DOCSLIB.ORG

Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Paradigms of Southern Authorship in the Anti-Tom Tradition, 1852-1902

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Paradigms of Southern Authorship in the Anti-Tom Tradition, 1852-1902 University of Warwick institutional repository: http://go.warwick.ac.uk/wrap A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of PhD at the University of Warwick http://go.warwick.ac.uk/wrap/73507 This thesis is made available online and is protected by original copyright. Please scroll down to view the document itself. Please refer to the repository record for this item for information to help you to cite it. Our policy information is available from the repository home page. 'Written with a Mrs Stowe's Feeling': Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Paradigms of Southern Authorship in the Anti-Tom Tradition, 1852-1902 by Saranne Esther Elizabeth Weller A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English and Comparative Literary Studies University of Warwick Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies September 2001 CONTENTS Acknowledgements iii Declaration iv Abstract v Introduction 'To you, generous, noble-minded men and women, of the South [ ] to you is her appeal': Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Southern Reader 1 Chapter 1 'The full force of its exciting power': Textual Inspiration and Authorisation in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin 14 Chapter 2 'Something entirely new in literature': The Hesitant Rebellion of the Female Southern Author in Caroline Lee Hentz's The Planter's Northern Bride 67 Chapter 3 "'Don't you uncle me"': The Male Aesthetics of Sympathy in William Gilmore Simms's Woodcraft 121 Chapter 4 'Uncle Tom is pure fiction': Realism and Romance in James Lane Allen's 'Mrs Stowe's "Uncle Tom" at Home in Kentucky' and 'Two Gentlemen of Kentucky' ..... ......................................................................................................................................... 172 Chapter 5 The 'White Man's Burden' of the 'Romance': Reconstructing the Southern Male Author in Thomas Dixon's The Leopard's Spots 210 Bibliography 261 iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I should like to thank my supervisor Dr Helen Dennis for her sustained enthusiasm for this project over a number of years. Her unfailing intellectual and emotional support has been vital and her recommendations on successive drafts were essential for the completion of this research. Thanks also goes to Professor Helen Taylor for her invaluable guidance in the earlier stages of conception and initial development of the thesis. I am indebted to my brother, Dr Shane Weller for his careful reading of parts of the final draft. I also wish to thank those who gave me the opportunity to study and teach in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick by granting me funding as a Graduate Teaching Assistant. Finally, thank you to my ever-patient family. iv DECLARATION I declare that the following thesis is entirely my own work and confirm that no part of this work has been submitted for a degree at another university. An earlier version of chapter 1 appeared as 'Uncle Tom's Cabin: Genesis of a Tradition' in Overhere, 18 (1999). v ABSTRACT The purpose of this thesis is to analyse the representation of authorship, readership and intertextuality in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and the southern anti- Tom tradition from 1852 to 1902. The principal claim of the thesis is that Stowe's novel provides nineteenth-century southern readers with a series of aesthetic paradigms that enable these readers to construct and reconstruct the role of artist in the South as this intersects with the construction of gender identity in nineteenth-century America. In Chapter 1, Uncle Tom's Cabin is interpreted through Julia Kristeva's theory of intertextuality, whereby 'the one who writes is the same as the one who reads', to argue that Stowe's text promotes acts of active rather than passive readership. The reading of Caroline Lee Hentz's The Planter's Northern Bride in Chapter 2 interrogates the ways in which the female writer locates herself within a female literary tradition by subverting the Bloomian model of literary paternity to create the gothic mother author. Chapter 3 demonstrates how William Gilmore Simms appropriates Stowe's aesthetics of sympathy r- in the 'sensible man'. B~hes's recapitulation of the writer and reader as 'producer' and 'consumer' is mapped onto Simms's aesthetic terminology of 'utility' and 'extravagance' to reconcile Stowe's