The Female Power In Uncle Tom's Cabin--Redemption Through Women

Written in 1851 in response to the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, Uncle Tom's Cabin is considered as the most influential anti-slavery novel in that period. It focuses on the poor life of black slaves and their struggle to achieve freedom, and makes a vehement attack upon the chattel slavery. Antislavery as it is, Uncle Tom's Cabin is not like an ordinary slave story that focuses on the life and struggle of a black slave. As a woman writer, Harriet Beecher Stowe pays close attention to the severe effect of the slave system on women and their families. As we know, the exploitation associated with the slave system occurs largely in families. Inevitably, while men are working in the market, it is women that are daily affected by the witnessing of slavery. The 1850 Fugitive Slave Law pushed many Northern women in direct confrontation with the moral dilemma posed by this issue: whether to obey the law and apprehend escaped slaves or to break the law, act on their feelings of charity and help the fugitives. In response to the Slave Law, Uncle Tom's Cabin is more concerned with what women should do to fight against it and slavery as a whole. In contrast to the physical superiority of men, the women in the novel are endowed with strong moral power to change the world. The strong women in Uncle Tom's Cabin play an essential role in the fight against the chattel slavery in order to redeem the fallen world. Therefore, Uncle Tom's Cabin is not only an antislavery novel, most importantly, it is a novel written by, for and about women. By a demonstration of the female power in Uncle Tom's Cabin, Stowe shows women, taking the place of men, are the force to redeem the whole nation. This essay explores the ways that Stowe dramatizes women's roles and power in the fight against the chattel slave system to redeem the fallen world in Uncle Tom's Cabin, thereby, reorganizing the American culture from the women's points of view.Stowe's argument for the redeeming power of women was gradually developedwith the social background-two social events greatly affected Stowe's creation of the novel. This paper will begin with a discussion of the social background in the mid-nineteenth century in America. One is the organization of a feminist movement in 1848 and the other is the passage of a new Fugitive Slave Law, forbidding the Northerners to help the runaway slaves, and requiring them to cooperate in the capture of fugitive slaves in 1850. In addition to the social background, with the development of capitalism, a new ideology-the ideology of femininity and domesticity comes into being. This ideology glorifies the role of woman as homemaker and idealizes the moral influence of wives and mothers. Though husband is the worldly head and breadwinner of his family, it is wife who serves as the moral and spiritual guide of the family. Stowe's argument for the redeeming power of women was highly consistent with her belief in the cultural ideal of womanhood and domesticity, in particular that of motherhood and childhood in the 19th century America. So in the following chapters, I will discuss the ideology of femininity and domesticity which helps to shape Stowe's points of view concerning women and focus on the way in which Stowe manipulates the ideology of femininity and domesticity to argue that women represent the force of redemption of the world. In Stowe's view, both men and masculine institutions fail to reform the world. However, women can redeem the fallen world in their special way-change of heart by Christian love and self-sacrifice. Stowe's strategy to redeem the world through the female power is quite progressive in that period, however, if we draw on the feminist theory by Elaine Showalter, American feminist theorist, Stowe's strategy is conservative and impractical. But to denounce Stowe and her novel as wholly conservative and reactionary to the mainstream of women's movement would be the result of the failure to come to terms with the complexity of the context in which the novel was written. Taking the social background an...