Burnt Bacon and the Invisibility of Privilege

Having read this poem before I’ve already looked pretty in depth into the historical context of the poem and so for this post I thought it would be more interesting to focus on another aspect of the poem for analysis. What I found most interesting this read through is words the white maid, the main character in this 3rd person close perspective, uses to disarm the violent nature of her husband’s acts. Even from the first line of the poem she is described as understanding the situation as a ballad. The fact that a poem about her thoughts of the situation couldn’t fit into the form of a ballad gives us an ironic look into how her understanding of the world is limited. The disarming language only continues when she describes her husband as the Fine Prince and Emmett Till as the Dark Villain. This functions to illustrate the privilege a dominate culture is allotted to define both history and the other. It is only because of their cultural position that the white family can continue to live life unhindered by the tragedy they caused. But the white maid as a women is still removed from the ultimate position of privilege. This is why later in the narrative we can see cracks in her understanding start to develop. When she sees her child hit by her husband the story begins to rupture and she can see how that violence may come back to affect her. 

That said, I think this interpretation is limited by my less than extensive knowledge of ballads and am interested in how an interpretation focusing on the references to ballads might differ from this one. I also think my interpretation could benefit from an exploration of the similarities between the two mothers as the hiding of burnt bacon suggests that even before he hit her child that she felt uncomfortable with the power dynamic between her husband and her.