antithesis of marketplace and sentiment within the southern home. In Chapter 4, James Lane Allen's paired stories 'Mrs Stowe's "Uncle Tom" at Home in Kentucky' and 'Two Gentlemen of Kentucky' are read in the context of the literary debates between realism and romance in the late nineteenth-century. In doing so, Allen attempts to reconfigure these gendered aesthetic paradigms and so legitimise southern cultural elegy as a southern form but effectively begins the process of dismantling Stowe's aesthetics of sympathy. Chapter 5 discusses the ways in which Thomas Dixon's The Leopard's Spots dramatises the failure of Stowe's aesthetics of sympathy in the context of the southern rape complex. INTRODUCTION 'TO YOU, GENEROUS, NOBLE-MINDED MEN AND WOMEN, OF THE SOUTH [nolTO YOU IS HER APPEAL': HARRIET BEECHER STOWE AND THE SOUTHERN READER When Uncle Tom's Cabin appeared in print in the early months of 1852 it was, J. C. 01 Furnas later declares, a 'verbal earthquake, an ink-and-paper tidal wave'. Furnas's metaphor suggests that the impact of the novel was like a force of nature - greater than the individual, equally uncontrollable and inexorable in its power - and the myths that surround the conception and the reception of the novel do nothing to diminish the apocalyptic might that Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel seemed to presage. Questioned about her inspiration for the novel, Stowe avowed that 'God wrote it' and, when nforkA Abraham Lincoln met Stowe during the Civil War, his apocryphal address - 'So this is the little lady who made this big war' - honoured Stowe with an almost divine omnipotence. Yet, in its depiction of the abuses of the economic and social system of slavery in the antebellum South, Uncle Tom's Cabin was premised upon both the authority of individual experience and the power of every American man and woman to effect change. In the preface to the novel, Stowe volunteered her 'personal knowledge' and appealed to the 'witnesses' who could verify her facts.' Indeed, Stowe's rendering of a personal narrative addressed to the individual reader was integral to the ways the novel was received by its readers. As Robyn R. Warhol has noted, the repeated I 1. C. Furnas, Goodbye to Uncle Tom (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1956), p. 7; Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin [1850], ed. Jean Fagan Yellin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 4. Subsequent references to this edition will be cited parenthetically in the text. 2 interjection by a narrative voice directed to the reader was not an unusual strategy in mid-nineteenth-century fiction. To do so presupposed that the reader would identify with the narrator, that they had a shared value system and codes of discourse, that the reader would trust the narrative and was finally eminently persuadable to a cause they were already, inherently, predisposed to believe in.2 What makes Stowe's narratorial interventions so intriguing, however, is the question of to whom Uncle Tom's Cabin was actually addressed. The answer is initially simple - it was a novel addressed to women and, more specifically, the mothers of the North - and this was certainly not a new strategy for female antislavery and abolitionist campaigners. Lydia Maria Child, in her preface to An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans (1833), presented herself to her readers in comparable ways. She anticipated that her readers might query 'what a woman who had much better attend to her household concerns will say upon the subject' of slavery, but, whilst acknowledging her departure from acceptable female topics, she clearly expected her readers to be, like her, women with homes and families themselves - r:Reader,I beseech you not to throw down this volume as soon as you have glanced at the title. Read it [... ] for an hour's amusement to yourself, or benefit to your children'.' Within the context of acceptable female reading habits ('amusement') and a mother's educative responsibility for her children, Child attempts to locate her radical text at the centre of conventional female experiences and duties. Likewise, Angelina Grimke's Appeal to the Christian Women of the South (1836) and Appeal to the Women of the Nominally Free States (1837) and 2 Robyn R. Warhol, 'Towards a Theory of the Engaging Narrator: Earnest Interventions in Gaskell, Stowe, and Eliot', PMLA, 101 (1986), 811-18 (pp. 811, 814). 3 Lydia Maria Child, An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans [1833], ed. Carolyn L. Karcher (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), p. 4. 