A-Brief-Analysis-of-Female-Power-in-Uncle-Tom’s-Cabin--浅析《汤姆叔叔的小屋》所蕴含的女性力量.doc

本科生毕业论文

浅析《汤姆叔叔的小屋》所蕴含的女性力量

院 系 　　　外国语学院
专 业 　英语（教育方向） 　　
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2015年 5月

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A Brief Analysis of Female Power in Uncle Tom’s Cabin

A Thesis Submitted
to School of Foreign Languages, Xuchang University
in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts

By

Supervisor：Liu Yu

May 3, 2015

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank all those who have given me their generous help, commitment and enthusiasm, which have been the major driving force to complete the current paper. Firstly, my deepest gratitude goes to Liu Yu, my supervisor, for her constant encouragement and guidance. Secondly, my thanks go to my beloved teachers who have taught me professional knowledge these four years. Lastly, I also owe my sincere gratitude to my friends and my fellow classmates who have helped me work out my problems during the difficult course of the thesis.

摘要
《汤姆叔叔的小屋》是十九世纪美国作家哈利特·比彻·斯托的一部小说，历来被认为是废奴文学的经典之作。它描述了黑奴的苦难生活和他们为争取自由而不懈奋斗的历程，愤怒地揭发和控诉了奴隶制的罪恶。《汤姆叔叔的小屋》不但是一部反奴小说，也是一部女性小说，书中十分关注女性人物对奴隶制的态度。本文以美国奴隶制为着眼点，从道德的角度对《汤姆叔叔的小屋》中女性作为母亲，妻子以及社会成员在反对奴隶制的问题上所表现的积极力量进行阐述，试图为更好地理解斯托夫人，更准确地解读其小说提供一个新视角。
关键词：《汤姆叔叔的小屋》；反对奴隶制；女性力量

Abstract
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, written in the 19th century by the American writer, Harriet Beecher Stowe, is thought to be the most influential anti-slavery novel in that period. It focuses on the black slaves’ poor life and their struggle for the freedom, and makes a powerful attack upon the slavery. It is not only an anti-slavery novel but also a female one, for it has paid close attention to the females’ attitude toward the slavery. This paper, based on American slavery, from the moral angle, aims to explore the active power of female figures when they are viewed as mothers, wives, and social members in Uncle Tom’s Cabin on the problem of anti-slavery. Moreover, this paper tries to supply a new visual angle for comprehending the author’s idea and interpreting her novel.
Key words: Uncle Tom’s Cabin; anti-slavery; female power

Table of Contents
Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………………..Ⅰ
摘要.……………………………………………………………………………………………..Ⅱ
Abstract………………………………………………………………………………………….Ⅲ Table of Contents ……………………………………………………………………………… Ⅳ
Introduction. ………………………………………………………………………………………1
Chapter One Power of Female as a Mother in Anti-slavery………………………………………3
1.1 Maternal Love of Eliza Urging Her to Resist………………………………………………3
1.2 Augustine’s Mother Affecting Him with Love …………………………………………….4
Chapter Two Power of Female as a Wife in Anti-slavery…………………………………………6
2.1 Mrs. Shelby’s Charity to Her Slaves………………………………………………………. 6
2.2 Mrs. Bird’s Attitude toward Fugitive Slave Law …………………………………………. 7
Chapter Three Power of Female as a Member of the Society in Anti-slavery……………………9
3.1 Eva’s Cosmic Love ………………………………………………………………………...9 3.2 Grandma Stephens’ Influence on Tom Loker………………………………......................11
Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………….12
Works Cited.……………………………………………………………………………………..13

