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jordannchloee's review
adventurous
funny
reflective
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.5
i think for the context within which this play was written and the temporal period within which it was published (1879) this was a fine and interesting and fairly well done play. I'm super interested in the way Hopkins linguistically indicates her characters' development through literal language growth while dually forwarding the plot through musical insertions that indicate a truth about the period and the people of the time. i also appreciated its focus on the actual enslaved people (as opposed to the masters being key characters) and the way that the primary of the text focused on their journey to freedom. the linguistic manipulation of 'peculiar' was also super fun for me to take in as its positioned in the way we would conceptualize peculiar in modernity but hard to grasp simultaneously. sam is peculiar because he wants to be free...which is technically within the definition of peculiar that is nonnormative but it is weird because i wouldn't exactly thing wanting to be free is a non normative perspective for an enslaved person to maintain. i think the most frustrating part about this piece for me was the treatment of Virginia (Jinny) and the general conceptualizations around womanhood. i understand also this was a byproduct of the time but am frustrated by the ways in which she is marked as having pseduo independent thoughts but never gets to act on them. i also thought the ending was super curious and their positioning of God was dubious and variant throughout the text. i would think that, with a woman author, especially the woman characters would have sat differently than they did for me in texts from a similar period. but these women characters pretty strictly follow archetypes of the time. that is not to say its a bad thing! it just is. overall i would recommend this play for individuals reading the period and interested in learning about the normative perspectives of this time.
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