2011 Interdisciplinary Perspectives Presentations
Location
UMass Boston Campus Center Ballroom C
Start Date
28-4-2011 4:00 PM
End Date
28-4-2011 6:00 PM
Description
Harriett Beecher Stowe is often identified as an advocate for Christianity, woman's suffrage, autonomy, and the abolishment of slavery. However, inviting the reader to view her work through an anarchist lens, her magnum opus—Uncle Tom’s Cabin— offers the reader the opportunity to reconstruct her politics with immense implication. Critics regard Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" as a sermon devised with the intention to inflate the nation with the righteous spirit of God, offering to the reader the opportunity to partake in the message of her religious vision. While Stowe's absolute faith in her Christian profile of God is present, she invariably injects her feminist beliefs into the scriptures and provides the reader with a gridlock between deviation from tradition and her traditional faith. What's more, her Utopian society as presented with the Quaker Society oddly strips away the identity of God as the catalyst for moral good and evils. This essay critiques Stowe's politics by defining her Utopian society in terms that correlate and provide evidence of an idealist anarchist society, positing that by identifying the novel through an anarchist lens we can reconstruct her stance which, in turn, eliminates the necessity of religion and government within the Utopia.
Included in
African American Studies Commons, American Popular Culture Commons, Literature in English, North America, Ethnic and Cultural Minority Commons
The Failure of the Free World: Anarchy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin
UMass Boston Campus Center Ballroom C
Harriett Beecher Stowe is often identified as an advocate for Christianity, woman's suffrage, autonomy, and the abolishment of slavery. However, inviting the reader to view her work through an anarchist lens, her magnum opus—Uncle Tom’s Cabin— offers the reader the opportunity to reconstruct her politics with immense implication. Critics regard Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" as a sermon devised with the intention to inflate the nation with the righteous spirit of God, offering to the reader the opportunity to partake in the message of her religious vision. While Stowe's absolute faith in her Christian profile of God is present, she invariably injects her feminist beliefs into the scriptures and provides the reader with a gridlock between deviation from tradition and her traditional faith. What's more, her Utopian society as presented with the Quaker Society oddly strips away the identity of God as the catalyst for moral good and evils. This essay critiques Stowe's politics by defining her Utopian society in terms that correlate and provide evidence of an idealist anarchist society, positing that by identifying the novel through an anarchist lens we can reconstruct her stance which, in turn, eliminates the necessity of religion and government within the Utopia.
Comments
Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA