Novel Chiaroscuro: Inspired Blackness in the Mid-Victorian Novel Pubblico

Muneal, Marc (2010)

Permanent URL: https://etd.library.emory.edu/concern/etds/3n203z857?locale=it
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Abstract

Abstract
Novel Chiaroscuro: Inspired Blackness in the Mid-Victorian Novel
By Marc Muneal
Harriet Beecher Stowe's expressions and juxtapositions of blackness, both literal
and symbolic, form the crux of comparison in my project, which analyzes the rhetorical
impact of high-contrast imagery. The novel's sentimental exposition of cruelty under
slavery depends heavily upon a three distinct but related strategies she used to illustrate
the subjugation of black by white. These strategies comprise a systematic framework I
analogically call chiaroscuro, alluding to the holistic effect created by the distribution of
light and dark in a painting, and picking up on Stowe's cue that her novel was one of
"pictures." Immediate juxtapositions occur when the novel presents a tableau of a black
character standing next to a white with a suggestion of equivalence, aesthetic or
symbolic, that traps the white reader into identification and sympathy with the black
figure. Internal juxtapositions play on the doubled nature of mulatto existence, re-
creating the tableau by invoking parental or ancestral connections. O nomastic
juxtapositions
involve the doubling and triangulation of names, creating a metatextual
community of contrast that extracts and scrutinizes oppositional characters. After
elaborating on how the author executes each of these chiaroscuro strategies in Uncle
Tom
, "Novel Chiaroscuro" then turns to Stowe's literary relationships with three
influential Victorian novelists who had taken notice of her work. Charles Dickens,
Charles Kingsley, and George Eliot, each affected personally and emotionally by Stowe's
celebrity, wrote novels that revive, respond to, and sometimes subvert her schemes of
black-white contrast. Through my analyses of Dickens's Hard Times, Kingsley's Two
Years Ago
, and Eliot's The Mill on the Floss-each of which, not coincidentally, boasts
its own Toms-my project demonstrates not only those novels' thematic but also their
technical debts to Uncle Tom's Cabin. Stowe introduced the mid-Victorian authors to a
new vocabulary and syntax of words and pictures, and by systematically analyzing these
using the chiaroscuro framework, my project answers fundamental riddles about
subordinated identity posed in the novels.

Table of Contents


TABLE OF CONTENTS

1.
Introduction
Toms, Black and White

26.
Chapter One
A Community of Contrast: Harriet Beecher Stowe and Uncle Tom's Cabin

71.
Chapter Two
Charles Dickens, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Tom: The Real Culprit's Name in
Hard Times

115.

Chapter Three
Anatomy of an Afterthought: Charles Kingsley, the "Accursed Slavery Question,"
and the Quadroon's Function in Two Years Ago

159.

Chapter Four
Lucy Deane's Confession to the Mulatter Queen of the Gypsies

202.

Conclusion

209.

Bibliography


FIGURES AND TABLES

13.
Fig. i.1. Illustration appearing in Burnett's The One I Knew Best of All

30.
Fig. 1.1. Eva's Farewell

34.
Fig. 1.2. Illustration, "Eva stood looking at Topsy"

45.
Fig. 1.3. Illustration, "Eva comes to tell Uncle Tom he is sold"
Fig. 1.4. Illustration, "The Fugitives are Safe in a Free Land"

96.
Table 2.1. Mary Rose Sullivan's "Black and White Characters in Hard Times"

99.
Table 2.2. Categories created within Hard Times

119.

Fig. 3.1. Benjamin Disraeli as "The Political Topsy"

173.

Fig. 4.1. Illustration, "Ducking a Witch."

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