3 Catherine Beecher's answering An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism Addressed to Miss A. E. Grimke (1837) articulated the opposing arguments concerning women's suitable role in the slavery and abolitionist debates. If Uncle Tom's Cabin was addressed to northern mothers, her female readers were encouraged to identify with the sympathetic white women in her novel as they attempt to understand and ameliorate the suffering of the distressed slave through the shared experience of maternity. Northern female readers would find their representatives in women like Mrs Shelby - a Kentucky slave-owner but nominally a sympathetic mother - and Mrs Bird, Rachel Halliday or Miss Ophelia. Like Child, however, Stowe needed to consider the extent to which women could intercede in the political and economic issue of slavery. In addressing the mothers of the North, Stowe amended the unwomanly activities that her text might imply by encoding a reader response into her text that was appropriate to female behaviour.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Captivity and Identity in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko Or, the Royal Slave
    وزارة التعليم العالي والبحث العلمي MINISTERE DE L’ENSEIGNEMENT SUPERIEUR ET DE LA RECHERCHE SCIENTIFIQUE جامعة مولود معمري - تيزي وزو UNIVERSITE MOULOUD MAMMERI DE TIZI-OUZOU كلية اﻵداب واللغات FACULTE DES LETTRES ET DES LANGUES DEPARTEMENT D’ANGLAIS Domaine : Lettres et Langues Etrangères. Filière : Langue Anglaise. Spécialité: Media and Cultural Studies. Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master in English Captivity and Identity in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko or, The Royal Slave (1688) and Penelope Aubin’s The Noble Slaves (1722). Presented by: Supervised by:Mrs.Kahina LEGOUI Djamila BOUAZIZ Karima RAIAH Board of Examiners: Mrs. Tabti Kahina, M. A. A, Department of English, Chair. Mrs. Abdelli Fatima, M. A. A, Department of English, Examiner. Mrs. Legoui Kahina, M.A.A, Department of English, Supervisor Promotion: December 2016 N° d’Ordre : …………… N° de série : …………… Laboratoire de domiciliation du master: Etudes des Langues et Cultures Etrangères. To: my dear parents Ali and Baya my dear brother Salim my dear sister Houria my best friends Djamila To: my dear parents Said and Djouher my dear brothers especially Mouloud my dear sisters my best friends Karima I Acknowledgements We would like to thank our supervisor Mrs. LEGOUI for her precious help and assistance in the realization of this dissertation. We would like also to thank our teachers for their guidance and advice all along the academic year and for all the teachings they provided us with. Special thanks must go to our parents and our friends who have provided us with moral support and encouragement. II Content Acknowledgements ………………………………………………………………….………I Abstract………………………………………………………………………………………IV I.
    [Show full text]
  • Music and the American Civil War
    “LIBERTY’S GREAT AUXILIARY”: MUSIC AND THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR by CHRISTIAN MCWHIRTER A DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of History in the Graduate School of The University of Alabama TUSCALOOSA, ALABAMA 2009 Copyright Christian McWhirter 2009 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ABSTRACT Music was almost omnipresent during the American Civil War. Soldiers, civilians, and slaves listened to and performed popular songs almost constantly. The heightened political and emotional climate of the war created a need for Americans to express themselves in a variety of ways, and music was one of the best. It did not require a high level of literacy and it could be performed in groups to ensure that the ideas embedded in each song immediately reached a large audience. Previous studies of Civil War music have focused on the music itself. Historians and musicologists have examined the types of songs published during the war and considered how they reflected the popular mood of northerners and southerners. This study utilizes the letters, diaries, memoirs, and newspapers of the 1860s to delve deeper and determine what roles music played in Civil War America. This study begins by examining the explosion of professional and amateur music that accompanied the onset of the Civil War. Of the songs produced by this explosion, the most popular and resonant were those that addressed the political causes of the war and were adopted as the rallying cries of northerners and southerners. All classes of Americans used songs in a variety of ways, and this study specifically examines the role of music on the home-front, in the armies, and among African Americans.
