recent conference presentations
Society for the study of American women writers, november 2015
"‘Feeling Right’ about Liberia: Aunt Chloe's Kitchen and Colonization in Uncle Tom's Cabin”
Julia Cosacchi
Fordham University
As critics such as Gillian Brown and Myra Jehlen have noted, Uncle Tom’s Cabin positions domesticity as the force that both can and must oppose and overcome slavery. When kitchens, quintessentially domestic spaces, function as the site of this opposition, they assume a new function as liminal spaces that trouble the boundary between public and private spheres. While scholarship has attended to the symbolic function of certain kitchen sites in Stowe’s novel—Dinah’s and Rachel Halliday’s—no sustained discussion has yet engaged the significance of Aunt Chloe’s kitchen, the domestic interior of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Such an analysis, I argue, reveals that Chloe’s kitchen operates symbolically as a counterpoint to the utopian promise suggested by Rachel’s Quaker kitchen. I consider Chloe's kitchen specifically in terms of the novel's ongoing search for the black domestic ideal, an ideal finally located--problematically--in Liberia. Building upon Brown’s observation that Stowe’s Liberia is “colonized for domesticity,” I argue that the novel's treatment of colonization forces Stowe to confront aspects of her own domestic ideology insofar as it relates to abolition and social reform. Through the figure of Chloe, we see clearly that Stowe's domestic ideals, predicated as they are on whiteness, cannot sustain a black community in Africa any more than they can in Kentucky. Chloe's disappearance at the end of the novel--her preemptive exile, as it were, from Liberia--indexes the dilemma of the black domestic ideal that, I argue, is a central concern throughout Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
"States of Innocence: Stowe and the Labor of Dressmaking in New England Novels"
Gretchen Murphy
University of Texas-Austin
Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies
This paper draws on original archival work uncovering Stowe’s entanglement with the London Association for the Aid and Benefit of Dressmakers and Milliners, showing how Stowe’s uncomfortable relationship with that organization motivated her subsequent depictions of needlewomen in her transitional work of regionalism The Minister’s Wooing (1862). Stowe’s relationship with this philanthropic group began during her visit to London in 1853, in the wake of Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s success. By unknowingly employing a dressmaker who used cheap, exploited labor, Stowe invited a series of embarrassing criticisms in the London Times. Stowe wrote about the incident in Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands (1854), revealing her conflicted and defensive relationship to the cause, not only as a complicated distraction from abolition but also as a problematic sign of her distance from working women such as Jane Le Plastrier, the dressmaker who under the pen-name First Hand became Stowe’s sharpest critic in the London Times. Stowe, who encountered and shaped her response to the Association through her acquaintance with philanthropic aristocrats such as Lord Shaftsbury, recognized a troubling tension in the Association between workers and philanthropists and her new-found status as female celebrity, a tension that she muted in her response to these incidents in her regional New England fiction.
The Minister’s Wooing insist on the figure of the independent needlewoman as an equal member of an imagined New England village that evades labor exploitation and class stratification. This archival context for these depictions complicates interpretations of such utopic elements as expressions of Stowe’s feminist matriarchal vision (Berkson, Harris, Schultz). Instead, Stowe’s evolving thought on the problem of free worker’s rights in relation to abolition offers a more critical lens for reading Stowe’s New England novels, which are formative expressions of discomfort with capitalism and industrialization identified in critical accounts of later local color writing (Brodhead, Foote). Understanding these novels as motivated by Stowe’s discomfort with the ways that Le Plastrier had used Stowe’s fame in a public labor dispute sheds light not only the on novels’ cultural work, but also on the problem of Stowe’s self-fashioning as a political strategist and female celebrity.
Gretchen Murphy is author of Hemispheric Imaginings: The Monroe Doctrine and Narratives of US Empire (Duke UP, 2005) and Shadowing the White Man’s Burden: US Imperialism and the Problem of the Color Line (NYUP, 2010). She is a Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at University of Texas-Austin.
"Stowe’s Transatlantic Poetic Explorations"
Nancy Lusignan Schultz
Salem State University
Harriet Beecher Stowe died in 1896, and 2016 marks the 120th anniversary of her death. As such, a reconsideration of her lesser-known works is warranted. Chief among these is her poetry—a significant area of her oeuvre that has attracted very little scholarly attention. Stowe wrote an unknown number of poems, and very little scholarship has focused on them. In 1967, Collected Poems of Harriet Beecher Stowe, by John Michael Moran, Jr. (1906-1995), was published by Transcendental Books in Hartford, CT and reprinted the same year in The Emerson Society Quarterly. An independent scholar, Moran worked as an accountant for forty-five years. In his brief foreword, Moran observed that while Stowe’s poetry had attracted some attention during her lifetime, it is “now neglected.” Moran’s collection ran one hundred pages and contains fifty-nine poems, with about half a dozen focused on Italy and Catholicism.