V

Introduction

Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, the anti-slavery forces debated not only the status of the black in the United States but also their physical and psychological nature. When Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published in the abolitionist journal National Era in June 1851, the crisis over slavery in the United States reached a high pitch, and this novel immediately became a major weapon for people against slavery. “Appearing in two-volume book form in March 1852, Uncle Tom’s Cabin set off an astounding public response which was unique in the history of American publishing. Its first edition of 5,000 was gone in four days, and in one year, it sold more than 300,000 copies” (Yang, 1999:174). Uncle Tom’s Cabin makes a powerful attack on the evils of the slavery and presents an earthly struggle for the black emancipation in the United States. Therefore, its vital role in the abolitionist cause is beyond question. Even the Civil War novelist John De Forest, inaugurating the search for “The Great American Novel” in an 1868 essay in The Nation, thought Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the best candidate. However, even though Uncle Tom’s Cabin helped instigate the Civil War, it then ceased to have value once its purpose had been accomplished. The book’s phenomenal popularity is in its own day and in the century following the Civil War it has served to cast suspicion. The most controversial aspect is that many blacks feel their images are smeared in Uncle Tom’s Cabin for it has touched the sensitive zone of black inferiority, which is frequently depicted by Stowe through her racial stereotypes (Liu, 89). Uncle Tom, who is completely black, is too passive, simple and submissive, and becomes a symbol of the lackey (Lin, 69). Moreover, many free blacks, who have opted to stay in the country and fight, have a complaint against the novel’s end. “One writer in an Afro-American newspaper vehemently protested, ‘Uncle Tom must be killed, George Harris exiled! Heaven for dead Negroes! Liberia for living mulattoes. Neither can live on the American continent. Death or banishment is our doom, say the Slaveocrats, the Colonizationists and, save the mark—Mrs. Stowe’”(Sundquist, 69).
Harriet Beecher Stowe, with her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, had aroused the attention of Americans to slavery and thereby influenced the course of American history (Yang, 2006:59). Since her novel helped and convinced the nation to go to war and to free its slaves, Abraham Lincoln was said to have exclaimed in 1862 after the Civil War, “So this is the little lady who started our big war” (Zhou and Luo, 114). Undoubtedly Uncle Tom’s Cabin had affected the slavery abolishing. However, for slavery was abolished, it lost its popularity on anti-slavery gradually. According to Stowe’s broad depiction of the role of women in the novel, nowadays more and more critics pay attention to the ideology of femininity in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Regarding the social background where Stowe lived, they find it reasonable that she emphasizes women’s roles in the fight against chattel slavery in America. On the one hand, by 1851, when Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published, the debate over what American women could do to end slavery had ragged for more than a decade. On the other hand, it was also published with the advent of two crucial events. One was the meeting at Seneca Fall, which was the peak of feminist movement, where feminists had spelled out their demands for full participation in American life, and the other was the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law which forbade the Northern people to help the runaway slaves, and required them to cooperate in the capture of fugitives. Stowe works in her feminist beliefs that women are equal to men in intelligence, bravery, and spiritual strength. The ideology of femininity and domesticity in the 19th century is that men’s place is at the market, while women’s place is at the domestic center of home; Stowe accepts this standard definition of women confined to the domestic sphere, but she also displays a facility for converting essentially repressive concepts of femininity and domesticity into a positive system of values in which women are more influential than men and superior to them (Cao, 42). Stowe asserts that women should limit the expression of slavery to the domestic circle and argues that the crucial need for women is not to exert political power but to use their female force to promote a national spirit of candor, forbearance, charity and peace (Qiu, 61).
Through three aspects that the female is viewed as a mother, a wife and a member of the society, this paper elaborates on the point that females in Uncle Tom’s Cabin have shown active power in anti-slavery within domestic life.