    [Show full text]
  • Civilization and Sexual Abuse: Selected Indian Captivity Narratives and the Native American Boarding-School Experience
    ................................................................................................................. CROSSROADS. A Journal of English Studies 27 (2019) EWA SKAŁ1 DOI: 10.15290/CR.2019.27.4.05 University of Opole ORCID: 0000-0001-7550-3292 Civilization and sexual abuse: selected Indian captivity narratives and the Native American boarding-school experience Abstract. This paper offers a contrastive analysis of Indian captivity narratives and the Native American boarding-school experience. Indian captivity narratives describe the ordeals of white women and men, kidnapped by Indians, who were separated from their families and subsequently lived months or even years with Indian tribes. The Native American boarding-school experience, which began in the late nineteenth century, took thousands of Indian children from their parents for the purpose of “assimi- lation to civilization” to be facilitated through governmental schools, thereby creating a captivity of a different sort. Through an examination of these two different types of narratives, this paper reveals the themes of ethnocentrism and sexual abuse, drawing a contrast that erodes the Euro-American discourse of civilization that informs captivity narratives and the boarding-school, assimilationist experiment. Keywords: Native Americans, captivity narratives, boarding schools, sexual abuse, assimilation. 1. Introduction Comparing Indian captivity narratives and writings on the Native American board- ing- school experience is as harrowing as it is instructive. Indian captivity narratives, mostly dating from 1528 to 1836, detail the ordeals of white, Euro-American women and men kidnapped by Native peoples. Separated from their families and white “civili- zation,” they subsequently lived for a time among Indian tribes. Such narratives can be seen as a prelude to a sharp reversal that occurred in the late nineteenth century under U.S.
    [Show full text]
  • Introduction
    Introduction R. J. Ellis One of the most influential books ever written, Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly was also one of the most popular in the nineteenth century. Stowe wrote her novel in order to advance the anti-slavery cause in the ante-bellum USA, and rooted her attempt to do this in a ‘moral suasionist’ approach — one designed to persuade her US American compatriots by appealing to their God-given sense of morality. This led to some criticism from immediate abolitionists — who wished to see slavery abolished immediately rather than rely upon [per]suasion. Uncle Tom's Cabin was first published in 1852 as a serial in the abolitionist newspaper National Era . It was then printed in two volumes in Boston by John P. Jewett and Company later in 1852 (with illustrations by Hammatt Billings). The first printing of five thousand copies was exhausted in a few days. Title page, with illustration by Hammatt Billings, Uncle Tom’s Cabin Vol. 1, Boston, John P. Jewett and Co., 1852 During 1852 several reissues were printed from the plates of the first edition; each reprinting also appearing in two volumes, with the addition of the words ‘Tenth’ to ‘One Hundred and Twentieth Thousand’ on the title page, to distinguish between each successive re-issue. Later reprintings of the two-volume original carried even higher numbers. These reprints appeared in various bindings — some editions being quite lavishly bound. One-volume versions also appeared that same year — most of these being pirated editions. From the start the book attracted enormous attention.
    [Show full text]
  • Lyrical Liberators Contents
    LYRICAL LIBERATORS CONTENTS List of Illustrations xiii Acknowledgments xv Introduction 1 1. Calls for Action 18 2. The Murder of Elijah P. Lovejoy 41 3. Fugitive Slaves 47 4. The Assault on Senator Charles Sumner 108 5. John Brown and the Raid on Harpers Ferry 116 6. Slaves and Death 136 7. Slave Mothers 156 8. The South 170 9. Equality 213 10. Freedom 226 11. Atonement 252 12. Wartime 289 13. Emancipation, the Proclamation, and the Thirteenth Amendment 325 Notes 345 Works Cited 353 General Index 359 Index of Poem Titles 367 Index of Poets 371 xi INTRODUCTION he problematic issue of slavery would appear not to lend itself to po- etry, yet in truth nothing would have seemed more natural to nineteenth- T century Americans. Poetry meant many different things at the time—it was at once art form, popular entertainment, instructional medium, and forum for sociopolitical commentary. The poems that appeared in periodicals of the era are therefore integral to our understanding of how the populace felt about any issue of consequence. Writers seized on this uniquely persuasive genre to win readers over to their cause, and perhaps most memorable among them are the abolitionists. Antislavery activists turned to poetry so as to connect both emotionally and rationally with a wide audience on a regular basis. By speaking out on behalf of those who could not speak for themselves, their poems were one of the most effective means of bearing witness to, and thus also protesting, a reprehensible institution. These pleas for justice proved ef- fective by insisting on the right of freedom of speech at a time when it ap- peared to be in jeopardy.
