe haven, “a site of regeneration and beauty,” and “a space for regeneration and renewal” (Boyd 62). The impenetrable depth of the swamp has the black power of resilience to surface up the repressed in history.

Vision of swamp as a symbolic fastness is highlighted when a cholera epidemic disrupts the white neighborhood. As “pollution flourishes where there is cultural contradiction,” (Miller 78) an epidemic disease like slavery affects all – Northerners and Southerners, slave masters and slaves – and instigates social disorder and collapse. As Rene Girard aptly points out, “between the plague and social disorder there is a reciprocal affinity” and “the plague is a transparent metaphor for a certain reciprocal violence that spreads” (834-36). Although swamp represents the site of disease and pollution in its typical interpretation, the inhabitants are immune to and saved from an epidemic which takes away many whites including Nina’s life.

It is to be remarked that the climate, in the interior of the swamp, is far from being unhealthy. Lumbermen, who spend great portions of the year in it, cutting shingles and staves, testify to the general salubrity of the air and water. The opinion prevails among them that the quantity of pine and other resinous trees there, impart a balsamic property to the water, and impregnate the air with a healthy resinous fragrance, which causes it to be an exception to the usual rule of the unhealthiness of swampy land. (Stowe 239-40)

The swamp thus represents not the locus of commonly prejudiced unhealthiness, and “lost control,” but “the space of seizing control, and a sanctuary” (Karafilis 40) for healthy mind and body of the lowly. Rather than stagnated as a region of “hopeless disorder,” Dred ’s swamp functions as “the quaking zone” mediating in between the transition of spatial locality where “land and water meet” (Giblett 3). Neither land nor water, but also both land and water, swamps and wetlands become places of “life and death, light and dark, as biologically rich and fertile, mucky and murky, vital for life on earth.” Swamps are thus functioning as “living black waters” (Giblett xi). According to William Howarth, whether called “swamp, flat, marsh, or bog,” “these areas have come by long association to express divided values: (1) difficulty or uncertainty, as in a quagmire, or morass; (2) change, since wetlands are transition zones, between water and land; and (3) contingency or possibility, because wetlands may foster new life” (Howarth 521).

As fugitives in the dismal swamp are immune to the cholera epidemic, they are safe from the threat of southern slavery, although it might be a temporary one and requires a scapegoat which will soon be discussed in the following section. Presenting as a borderland in between slavery to freedom but also as a fastness, Stowe stresses the proximity of swamp to the land of slavery throughout the text: “[T]he wild, dreary belt of swamp-land which girds in those states scathed by the fires of despotism is an apt emblem” of “that darkly struggling” (Stowe 496). This ambivalent or multiple interpretation of swamp reflects what Stowe aims to emphasize in Dred. Right before describing runaway slaves gathered together in the clearing of the Dismal Swamp, Stowe writes that “there is no study in human nature more interesting than the aspects of the same subject seen in the points of view of different characters. One might almost imagine that there were no such thing as absolute truth, since a change of situation or temperament is capable of changing the whole force of an argument” (445). Denying the existence of an absolute truth especially from the white perspective, Stowe departs from the “racial orthodoxies that had informed her first novel” (Levine xix) and tries to “understand slavery from the point of view of the enslaved” (Levine xvii). Also, by doing so, Stowe attempts to situate her position as a mediator of two different worlds as her heroic character Dred does. Swamp defies a fixed definition, since it is full of fluid possibilities.

An inhabitant of the Great Dismal Swamp, Dred is described as not only distinctly black, magnificent, and Herculean, but also a man of “visions and supernatural communications” with “peculiar magical powers.” Stowe introduces a maternal grandfather of Dred as one of reputed African sorcerers who passes “prophetic and supernatural impulses” (Stowe 274) down to his grandson. Dred thus “often escaped danger by means of a peculiarity of this kind” (Stowe 275). Specifically, Dred had been “warned from particular places where the hunters had lain in wait for him; had foreseen in times of want where game might be ensnared, and received intimations where persons were to be found in whom he might safely confide; and his predictions with regard to persons and things had often chanced to be so strikingly true” (Stowe 275) that people regarded him as a prophet.

