Thesis (M.S.)--Auburn University, 2007. / Abstract. Vita. Includes bibliographic references (ℓ. )

This paper looks at three significant instances of the representation of abolitionist martyrdom in nineteenth-century America to first sketch the abolitionist discourse and its varied conceptualizations of martyrdom and second question the rationale and success of this strategy for manumitting slaves. Accordingly, I start with Brown, who (with help from sympathetic northerners and the megaphone of the Associated Press) appealed to the martyrological tradition in order to transform his paramilitary failure at Harper’s Ferry into a powerful symbol of his own abolitionist righteousness over and against the state’s iniquity. Though the superficial differences between Brown and arch-sentimentalist Harriet Beecher Stowe have discouraged their comparison, a look at the logic of martyrdom reveals a similar strategy at work in both Brown’s martyrization and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which makes death an argument for the manumission of slaves. I argue that this hugely successful novel reveals the potency of martyrological thinking in 19th-century America as it also reveals martyrdom and its logic to be the foundation of sentimentalism like Stowe’s. Finally, I look at the speeches and nonfiction of Frederick Douglass to argue that his own martyrization of John Brown is different than what we see in Brown and Stowe because it provokes change rather than validating abolitionism that already exists. To various degrees, these writers seem aware that there may be a problem in the rhetorical use of martyrdom against the putatively secular state; they consequently employ different strategies for negotiating the meaninglessness of suffering and death with the soteriological and eschatological assumptions of their day. These negotiations reveal the extent to which martyrdom could be taken seriously as a hammer of abolitionism by different authors and thus also indicate the degree to which martyrdom can be taken seriously as a political solution whatsoever. Ultimately, I want to argue that martyrdom and its logic are at best dubious when applied to secular politics precisely because it relies upon the analogy to Jesus Christ as savior, which cannot hold outside Christianity. Simply put, the death of a mortal cannot register eschatologically and, more importantly, death does not make a cogent argument for anything. Instead, martyrdom is preaching to the choir par excellance; whether the choir is Christian, abolitionist, or something else, martyrological appeals do not grow its membership, as martyrologists since early modernity have assumed.

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No. of bitstreams: 1 sousa_tp_me_sjrp.pdf: 3525104 bytes, checksum: caf019ed69cfa65f4161ee0be85d7f7a (MD5) Previous issue date: 2017-03-16 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) / Tradução e adaptação podem ser ferramentas de resistência para culturas e identidades não hegemônicas ou para a manutenção de formas de identificação e manifestações culturais dominantes no cenário mundial. Nesta dissertação, procuramos observar como uma adaptação e duas traduções brasileiras de A Cabana do Pai Tomás abordam questões de identificação e de narrativas raciais ao longo de um período de tempo (cerca de 60 anos) em que o paradigma tradicional do Brasil em relação à raça começa a ser questionado, em grande parte devido ao contato com as noções de raça dominantes na cultura estadunidense. Também observamos como a negociação, caracterizada por ser assimétrica e apropriadora, é aplicada nas reescritas selecionadas, e quais os ganhos e perdas advindos dos diferentes níveis de abertura ao diálogo com o Outro hegemônico na tradução e na adaptação. Para isso, foram selecionadas três reescritas da obra Uncle Tom's Cabin, de Harriet Beecher Stowe, para o português brasileiro. Levando em consideração a própria temática da obra – a escravidão nos EUA –, as questões raciais inevitavelmente entram em pauta no romance e, consequentemente, as reescritas são obrigadas a lidar com os discursos raciais e a representação de identidades raciais específicas, especialmente a identidade negra. Como os discursos raciais tradicionalmente apoiados nos Estados Unidos contrastam fortemente com a narrativa racial tradicional no Brasil, as reescritas acabam por refletir ideologias raciais condizentes com o discurso de sua época, mas que podem contrastar com os discursos umas das outras. Após reflexões sobre a natureza da tradução e da adaptação como reescritas literárias e das formas de identificação na pós-modernidade, em particular as identidades raciais, foram feitas análises comparativas entre trechos do original em inglês e das três reescritas selecionadas, de modo a observar nesses excertos questões pertinentes ao discurso racial veiculado a cada reescrita e à forma como a negociação entre as culturas norte-americana e brasileira se manifestou nas opções tradutórias apresentadas. / Translation and adaptation can either represent tools of resistance for non-hegemonic cultures and identities, or tools for hegemonic identities and cultures to maintain power in a global level. This dissertation aims to observe how a Brazilian adaptation and two Brazilian translations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin deal with matters of racial identity and racial narratives spanning a period (roughly 60 years) in which the traditional Brazilian paradigm about race started to shift, in great part due to contact with concepts of race prevalent in American culture. We observed how negotiation, an approach characterized by its asymmetry and appropriative nature, acts in the selected rewritings, and which gains and losses happen when said rewritings allow varying degrees of contact with a hegemonic Other in translation and literary adaptation. With this goal, three rewritings of Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, to Brazilian Portuguese were chosen. Considering the main theme of the novel – slavery in the United Stated– racial matters inevitably come to the forefront of discussion, and therefore the rewritings have to deal with racial discourses and the representation of specific racial identities, especially black identity. Since the racial discourses traditionally associated with the United States differ significantly from the racial narrative traditional in Brazil, the rewritings can’t help but reflect racial ideologies matching the discourses prevalent at their time; however, those discourses may contrast with the discourse of the remaining rewritings. After reflecting upon the nature of translation and literary adaptation as literary rewritings and upon the formation of identities in post-modern times, racial identities in particular, we compared and analyzed excerpts of the original novel and the three selected rewritings, in order to observe in those passages matters related to the racial discourse associated with each rewriting, and the way negotiation between American and Brazilian cultures made itself known in the translation options presented.