Chapter One Power of Female as a Mother in Anti-slavery

Mother is a term that holds special charm for Stowe; Stowe’s mother is very polished and retiring and comes from a “better” family, reading widely and speaking French. Stowe recalls her mother as “one of those strong, restful, yet widely sympathetic natures in whom all around seems to find comfort and repose” (Yang, 1999:175). Stowe considers her readers as mothers and idealizes the experience of motherhood. A lot of mothers such as Eliza, Augustine’s mother and so on are warmly celebrated in Uncle Tom’s Cabin for their morality, integrity, dignity, courage, forbearance and above all the female power.
1.1 Maternal Love of Eliza Urging Her to Resist
To settle the financial problem, Mr. Shelby, Eliza’s master, decides to sell Tom and Eliza’s son. When learning her beloved son will be bought by a brutal trader, Eliza turns pale and gasps for breath, as if someone has struck her with a deadly blow. Finally, Eliza automatically obeys the voice of nature and attempts her rescue. Considering the kindness the mistress gives her, Eliza leaves a letter which pleads with her mistress to forgive her leaving and understand her. Nothing can prevent her from being with her only child.
People on the Shelby plantation are shocked by Eliza’s escape, for she is just a domestic, timid and little woman. What’s more, she is also a Christian woman and she once says to her husband: “I always thought that I must obey my master and mistress, or I couldn’t be a Christian” (Stowe, 17). However, actually, she escapes bravely just because of the maternal love.
The danger of the child blends into her mind; with a confused and stunning sense of the risk, Eliza is running away from the only home she has ever known. The immense strength of her love for her child is especially emphasized. In the course of escaping, every quaking leaf and fluttering shadow can send the blood backward to her heart and quicken her footsteps. What is stronger than all is maternal love; Eliza feels a sense of comfort with the weight of the boy in her arms and every flutter of fear seems to increase the supernatural power to escape. One thousand lives seem to be controlled in Eliza’s hands when the slave-catchers nearly come up with her before the freezing Ohio River. With the strength as if the God gave, Eliza flies a leap onto one floating ice to another. “The huge green fragment of ice on which she alighted pitched and creaked as her weight came on it, but she staid there not a moment”(Stowe, 62). Her stockings cut from her feet while blood marks every step, but she sees nothing and feels nothing. “It is a desperate leap-impossible to anything but madness and despair; and Haley, Sam and Andy, instinctively cried out and lifted up their hands, as she did it” (Stowe, 61).
As a nearly perfect woman according to the cult of womanhood, Eliza surprises the U.S.A. with her courage and strong will. She runs away with her child at night and takes the risk of crossing the Ohio River by jumping over the ice floes. It’s just the motherly devotion that gives her power to carry out her frenzied, desperate flight from slavery.
1.2 Augustine’s Mother Affecting Him with Love
Augustine St. Clare is a figure different from his slave-holding father, brother and society. From his willful and autocratic father, Augustine has inherited all the perquisites of noblesse, but from his mother, he has inherited a deeply sensitive nature, an abhorrence of slavery, and a sense of obligation. Augustine is tender, soft, sympathetic, dreamy and not at all interested in business. He neither brings himself to discipline the slaves nor to force them, for he thinks his slaves are simply outcasts in a society that has not taught them anything useful and that it’s not their fault if they sometimes don’t behave elegantly. As a result, he always remains charitable and sympathetic toward his slaves. In a sense, this kind of characteristic is what his mother makes of. All his mother’s exhortations affect him deeply. She attempts to influence her son’s actions in regard to slavery. When Augustine is a child, his mother once points up to the stars in the sky and instructs him: “See, there, Augustte! The poorest, meanest soul on our place will be living. When all these stars are gone forever,—will live as long as God lives” (Stowe, 232).
In Augustine’s opinion, his mother is an angel, whose morality purifies his mind. He once says to Miss Ophelia:
She probably was of mortal birth；as far as I could observe，there was no trace of any human weakness or error about her—She was a direct embodiment and personification of the new Testament, —a living fact, to be accounted for, and to be accounted for in no other way than by its truth.(Stowe, 229)
Augustine witnesses the scene that his mother is against slavery with every atom of her being. He dies with the word “mother” on his lips, realizing he fails to heed the example of his mother.
From Eliza and Augustine’s mother, who have a positive effect on their sons, Stowe reflects her deep emotion at maternal love. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, mothers provide children with love and also teach them to internalize the value of love.

Chapter Two Power of Female as a Wife in Anti-slavery

Stowe appeals American females to recognize their true roles as the guardians of American morals. During the process of assuming this role, she argues they can exert a wise and appropriate influence, and that it will most certainly tend to bring an end, not only to slavery but also to unnumbered other evils and wrongs.
2.1 Mrs. Shelby’s Charity toward Her Slaves
Mrs. Shelby, a Christian woman, tries to use charity and morality to get on with her slaves. Although a member of the slaveholding class, Mrs. Shelby is powerless to prevent the slave sales. Forbidden by her husband from using her “practical mind” to settle their financial affairs, Mrs. Shelby devotes much of her time to the efforts for the comfort, instruction and improvement of her slaves and is greatly admired by them.
A wife, as it sees on the Shelby plantation, may actually be able to do very little to oppose slavery, but she can at least resist mildly and in other words, she can at least protest, conspire and connive. These actions may not be mu