    [Show full text]
  • Poets of the South
    Poets of the South F.V.N. Painter Poets of the South Table of Contents Poets of the South......................................................................................................................................................1 F.V.N. Painter................................................................................................................................................1 PREFACE......................................................................................................................................................2 CHAPTER I. MINOR POETS OF THE SOUTH.........................................................................................2 CHAPTER II. EDGAR ALLAN POE.........................................................................................................12 CHAPTER III. PAUL HAMILTON HAYNE.............................................................................................18 CHAPTER IV. HENRY TIMROD..............................................................................................................25 CHAPTER V. SIDNEY LANIER...............................................................................................................31 CHAPTER VI. ABRAM J. RYAN..............................................................................................................38 ILLUSTRATIVE SELECTIONS WITH NOTES.......................................................................................45 SELECTION FROM FRANCIS SCOTT KEY...........................................................................................45
    [Show full text]
  • “The Law of the Descent of Thought”
    LAL2003_03 Page 343 Monday, October 20, 2008 3:54 PM “The Law of the Descent of Thought” LAW, HISTORY, AND CIVILIZATION IN ANTEBELLUM LITERARY ADDRESSES Alfred L. Brophy* Abstract. In the antebellum era, literary addresses were a common form of public expression. Although legal historians have mined Fourth of July orations for their insight into legal thought, they have made virtually no use of literary addresses. This essay closely analyzes nearly forty addresses given at the University of Alabama from through . It uses the addresses to cre- ate a picture of the world view of the orators and gauge the changes in thought in the antebellum South on political theory and jurisprudence. The addresses allow us to assess the orators’ intellect, interests, knowledge, and belief systems. The addresses illustrate a wide-ranging respect for ideas, including the abolition of capital punish- ment; the scholar’s search for truth against the tide of public opinion; republicanism, democracy, and radicalism in American politics; and the importance of slavery to Southern culture. They also illustrate the changes from Enlightenment ideas of moral and technological progress to the prosla- very vision of the late antebellum period. A final section turns to judicial opinions in Alabama to make a preliminary sketch of the ways that some of the ideas expressed in the addresses correlate with the moral philosophical views of judges on issues such as utility. Keywords: literary addresses, antebellum colleges, proslavery thought, romanticism, enlighten- ment, University of Alabama, moral philosophy, slavery, antebellum jurisprudence In the years before the Civil War, colleges throughout the country gathered their students and faculties together to listen to orations sponsored by literary societies.1 The students heard wide-ranging orations.