This presentation will focus on a handful of poems about Italy in her collection called A Day in the Pamfili Doria: Religious Poems by Harriet Beecher Stowe, published by Ticknor and Fields in 1867. Four of the Italian poems appear in the book’s final section called “Pressed Flowers from Italy.” The collection contains 29 poems, including Stowe’s “Pressed Flower” poems: “A Day in the Pamfili Doria,” “The Gardens of the Vatican,” “Saint Peter’s Church: Holy Week, April 1860,”and “The Miserere.” These poems situate Stowe’s Protestant gaze on evocative Catholic experiences and scenes, especially gardens, near Rome. Stowe’s response to her Italian experience (she made three trips to Europe in 1853, 1856, and 1859) and to Catholicism in her poetry highlights and segregates this aesthetic response, exploring the sentimental margins of a powerful aesthetic experience.
“Turning Words Into People: Anti-Literacy and Proleptic Audience in Uncle Tom’s Cabin”
Faye Halpern
University of Calgary
It is easy to think that Uncle Tom’s Cabin embraces literacy, detailing as it does Tom’s efforts to learn how to read. Sarah Robbins, for example, calls the novel a “literacy manual.” This paper, however, will explore the strain of anti-literacy in the novel: for Stowe, reading, especially newspaper reading, is a technology of dehumanization. Instead of embracing conventional literacy, the novel develops it’s own sense of what true literacy entails, one that opposes how most people construed adult literacy both then and now. If we analyze the novel’s notion of a literacy grounded in communal orality--in groups of people reading aloud to each other--we can see how Uncle Tom’s Cabin upends a notion of literacy grounded in the silent, isolated activity of decoding words on a page. Stowe wants to cultivate a practice of reading that turns a passage of text into the “real presence of distress”; only in that way can written words move a reader to action. In fact, Stowe is hearkening back to earlier practices of reading, ones that had been ascendant in Europe and early America, but these practices are ones that modern readers, especially literary critics, find very hard to respect. Our prejudice against this novel’s anti-literacy has obscured how Uncle Tom’s Cabin can inspire us to revisit narratological theories of “intended audience” as existing prior to a text: Uncle Tom’s Cabin shows how certain very powerful novels can create rather than find an intended audience.
"Between Real Pictures and Moving Metaphors: Stowe’s Domestic Dance"
Allison S. Curseen
Baruch College
In chapter twenty of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the narrator declares that the slave child, Topsy “has been fairly introduced into our corps de ballet.” Considering Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Calvinist suspicions about theater, presenting her narrative as ballet seems odd. Yet from pirouettes to Marie Taglioni references, the 1840s dance world appears throughout Stowe's writing. This paper explores the generative but contradictory space between Stowe’s pictures of actual dance and her metaphorical gestures to dance. For the former (in as much as they generally condemn dancing) underscore (as narrative proof) the ideas about female propriety and domestic grace articulated in A Treatise on Domestic Economy. Yet Stowe’s dance metaphors undermine the treatise’s idea that dance is at best useless and at worse corrupting. Part of a larger project, exploring the relationship between children’s physical movements and mid-19th century anxieties about slavery, child-rearing, and unregulated movement, this paper argues that the contradictory movement between real pictures of dance and dance metaphors constitute something like a domestic choreography at work in how Stowe imagines labor, order, and disruptive (black, child, animal) bodies.
Attending to this domestic choreography may help us account for the important but under-discussed tension in Stowe’s work between the excessive nature of movement (which Stowe’s reform-minded texts constantly try to generate) and what Gillian Brown identified as the graceful economy of stillness (which Stowe, her sister, and their contemporaries herald as a feminine ideal). On the one hand, these metaphors of dance make us privy to how even Stowe’s most iconic pictures of domestic stillness are animated by the easy-to-overlook stirrings of Stowe’s own unregulated narrative movements (i.e. mixed metaphors, stray allusions, ambiguous clauses, and creative punctuation)—a kind of narrative excess in Stowe’s work that I argue puts her writing in fugitive kinship with the unorderly and disruptive bodies Stowe so ambivalently depicts. Yet on the other hand, this paper pays particular attention to how the content of Stowe’s pictures assigns the frenzied excess of movement to animals and black laborers while rendering the ideal feminine stillness in white bodies. For ultimately tracing Stowe’s domestic choreography may demand that we interrogate both the generative movement of Stowe’s narrative excesses and the narrow space between antislavery and anti-black in Stowe’s abolitionist vision.
