Novel Chiaroscuro: Inspired Blackness in the Mid-Victorian Novel Público
Muneal, Marc (2010)
Published
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."
About this Dissertation
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