However, Dred is a complex character of “considerable ambiguity throughout much of the text” who seems to “resist immediate classification” (Boyd 59-60) as the setting of swamp. Although Dred is a man who inherits and possesses innate Africanness and even his outfits present “fantastic sort of turban” and garments made of “coarse negro-cloth” which adds “outlandish effect of his appearance,” (Stowe 198) he is also a man of Christian belief. Escaping from his slave overseer, Dred “carried with him to the swamp but one solitary companion – the Bible of his father” (Stowe 210). And “that book, so full of startling symbols and vague images, had for him no interpreter but the silent courses of nature . . . traversing for weeks these desolate regions, he would compare himself to Elijah traversing for forty days and nights the solitudes of Horeb; or to John the Baptist in the wilderness . . . sometimes he would fast and pray for days; and then voices would seem to speak to him, and strange hieroglyphics would be written upon the leaves” (Stowe 211). By presenting Dred as a prophetic figure who carries a vocation of freedom, Stowe once again depicts the sincerest, the most ideal, and chosen Christian as a black man who truly believes in the equality of all men. Unlike ministers who sell and buy slaves to satisfy avarice, Dred is a man of self-control and restraint who “never tasted strong liquors in any form, and was extremely sparing in his eating; often fasting for days in succession, particularly when he had any movement of importance in contemplation” (Stowe 496). In the Dismal Swamp, Dred confesses that he “found the alligators and the snakes better neighbors than Christians, They let those alone that let them alone; but Christian will hunt for the precious life” (Stowe 278). Unlike Uncle Tom, the Bible to Dred was “not the messenger of peace and good-will, but the herald of woe and wrath!” (Stowe 210). Unlike Uncle Tom, Dred is not a forgiving, nonviolent saint. Rather, Dred carries with him a rifle and struggles with an “absorbing sentiment, as if he had been chosen by some higher power as the instrument of doom” and must wait till “the Lord giveth commandment” (Stowe 497).

As Dred mediates and enacts the power in between the tradition of African sorcery and Christian prophecy, and struggles in between Christian obedience and defiance as a free willed man, he becomes a traverser in the swamp. Stowe presents Dred’s journey who “traversed the whole swampy belt of both the Carolinas, as well as that of Southern Virginia; residing a few months in one place, and a few months in another” (Stowe 212). Dred had been “a great traveller – a traveller through regions generally held inaccessible to human foot and eye” (Stowe 510). Unlike late nineteenth century Northern Americans who “traveled to the South as tourists to enjoy warm climate and the different landscapes” especially the swamps as Vileisis points out (106), Dred’s pilgrimage was not for his own excitement in the wild place. “Wherever he stopped,” Stowe further describes that Dred “formed a sort of retreat, where he received and harbored fugitives” (Stowe 212). Therefore, “Dred does not simply withdraw into the clearing in search of sanctuary from the world of Southern slavery; in point of fact, he crosses and re-crosses the borderline between the swamp and “cultivated” life carrying with him the threat of an epidemic of violence” (Boyd 63). As Stowe introduces a journey of Dred from slavery to freedom, she is creating a fictional slave narrative of black voice who presents the deconstruction of “fixed hierarchies and polarities.” Permanent fixity is impossible in the all-encompassing swamp. In such a space, as Karafilis examines, “oppositions conflate to form new entities” that “the fluid boundaries of the swamp mock fixity and the possession of clearly demarcated, discrete areas” (40). Thus, the swamp in Dred is “more than a refuge from the racist American system; it is an alternative collective space and the locus of revolutionary political activity,” (Karafilis 41) constructed and managed by black rebels. In the black swamps and marshes, the fugitive slaves are baptized into awakening in the waters of primitive memories of free Africa and motherhood.

As an ambiguous and mysterious realm, the swamp defies “the pervasive logical distinctions at the basis of culture: the demarcation between life and death and polarities such as good and evil, light and dark, male and female” and “that is largely why it has always seemed so threatening, the antithesis of civilization” (Miller 78). As an obscure character, Dred defies the banal, conventional, and singular interpretation. A man who crisscrosses civilized world of the others and his own where he is baptized into awakening in the waters of primitive memories of free Africa, Dred should be reconsidered as Stowe’s significant character who questions normative identities and values. Unfortunately, as Miller indicates, “critics have been quick to dismiss Dred as an absurd concoction of the literary imagination” of his “supernatural strength and agility . . . preternatural empathy with nature, and boundless compassion for all things lowly and helpless” (95). Hederick approaches in a similar way by interpreting Dred as “an initially mysterious appealing character, [who] soon makes the reader sigh over turgid passages in which he speaks not in dialect but in the accents of an Old Testament prophet” (259). However, Dred’s ability to move across boundaries makes him as a “heterogeneous, liminal, and uncontainable figure” and thus prompts readers to “question the binary constructions elaborated by dominant society, its institutions, and epistemologies” (Karafilis 41-42). Reading Dred requires the readers to depart from our comfort zone. Dred, as his name implies, remains a dread for the white slave masters and unawakened readers who imprison themselves within the established orders and “orthodox” truth. The task given to Stowe’s scholars from now on is to resurrect and reanalyze Dred’s obscurity within the Great Dismal Swamp.

