A FEMINIST READING OF UNCLE TOM’S CABIN

Published in 1852, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly, introduces the world to the tribulations of the enslaved African Americans. While as a woman writer, Harriet Beecher Stowe also pays close attention to female power and consciousness apart from the abolitionism in her work. Through the analysis of women’s domesticity and women’s strength in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, this paper attempts to fathom into Stowe’s feminist ideas manifested in this book, therefore colors the understanding of this literary canon.

North America

This chapter assesses the main strands of Edwards’s reception in North America from the eighteenth century through the early twentieth century. Most Americans did not know much, if anything, about Edwards until decades after his death, when various—often conflicting—views of Edwards appeared. New Divinity ministers expanded his theological vison while revivalists, including Charles G. Finney, enlisted Edwards’s legacy for their purposes, and thousands of evangelicals embraced Edwards’s Life of David Brainerd. Edwards intrigued (and offended) writers like Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe, and his condemnation of sin caught the interest of antislavery advocates in the Civil War. His legacy helped to shape the rise of American literature as a discipline, leading to the widespread academic study of Edwards that exploded in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with over 5000 books, dissertations, articles, and theses published on Edwards.

EMANCIPATION IN THE AMERICAN ARTISTIC CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE XIX CENTURY

This article is devoted to the research of discourse of emancipation in American artistic consciousness on examples of abolitionist novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe and painting images of XIX century. The topicality of the research is due to insufficient study in Ukrainian philosophy of the ideas of abolitionism and the emancipation of black Americans through the prism of literary images, especially painting images. Among the research tasks are: to analyze topics of slavery and emancipation, ways of representation of racist and abolitionist ideology in the novel’s plot and artistic images; to analyze types of images of “blacks” in literature and painting. Novelty of work is in the reconstruction of emancipation discourse, which confronts with discourse of racism and black Americans’ discrimination in the American literature (on the example of Beecher Stowe’s novel) and in painting images of XIX century. The novel of Harriet Beecher Stowe became a bestseller in Europe and America, the symbol of revolution, it stirred up people’s consciousness in many countries which used different forms of dependency and obligation during XIX – XX century, and later it entered the list of classics of children’s literature. Using the novel as an example, the author shows that the two opposite discourses – colonial (slavery) and anti-colonial (emancipation) are the basis of the controversy of the protagonists, which reflects the social and political controversy over the position and status of black Americans. Ideas of women’s emancipation from gender, social and labor oppression are reflected in the images of black slave women, and in the XX century they became the ideological basis of “black feminism”. Using examples of the novel and painting, the author examines racial and gender stereotypes, the problem of the relationship between “white” and “black”, the problem of preserving the family and women’s resistance to male domination in conditions of slavery, the problem of the formation of national identity in America after the abolition of slavery. The author analyzes the plots in European and American painting, which reflect not only “colonial” images where black Americans are represented as racial and cultural Others, but also “emancipation” images, which symbolically state the resistance to slavery or confirm the subject’s freedom. It is researched in the article that the active development of the emancipation topic in the artistic consciousness shows the change of social status of racial Others in the public consciousness of the XIX century, which was the result of abolitionist and women’s movements for minority rights in America.

Literary Transmigration George Eliot, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the Spirit of Transatlantic Exchange

Reading several letters from the eleven-year correspondence alongside Dred and Daniel Deronda, this paper argues that the model of transatlantic spiritual communication presented by Stowe and Eliot’s epistolary friendship takes on a new and potentially radical light when applied to the concept of a transnational and post racial spiritual community. Each text fundamentally challenges the ability of the realist novel to depict a nuanced understanding of racial identity through the use of spiritualist and religious discourse and imagery.