Julia Cosacchi
Fordham University
As critics such as Gillian Brown and Myra Jehlen have noted, Uncle Tom’s Cabin positions domesticity as the force that both can and must oppose and overcome slavery. When kitchens, quintessentially domestic spaces, function as the site of this opposition, they assume a new function as liminal spaces that trouble the boundary between public and private spheres. While scholarship has attended to the symbolic function of certain kitchen sites in Stowe’s novel—Dinah’s and Rachel Halliday’s—no sustained discussion has yet engaged the significance of Aunt Chloe’s kitchen, the domestic interior of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Such an analysis, I argue, reveals that Chloe’s kitchen operates symbolically as a counterpoint to the utopian promise suggested by Rachel’s Quaker kitchen. I consider Chloe's kitchen specifically in terms of the novel's ongoing search for the black domestic ideal, an ideal finally located--problematically--in Liberia. Building upon Brown’s observation that Stowe’s Liberia is “colonized for domesticity,” I argue that the novel's treatment of colonization forces Stowe to confront aspects of her own domestic ideology insofar as it relates to abolition and social reform. Through the figure of Chloe, we see clearly that Stowe's domestic ideals, predicated as they are on whiteness, cannot sustain a black community in Africa any more than they can in Kentucky. Chloe's disappearance at the end of the novel--her preemptive exile, as it were, from Liberia--indexes the dilemma of the black domestic ideal that, I argue, is a central concern throughout Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
"States of Innocence: Stowe and the Labor of Dressmaking in New England Novels"
Gretchen Murphy
University of Texas-Austin
Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies
This paper draws on original archival work uncovering Stowe’s entanglement with the London Association for the Aid and Benefit of Dressmakers and Milliners, showing how Stowe’s uncomfortable relationship with that organization motivated her subsequent depictions of needlewomen in her transitional work of regionalism The Minister’s Wooing (1862). Stowe’s relationship with this philanthropic group began during her visit to London in 1853, in the wake of Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s success. By unknowingly employing a dressmaker who used cheap, exploited labor, Stowe invited a series of embarrassing criticisms in the London Times. Stowe wrote about the incident in Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands (1854), revealing her conflicted and defensive relationship to the cause, not only as a complicated distraction from abolition but also as a problematic sign of her distance from working women such as Jane Le Plastrier, the dressmaker who under the pen-name First Hand became Stowe’s sharpest critic in the London Times. Stowe, who encountered and shaped her response to the Association through her acquaintance with philanthropic aristocrats such as Lord Shaftsbury, recognized a troubling tension in the Association between workers and philanthropists and her new-found status as female celebrity, a tension that she muted in her response to these incidents in her regional New England fiction.
The Minister’s Wooing insist on the figure of the independent needlewoman as an equal member of an imagined New England village that evades labor exploitation and class stratification. This archival context for these depictions complicates interpretations of such utopic elements as expressions of Stowe’s feminist matriarchal vision (Berkson, Harris, Schultz). Instead, Stowe’s evolving thought on the problem of free worker’s rights in relation to abolition offers a more critical lens for reading Stowe’s New England novels, which are formative expressions of discomfort with capitalism and industrialization identified in critical accounts of later local color writing (Brodhead, Foote). Understanding these novels as motivated by Stowe’s discomfort with the ways that Le Plastrier had used Stowe’s fame in a public labor dispute sheds light not only the on novels’ cultural work, but also on the problem of Stowe’s self-fashioning as a political strategist and female celebrity.
Gretchen Murphy is author of Hemispheric Imaginings: The Monroe Doctrine and Narratives of US Empire (Duke UP, 2005) and Shadowing the White Man’s Burden: US Imperialism and the Problem of the Color Line (NYUP, 2010). She is a Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at University of Texas-Austin.
"Stowe’s Transatlantic Poetic Explorations"
Nancy Lusignan Schultz
Salem State University
Harriet Beecher Stowe died in 1896, and 2016 marks the 120th anniversary of her death. As such, a reconsideration of her lesser-known works is warranted. Chief among these is her poetry—a significant area of her oeuvre that has attracted very little scholarly attention. Stowe wrote an unknown number of poems, and very little scholarship has focused on them. In 1967, Collected Poems of Harriet Beecher Stowe, by John Michael Moran, Jr. (1906-1995), was published by Transcendental Books in Hartford, CT and reprinted the same year in The Emerson Society Quarterly. An independent scholar, Moran worked as an accountant for forty-five years. In his brief foreword, Moran observed that while Stowe’s poetry had attracted some attention during her lifetime, it is “now neglected.” Moran’s collection ran one hundred pages and contains fifty-nine poems, with about half a dozen focused on Italy and Catholicism.
