Conclusion: the conservation of identities
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
Summary
I have been told by some cautious friends, that the time for such remonstrances as I do most earnestly recommend to our Scottish representatives, would be now … unfavourable…. Your birthright, proceed these Job's comforters, will be taken from you at all events by superior numbers. Yield it up, therefore, with a good grace, and thank God if they give you a mess of pottage in return – it will be just so much gain.
– Walter Scott, Letters of Malachi MalagrowtherI am an ordinarily successful white man who has made a little money …. [W]hen I sometimes open a little box in which I still keep my fast yellowing manuscripts, the only tangible remnants of a vanished dream, a dead ambition, a sacrificed talent, I cannot repress the thought that, after all, I have chosen the lesser part, that I have sold my birthright for a mess of pottage.
– James Weldon Johnson, Autobiography of an Ex-Colored ManIn the passages quoted above, Walter Scott and James Weldon Johnson each reference the same biblical story of Esau selling his birthright to his brother, Jacob, for a “mess of pottage” (Genesis 25:31). Scott's speaker resists the “cautious friends” who urge him to become an Esau, and Johnson's worries that – passing as a “white man” – he has already done so.
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- The Poetics of National and Racial Identity in Nineteenth-Century American Literature , pp. 200 - 235Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003