    [Show full text]
  • Literacy and the Humanizing Project in Olaudah Equiano's The
    eSharp Issue 10: Orality and Literacy Literacy and the Humanizing Project in Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative and Ottobah Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments Jeffrey Gunn (University of Glasgow) [A]ny history of slavery must be written in large part from the standpoint of the slave. (Richard Hofstadter, cited in Nichols 1971, p.403) The above statement suggests two sequential conclusions. The first implication is that the slave is in an authoritative position to present an authentic or alternative history of slavery beyond the ‘imperial gaze’ of Europeans (Murphy 1994, p.553). The second implication suggests that the act of writing empowers the slave. Literacy is the vehicle that enables the slave to determine his own self-image and administer control over the events he chooses to relate while writing himself into history. Throughout my paper I will argue that the act of writing becomes a humanizing process, as Olaudah Equiano and Ottobah Cugoano present a human image of the African slave, which illuminates the inherent contradictions of the slave trade.1 The slave narratives emerging in the late eighteenth century arose from an intersection of oral and literary cultural expressions and are evidence of the active role played by former black slaves in the drive towards the abolition of the African slave trade in the British Empire. Two of the most important slave narratives to surface are Olaudah Equiano’s The interesting narrative of the life of Olaudah 1 I will use the term ‘African’ to describe all black slaves in the African slave trade regardless of their geographical location.
    [Show full text]
  • Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography
    THE PENNSYLVANIA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY VOLUME CXXXIV July 2010 NO. 3 THE POLITICS OF THE PAGE:BLACK DISFRANCHISEMENT AND THE IMAGE OF THE SAVAGE SLAVE Sarah N. Roth 209 PHILADELPHIA’S LADIES’LIBERIA SCHOOL ASSOCIATION AND THE RISE AND DECLINE OF NORTHERN FEMALE COLONIZATION SUPPORT Karen Fisher Younger 235 “WITH EVERY ACCOMPANIMENT OF RAVAGE AND AGONY”: PITTSBURGH AND THE INFLUENZA EPIDEMIC OF 1918–1919 James Higgins 263 BOOK REVIEWS 287 BOOK REVIEWS FUR, A Nation of Women: Gender and Colonial Encounters among the Delaware Indians, by Jean R. Soderlund 287 MACMASTER, Scotch-Irish Merchants in Colonial America, by Diane Wenger 288 SPLITTER and WENGERT, eds., The Correspondence of Heinrich Melchior Mühlenberg, vol. 3, 1753–1756, by Marianne S. Wokeck 289 BUCKLEY, ed., The Journal of Elias Hicks, by Emma J. Lapsansky-Werner 291 WOOD, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815, by Peter S. Onuf 292 HALL, A Faithful Account of the Race: African American Historical Writing in Nineteenth-Century America, by Karen N. Salt 293 FLANNERY, The Glass House Boys of Pittsburgh: Law, Technology, and Child Labor, by Richard Oestreicher 295 UEKOETTER, The Age of Smoke: Environmental Policy in Germany and the United States, 1880–1970, by Aaron Cowan 296 TOGYER, For the Love of Murphy’s: The Behind-the-Counter Story of a Great American Retailer, by John H. Hepp IV 298 MADONNA, Pivotal Pennsylvania: Presidential Politics from FDR to the Twenty-First Century, by James W. Hilty 299 COVER ILLUSTRATION: View of Monrovia from a membership certificate for the Pennsylvania Colonization Society, engraved by P.
    [Show full text]
  • UA35/11 Student Honors Research Bulletin WKU Honors Program
    Western Kentucky University TopSCHOLAR® WKU Archives Records WKU Archives 1987 UA35/11 Student Honors Research Bulletin WKU Honors Program Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.wku.edu/dlsc_ua_records Part of the American Literature Commons, Architecture Commons, Art and Design Commons, Business Law, Public Responsibility, and Ethics Commons, Climate Commons, English Language and Literature Commons, European History Commons, Fine Arts Commons, Gifted Education Commons, Higher Education Commons, and the Personality and Social Contexts Commons Recommended Citation WKU Honors Program, "UA35/11 Student Honors Research Bulletin" (1987). WKU Archives Records. Paper 3204. http://digitalcommons.wku.edu/dlsc_ua_records/3204 This Book is brought to you for free and open access by TopSCHOLAR®. It has been accepted for inclusion in WKU Archives Records by an authorized administrator of TopSCHOLAR®. For more information, please contact [email protected]. ! .... I ' \ • i• 4 ............... ~ ___ • ___~ _ ... __....... .. ,.... ' • I t I WESTERN KENTUCKY UNIVERSITY STUDENT HONORS RESEARCH BULLETIN t 1986-87 , f • I I I j, , ,• WESTERN KENTUCKY UN IVEHSITY ST UDENT IiONORS HES EARCIi BU LLF:TlN 1986·87 The Western Ke ntucky Uni versity Student H III/flr.~ 1?1',~ f'(II'('h 8 uflel ill is dedicated to scholar ly involvement and student research. The ~;e papers arc representati ve of work done by students from throughout the university. - PREFACE As the Student Honors Bulletin continues its task of giving Western students an opportunity to publish their scholarly research and writing. it involves more and more sc hool s and departments. The 1986-87 edition bri ngs attention to work done in all four of Western's colleges and papers from eight departments.