The following is a case study in contemporary cancel culture through three cases of it in the nineteenth century. Lord Byron, Lady Caroline Lamb, and Harriet Beecher Stowe serve as three prominent cases of cancel culture in their time period that are all closely linked to one another. Cancel culture changes the way that we study these figures and their writing in the modern day. This shows that although we believe that cancel culture is a new phenomenon with the rise of social media that is not the case. Cancel culture has been happening through time as a way for the public to enact social justice without getting the court involved. Cancel culture is a lesson in the public court of opinion. / Master of Arts / The following is a case study in contemporary cancel culture through three cases of it in the nineteenth century. Writers, Lord Byron, Lady Caroline Lamb, and Harriet Beecher Stowe serve as three prominent cases of cancel culture in their time period that are all closely linked to one another. Cancel culture changes the way that we study these figures and their writing in the modern day. It highlights how cancel culture is not as black and white as people initially believe while also showing an unbiased explanation of what transpires when a person is canceled. This shows that although we believe that cancel culture is a new phenomenon with the rise of social media that is not the case. Cancel culture has been happening through time as a way for the public to enact social justice without getting the court involved. Cancel culture is a lesson in the public court of opinion.

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Texts such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Nella Larsen’s Quicksand each present a different understanding and perspective of relationships based on their time periods and social statures. The type of relationship Stowe focuses on in her novel is that of friendship. Friends, defined as people with whom have a bond of mutual affection, and friendships, the state of mutual trust and support (Merriam-Webster), anchor the relationships that Eva and Eliza create with members on the plantation. These female protagonists turn to friendship as a way to live each day more normally – that is, to somehow alleviate the brutal cruelty of living through slavery. Despite varying odds, trials, and tribulations, seeking friendships that had preservative and supportive qualities allowed the female protagonists in Stowe’s novel to survive their own lives. The friendships Eva and Eliza formed discredit what many paternalist pro-slavery authors used as evidence to justify the institution of slavery. In the paternalist proslavery mindset, slave-owner and slave friendships revealed the benefits of slavery – that the two groups would be happier together rather than apart. Stowe discredits this mentality by relating to her 19th century reader’s emotions, representative of the sentimental genre in which she writes. However, in writing about slavery from a white woman’s perspective, Stowe isn’t fully exempt from the paternalist genre. As I will examine later, many of her statements about slavery and the friendships she narrates embody implicitly racist stereotypes and caricatures that complicate the abolitionist approach to her novel. In this way, she falls under the category of paternalist abolitionism, rather than paternalist proslavery. Stowe also highlights the fleeting nature of these friendships. Many, if not all, of the friendships Eva and Eliza form are not able to last, which is one way Stowe argues against the institution of slavery. Following Stowe, my discussion of Jacobs will introduce a slave’s perspective to female relationships in slavery. The relationships in Jacobs’ narrative are centered on family, and the power of relying on one’s own blood or close-knit community to survive slavery. Writing also within the sentimental mode, Jacobs focuses on her reader’s emotions in order to propel her anti-slavery argument. The female relationships Jacobs details are grounded in literal and metaphorical motherhood. She highlights these relationships as an emotional and familial, particularly motherly, survival method. Jacobs’ text showcases the importance of family, rather the relationships or friendships formed with strangers– thereby differentiating her argument from Stowe’s. Nella Larsen’s Quicksand draws on the emotional and social difficulties one biracial woman faced in a world affected by the legacy of slavery and World War I. As a biracial woman, Helga develops relationships with men and women she hopes will support her progressive way of thinking and sense of selfhood. Helga’s relationships are more aptly defined as partnerships – given that “partners” may involve sexual, non-sexual, and business-like dynamics between two people. Helga must find authentic, or non-hypocritical, people to assist in her journey for selfhood and kin. But similarly to the relationships in Stowe and Jacobs, the friendships Helga creates often fail her. The question of why they fail in Quicksand connects directly to the question the novel itself is asking: is the search for selfhood more important than the search for kin? The argument all three works make with these failures represents a call to action – not just for the time period in which their novels were written, but also for future American communities. The continuing consequences of racial and gender discrimination exposed by Stowe, Jacobs, and Larsen show us that real social change must come from people – from the relationships we form.

