Female Nationalist Narrative In Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Written in1851in 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 depicts 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 exploring an alternative course for national redemption from the severe effect of the slave system.In recent years, Chinese’s critical attention of the novel mainly focuses on the perspective of new historicism, post colonialism and religion, and etc. However, researches on Stowe’s narrative rhetoric perspective are rare. So far as I know, no one has discussed the work from the perspective of female nationalist narrative. The present thesis attempts to probe from a new angle to reveal Stowe’s view on national redemption by analyzing her female nationalist narrative in the novel.To begin with, the thesis gives an overview of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s time, the writer and her work Uncle Tom’s Cabin as well as the literature review, the originality and the organization of this paper.Then, the present author makes an analysis of Stowe’s narrative strategies helping building a rhetorical common ground to communicate her ideas to readers. Firstly, the author creates a buffer zone by means of sentimentalism to allow the reader to decide independently on how to define a personal identity in the nation’s crisis and how they should act. Secondly, she adopts a first-person-plural narrator to put the author and the reader on the equal footing and adapts the reader to their position of responsibility.Next, the present author focuses on Stowe’s depiction of typical images to reveal her alternative course for national redemption. Firstly, Stowe provides for the reader some provocative images to elucidate her messages of warning and redemption. These images illustrate that slave trade fractures maternity and will eventually deprive an entire community of consistent familial connection and emotional or spiritual bonding, while people’s inaction will lead to the continued degradation of the nation. Secondly, Stowe uses redemptive female characters, images of maternal sacrifice and blurred gender dichotomies to enable readers to unearth the nation’s potential for females. They are represented with the possibilities of adopting feminine virtues and blurring the conventionally accepted male-female dichotomy to model hope and redemption.Besides, the present author assesses Stowe’s narrative approach. Stowe’s narrative rhetoric leads to the identification of a recognizable female voice of the nation during the nineteenth-century. In addition, Stowe uses this female voice to lay groundwork with the male patriarchal reader as well and in this way also reflects how women of Stowe’s class viewed their governing counterparts.Finally, the dissertation argues Stowe employs a racially charged narrative rhetoric to communicate with the reader and the nation that the key to redeem a morally corrupted system is in the adoption of a more female perspective and maternal nature. The present thesis aims to further explore Stowe’s female view on national redemption, hoping that it could contribute to the extension of Stowe’s study in China. Since Stowe’s ideology of redemption in feminization exerted a profound influence on later female writers in America of19th century, the research on her female nationalist narrative perspective of Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a significant contribution for further exploration of American female literature at that time.