This presentation will focus on a handful of poems about Italy in her collection called A Day in the Pamfili Doria: Religious Poems by Harriet Beecher Stowe, published by Ticknor and Fields in 1867. Four of the Italian poems appear in the book’s final section called “Pressed Flowers from Italy.” The collection contains 29 poems, including Stowe’s “Pressed Flower” poems: “A Day in the Pamfili Doria,” “The Gardens of the Vatican,” “Saint Peter’s Church: Holy Week, April 1860,”and “The Miserere.” These poems situate Stowe’s Protestant gaze on evocative Catholic experiences and scenes, especially gardens, near Rome. Stowe’s response to her Italian experience (she made three trips to Europe in 1853, 1856, and 1859) and to Catholicism in her poetry highlights and segregates this aesthetic response, exploring the sentimental margins of a powerful aesthetic experience.
“Turning Words Into People: Anti-Literacy and Proleptic Audience in Uncle Tom’s Cabin”
Faye Halpern
University of Calgary
It is easy to think that Uncle Tom’s Cabin embraces literacy, detailing as it does Tom’s efforts to learn how to read. Sarah Robbins, for example, calls the novel a “literacy manual.” This paper, however, will explore the strain of anti-literacy in the novel: for Stowe, reading, especially newspaper reading, is a technology of dehumanization. Instead of embracing conventional literacy, the novel develops it’s own sense of what true literacy entails, one that opposes how most people construed adult literacy both then and now. If we analyze the novel’s notion of a literacy grounded in communal orality--in groups of people reading aloud to each other--we can see how Uncle Tom’s Cabin upends a notion of literacy grounded in the silent, isolated activity of decoding words on a page. Stowe wants to cultivate a practice of reading that turns a passage of text into the “real presence of distress”; only in that way can written words move a reader to action. In fact, Stowe is hearkening back to earlier practices of reading, ones that had been ascendant in Europe and early America, but these practices are ones that modern readers, especially literary critics, find very hard to respect. Our prejudice against this novel’s anti-literacy has obscured how Uncle Tom’s Cabin can inspire us to revisit narratological theories of “intended audience” as existing prior to a text: Uncle Tom’s Cabin shows how certain very powerful novels can create rather than find an intended audience.
"Between Real Pictures and Moving Metaphors: Stowe’s Domestic Dance"
Allison S. Curseen
Baruch College
In chapter twenty of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the narrator declares that the slave child, Topsy “has been fairly introduced into our corps de ballet.” Considering Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Calvinist suspicions about theater, presenting her narrative as ballet seems odd. Yet from pirouettes to Marie Taglioni references, the 1840s dance world appears throughout Stowe's writing. This paper explores the generative but contradictory space between Stowe’s pictures of actual dance and her metaphorical gestures to dance. For the former (in as much as they generally condemn dancing) underscore (as narrative proof) the ideas about female propriety and domestic grace articulated in A Treatise on Domestic Economy. Yet Stowe’s dance metaphors undermine the treatise’s idea that dance is at best useless and at worse corrupting. Part of a larger project, exploring the relationship between children’s physical movements and mid-19th century anxieties about slavery, child-rearing, and unregulated movement, this paper argues that the contradictory movement between real pictures of dance and dance metaphors constitute something like a domestic choreography at work in how Stowe imagines labor, order, and disruptive (black, child, animal) bodies.
Attending to this domestic choreography may help us account for the important but under-discussed tension in Stowe’s work between the excessive nature of movement (which Stowe’s reform-minded texts constantly try to generate) and what Gillian Brown identified as the graceful economy of stillness (which Stowe, her sister, and their contemporaries herald as a feminine ideal). On the one hand, these metaphors of dance make us privy to how even Stowe’s most iconic pictures of domestic stillness are animated by the easy-to-overlook stirrings of Stowe’s own unregulated narrative movements (i.e. mixed metaphors, stray allusions, ambiguous clauses, and creative punctuation)—a kind of narrative excess in Stowe’s work that I argue puts her writing in fugitive kinship with the unorderly and disruptive bodies Stowe so ambivalently depicts. Yet on the other hand, this paper pays particular attention to how the content of Stowe’s pictures assigns the frenzied excess of movement to animals and black laborers while rendering the ideal feminine stillness in white bodies. For ultimately tracing Stowe’s domestic choreography may demand that we interrogate both the generative movement of Stowe’s narrative excesses and the narrow space between antislavery and anti-black in Stowe’s abolitionist vision.