An exploration of Harriet Beecher Stowe's The Minister's Wooing as viewed through the lens of performance studies and domesticity. Previous tales of fallen women, both in novels and operatic form, deprived the coquette of the agency to change her societally determined route of personal destruction as previously shown in the studies of Catherine Clément. Stowe's unique tale of a French coquette overturns the typical plot of the fallen woman, as demonstrated in Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette, by giving the coquette agency to redeem herself through key performative, domestic and, according to Judith Butler, transformative acts. Such treatment of this character made Stowe a forerunner in sexual equality.

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Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / This essay explores a broad range of literary works that treat long-term grief as a natural response to the death of a child. Literary examples show gaps in the medical and social sciences’ considerations of grief, since these disciplines judge bereaved mothers’ grief as excessive or label it bereavement disorder. By contrast, authors who employ the ancient storyline of child death illuminate maternal grieving practices, which are commonly marked with a vigilance that expresses itself in wildness. Many of these authors treat grief as a forced pilgrimage, but question the possibility of returning to a previous state of psychological balance. Instead, the mothers in their stories and poems resist external pressure for closure and silence and favor lasting memory. Harriet Beecher Stowe, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Emily Dickinson, in letters to bereaved mother Susan Gilbert Dickinson and in the poetry included in these letters, represent maternal child loss as compelling a movement into a new state and emphasize the lasting pain and disruption of this loss.

This dissertation explores the importance of the panorama for American Renaissance writers' participation in ideological formations in the antebellum period. I analyze how Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Wells Brown, Henry Box Brown, and Harriet Beecher Stowe use the panorama as a metaphorical site to contest their different positions on epistemological and sociopolitical agendas such as transcendentalism, masculinist expansionism, and radical abolitionism. Emerson uses the panorama as a key metaphor to underpin his transcendental idealism and situate it in contemporary debates on vision, gender, and race. Connecting the panorama with optical theories on light and color, Emerson appropriates them to theorize his transcendental optics and makes a hierarchical distinction between light/transparency/panorama as metaphors for spirit, masculinity, and race-neutral man versus color/opacity/myopic vision for body, femininity, and racial-colored skin. In his paean to the moving panorama, Thoreau expresses his desire for Emersonian correspondence between nature and the spirit through transcendental panoramic vision. However, Thoreau's esteem for nature's materiality causes his panoramic vision to be corporeal and empirical in its deviation from the decorporealized vision in Emerson?s notion of transparent eyeball. Hawthorne repudiates the Transcendentalists' and social reformers' totalizing and absolutist idealism through his critique of the panorama and the emphasis on opacity and ambiguity of the human mind and vision. Hawthorne reveals how the panorama satisfies the desire for visual and physical control over the rapidly expanding world and the fantasy of access to truth. Countering the dominant convention of the Mississippi panorama that objectifies slaves as a spectacle for romantic tourism, Box Brown and Wells Brown open up a new American subgenre of the moving panorama, the anti-slavery panorama. They reconstruct black masculinity by verbally and visually representing real-life stories of some male fugitive slaves and idealizing them as masculine heroes of the anti-slavery movement. In Uncle Tom's Cabin, Stowe criticizes how the favorable representation of slavery and the objectification of slaves in the Mississippi panorama and the picturesque help to construct her northern readers' uncompassionate and hard-hearted attitudes toward the cruel realities of slavery and presents Tom's sympathetic and humanized "eyes" as an alternative vision.