Poverty, Violence and Exploitation Dominating the South and the North in William Attaway 's Blood on the Forge
Blood on the Forge is a gripping and tragic novel by William Attaway that tells a story about three brothers who face the violent oppression and hyper exploitation in their migration from the rural South to the industrial North of America. When Attaway was a child, his family was part of this population shift, thus this story wholly illustrates the tragedy and hardships of many African-American immigrants in those days. Blood on the Forge is considered a work of social critique as this novel protests poverty, violence and exploitation being put under the influence of capitalism in the South and the North during the Great Migration.
What first catches the readers’ eyes is the poverty of the Mosses’ family being acutely expressed in terms of hunger. Perceivably, the novel opens to Melody playing “the hungry blues” on his guitar in an attempt to suppress his hunger cravings. In the family, Big Mat is the only one who has to work hard as a sharecropper on Mr. Johnston 's farm in Kentucky to provide for his family. However, it’s burdensome that “share-cropping and being hungry went together” (1), Attaway writes. At that moment, Chinatown, Melody and Hattie are all anticipating Big Mat’s return from Mr. …show more content…
The novel protests against the mechanizing force of the steel mill − a brutal labor system that separates, destroys families, and depersonalize the pitiful immigrants. Blood on the Forge also accomplishes this by showing the continuity of exploitative relationships from South to North interconnected to violence and racism within Southern and Northern cultures that lead to the Mosses’ tragedy. Naturalistic, fatalistic, powerful, Blood on the Forge is truly a twentieth century’s stunning and haunting work of literary
Blood on the Forge is a gripping and tragic novel by William Attaway that tells a story about three brothers who face the violent oppression and hyper exploitation in their migration from the rural South to the industrial North of America. When Attaway was a child, his family was part of this population shift, thus this story wholly illustrates the tragedy and hardships of many African-American immigrants in those days. Blood on the Forge is considered a work of social critique as this novel protests poverty, violence and exploitation being put under the influence of capitalism in the South and the North during the Great Migration.
What first catches the readers’ eyes is the poverty of the Mosses’ family being acutely expressed in terms of hunger. Perceivably, the novel opens to Melody playing “the hungry blues” on his guitar in an attempt to suppress his hunger cravings. In the family, Big Mat is the only one who has to work hard as a sharecropper on Mr. Johnston 's farm in Kentucky to provide for his family. However, it’s burdensome that “share-cropping and being hungry went together” (1), Attaway writes. At that moment, Chinatown, Melody and Hattie are all anticipating Big Mat’s return from Mr. …show more content…
The novel protests against the mechanizing force of the steel mill − a brutal labor system that separates, destroys families, and depersonalize the pitiful immigrants. Blood on the Forge also accomplishes this by showing the continuity of exploitative relationships from South to North interconnected to violence and racism within Southern and Northern cultures that lead to the Mosses’ tragedy. Naturalistic, fatalistic, powerful, Blood on the Forge is truly a twentieth century’s stunning and haunting work of literary