The problematic transition in Dred which caused much negative criticism is its ending. As few characters in Uncle Tom’s Cabin confront deaths – Uncle Tom, St. Clair, and Little Eva – Stowe sacrifices her heroine Nina Gordon from the cholera pandemic and Dred as a victim of a drunken lynch mob led by Tom. The sudden death of Dred confuses and even disappoints Stowe’s readers. Several critics have lamented the death of Dred which degrades his heroic character as a titular one and also provided their own unique way of interpreting its ending of the novel. Hedrick compares Dred’s death with that of Uncle Tom: “just as Uncle Tom was assimilated to a feminine ethos of Christian suffering, so is Dred assimilated to the sentimental heroine’s fate” (Hedrick 259). Or, Tom Gordon’s final invasion into the swamp and following tragic death of Dred proves that “insulation of the swamp from patriarchal power is ultimately shown to be illusory” (Boyd 62). In the end, the remaining Harry and his wife, Old Tiff and children, the Claytons along with some fugitives all leave and settle down in Canada where they can “live happily together” (Stowe 543). Stowe’s image of Claytons’ Canadian farm borrows its motif from the Elgin settlement, founded by “Mr. King, a gentleman who removed and settled his slaves in the south of Canada” (Stowe 544) as she explains in her footnote. It is known that the Elgin community was founded around 1850 and emerged as a model black agricultural community.

Rather than perceiving Dred as a mere victim as her negative critics argue, Stowe elevates him as a martyr figure who influences the transformation of Harry, Hannibal and the Claytons. Dred is a prophet as Elijah foregoing the advent of Christ for freedom. He is a Moses stuck on the brink of the promised land. Therefore, by presenting swamp as the site of Dred’s death, it also functions as the site of possible rebirth. Described by a wetland expert William Neiring as “the kidneys of the landscape,” wetlands – superordinate concept of swamp – “perform rites of cleansing: they transfer, settle, filter, and recharge the mingled elements of soil and water” (qtd. in Howarth 520). Like swamp as a “living black water,” Dred remains as a living black hero, immortal in our literary imagination.

Is Dred then “the scapegoat who must be eliminated to return the community to order and peace?” (Boyd 63). The answer might yes and/or no. When one considers Stowe’s social milieu as Hedrick indicates, “in the hardening climate of the 1850s neither evolutionary reform nor slave rebellion appeared a feasible solution to Stowe” (260). Unlike appraisals of her work as sentimental and domestic, Stowe was indeed a practical and realistic writer of the century who was keenly aware of the limits and restrictions of America. America was not a land of unlimited possibilities. In Dred, as Levine points out, “Stowe is not quite as sanguine about the prospects for black elevation in the United States” (xxvi). In the end of the novel, Anne Clayton, who replaces the role of the deceased Nina, exclaims “I will go out of the state, then, I will go anywhere; but I will not stop the work that I have begun” (Stowe 538).

In lieu of “arguing for Liberian colonization” as she does in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, like “Martin Delany, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, and many other black abolitionists,” Stowe “shows the advantages of black emigration to Canada” (Levine xxvii) in Dred. In that way, the death of Dred does not return the society back to patriarchal or matrifocal one or infuse the institution of slavery. Instead, it suggests an alternative space, “not the American sacred space of the Puritans and the Founding Fathers,” (Karafilis 24) but the locus of equality and freedom in which “the blacks have a central place” in a black township (Levine xxviii). Thus, the spirit of Dred is further carried on that “although Dred dies before such rebellion occurs, the reader understands that the possibility of black armed resistance does not die with the title character” (Karafilis 26).

Dred reflects Stowe’s “negotiation of the possibilities and dangers of that accusatory rhetoric and mimetic conflict so dominating the political life of America” (Boyd 53). Perhaps, “the best known antebellum attempt to depict the rebel in fiction” (Yellin 685) turned out to be unsuccessful in the shadow of her previous work and in the wake of upcoming Civil War. And most of all, as the transition of interpreting swamp as hybrid space was unfamiliar with common people, they were not ready to take Stowe’s earnest and realistic presentation of fluid living black water. The Great Dismal Swamp in Dred remains a site of possibilities, of vital exuberance and growth: it is not a realized dream. The dream is to be realized by the black people baptized by Dred with the water of self-awakening. The swamp is a station to move on in the journey for freedom, far from “a kind of murky mindlessness” (Styron 202).