    [Show full text]
  • Racism's Occlusion from the Anti-Tom Novel to Charlottesville
    “A Single White Line Running Through a Web of Blackness”: Racism’s Occlusion from the Anti-Tom Novel to Charlottesville by © David Mitterauer submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts at the English Department Memorial University of Newfoundland August 2019 St. John’s Newfoundland and Labrador Snowflake in the diving glow Contemplating the waves over the ground A grimace of fear and awe Spreading in the crowd around Amazing, unearthly The figure’s face on the temple is me –“Veridical Paradox,” Delusion Squared i Abstract This MA thesis discusses how romance as a literary form makes the Anti-Tom novel a malleable rhetorical vehicle to carry white supremacist ideology. Drawing on an interdisciplinary framework of postcolonial theory and race studies, the thesis analyzes antebellum Anti-Tom novels (Sarah J. Hale’s Liberia [1853]; Caroline Lee Hentz’s The Planter’s Northern Bride [1854]; and Charles Jacobs Peterson’s The Cabin and Parlor [1852]) and expands the genre’s definition to include Thomas Dixon’s The Leopard’s Spots (1902) and contemporary white-supremacist science fictions (William Luther Pierce’s The Turner Diaries [1978]; Ellen Williams’ Bedford: A World Vision [2000]; and Ward Kendall’s Hold Back This Day [2001]). The primary concerns of this thesis are to understand how the American slaveholding past signifies in the present political moment, to understand why the removal of the General Robert E. Lee statue catalyzed the violent riots in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, and to understand the affective preconditions Donald J.
    [Show full text]
  • African American Childhood and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1850S-1900)
    BREWINGTON, PAULETTE YVONNE, Ph.D. Wild, Willful, and Wicked: African American Childhood and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1850s-1900). (2013) Directed by Dr. Karen A. Weyler. 249 pp. This dissertation examines nineteenth-century depictions of African American children in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Frank J. Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends (1857), and Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig (1859). It explores Stowe’s characters as wild, willful, and unruly minstrel-inspired comic figures further exaggerated with nineteenth-century stereotypes such as: shiftlessness, ignorance heathenism, and demonism. Both novels of Webb and Wilson serve as respondents to Stowe’s creations. Frank J. Webb presents industrious, educated children whose pranks are born out of self-possession. Wilson, on the other hand, illustrates that for the African American child in servitude in the free North, hardship and violence can rival that of the slave-holding South. WILD, WILLFUL, AND WICKED: AFRICAN AMERICAN CHILDHOOD AND THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERARY IMAGINATION (1850S-1900) by Paulette Yvonne Brewington A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Greensboro 2013 Approved by ____________________________ Committee Chair © 2013 Paulette Yvonne Brewington APPROVAL PAGE This dissertation has been approved by the following committee of the Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Committee Chair ______________________________________ Committee Members ______________________________________ ______________________________________ ______________________________________ ___________________________ Date of Acceptance by Committee _________________________ Date of Final Oral Examination ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page LIST OF FIGURES ............................................................................................................v CHAPTER I.
    [Show full text]