Many contemporary classical scholars, such as Benjamin Isaac and Denise McCoskey, frame the ancient Athenian attitudes toward their slaves as akin to or the same as White American racism. In this thesis, I argue that Athenian literary representations of slaves, in comparative perspective, are actually only superficially similar to those constructed in White American literature. I survey ancient Greek comedy and tragedy’s representations of slaves and demonstrate that the genres’ slave stereotypes recognise that slaves share with citizens a common humanity. I survey White American literature from the antebellum and Jim Crow eras, and I establish that its stereotyping of Black slaves and freedmen dehumanises them through the construction of racial difference. I argue that this crucial difference between Athenian and White American representations of slaves indicates that the Athenian city-state’s social system did not feature racism as it is articulated by critical race theorists Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and Joe Feagin. / Graduate / 0294 / 0591 / 0579 / gbutler@uvic.ca

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In October 1852, Amy Fiske (1785-1859) of Sturbridge, Massachusetts, stitched a sampler. But she was not a schoolgirl making a sampler to learn her letters. Instead, as she explained: “The above is what I have taken from my sampler that I wrought when I was nine years old. It was w[rough]t on fine cloth it tattered to pieces. My age at this time is 66 years.” Drawing from 167 examples of decorative needlework – primarily samplers and quilts from 114 collections across the United States – made by individual women aged forty years and over between 1820 and 1860, this dissertation explores how Fiske and women like her experienced social and cultural change in antebellum America, and probes their personal reactions to growing older. Falling at the intersection of women’s history, material culture study and the history of aging, this dissertation brings together objects, diaries, letters, portraits, and prescriptive literature to consider how middle-class American women experienced the aging process. Chapter 1 explores the physical and mental effects of “old age” on antebellum women and their needlework. It considers samplers modified later in life through the removal of the maker’s age or the date when the sampler was made. Chapter 2 examines epistolary needlework, that which relates a message or story in the form of stitched words. Chapter 3 focuses on technological developments related to needlework during the antebellum period, particularly indelible ink and the rise of the sewing machine, and the tensions that arose from the increased mechanization of textile production. Chapter 4 considers how gift needlework functioned among friends and family members. The materials, style and techniques represented in these gifts often passed along an embedded message, allowing the maker to share her opinions, to demonstrate her skill and creativity, and to leave behind a memorial of her life. Far from being a decorative ornament or a functional household textile, these samplers and quilts served their own ends. They offered aging women a means of coping, of sharing and of expressing themselves. In the end, the study argues that these “threads of time” provide a valuable and revealing source on the lives of mature antebellum women.

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First published in 1849, Charles Averill’s The Cholera-Fiend follows three villains as they attempt to artificially propagate cholera for their own villainous purposes in New York City. Gumbo, a Black servant to one of the villains, is meant to be the humorous relief in the text, but Gumbo experiences a calculated dehumanization from human to disabled, which causes him to be more at-risk for a health crisis—such as a tapeworm or cholera—than his white counterparts. Through analyzing the genre of cheap fiction, the views of medical professionals towards Black bodies, and other ways Black bodies were used as entertainment, I will argue that Gumbo’s character is representative of the disadvantages directed towards Blacks in times of health crisis—a social crisis within the wider health crisis.

This essay examines Harriet Jacobs’s autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl from the perspective of resistance theory. The essay uses the analytical framework created by Anna Johansson and Stellan Vinthagen in Conceptualizing 'Everyday Resistance': A Transdisciplinary Approach (2020) to concretize and understand different resistance methods and how black women resisted while navigating in society as slaves and as mothers. Resistance theory and methodology is a newer research area in literature studies, and this study attempts to add to that research field to broaden the understanding of Harriet Jacobs’s autobiography from a resistance perspective point of view. Johansson and Vinthagen’s analytical framework uses four different aspects to capture conceptual and situational combinations of everyday resistance and relationships existing between agents and powerholders. This study finds that motherhood and communal resistance motivate and influence Jacobs's will to continue fighting for liberty and explains how Jacobs’s everyday resistance actions create a feeling of meaning and agency in her life.

This thesis analyzes the role of performativity within the domestic novel during antebellum America; specifically, the ways in which E.D.E.N. Southworth’s The Hidden Hand and Louisa May Alcott’s Behind a Mask subverted cultural and societal norms by exploring the performative nature of class and gender. Through their respective protagonists, the two authors sought to question the power dynamics of an overwhelmingly patriarchal society. By granting their protagonists agency through performance, Southworth and Alcott explored the ways in which women might alter existing power structures to reject the restrictions gender essentialism placed upon antebellum women, and to advocate for women’s rights, such as economic stability and class mobility.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / In 1854 the United States Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska bill which left the question of slavery in the territory up to a vote of popular sovereignty. Upon the passage of the bill, New England’s most elite class of citizens, led by Eli Thayer, mobilized their networks of philanthropy in New England to ensure the Kansas-Nebraska territory did not embrace slavery. The effort by the New England elite to make the territories free was intertwined in a larger web of philanthropic motivations aimed to steer the future of America on a path that would replicate New England society throughout the country. The process and goal of their philanthropy in the Kansas-Nebraska Territory was not dissimilar from their philanthropy in New England. Moral classification of those in material poverty mixed with a dose of paternalism and free labor capitalism was the antidote to the disease of moral degradation and poverty. When Missourians resisted the encroachment of New Englanders on the frontier, the New England elites shifted their philanthropy from moral reform to the funding and facilitation of violence under the guise of philanthropy and disaster relief. For six years, until the outbreak of the American Civil War, New England philanthropists facilitated and helped fund the conflict known as Bleeding Kansas.