Greetings, fellow workshoppers!
Our next meeting will be Thursday, January 29 and our presenter will be a particularly promising and attractive student named Kit Shields. I kid! But seriously, I am our next presenter. My paper is attached to this email. Here are the deets:
Reading Right and Feeling Right in Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Kit Shields at the Religions in America Workshop
DATE: Thursday, January 29
TIME: 12:00 – 1:15
PLACE: Marty Center Seminar Room, second floor of Swift Hall
Critical for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s project of humanizing her enslaved characters in Uncle Tom’s Cabin is the redemption and reinstatement of a way of thinking that views sympathy, shared experience, and true religion–rather than law, honor, and order, for example–as the basis for a moral society. This heart-centered mode of thought and discourse was, for Stowe and many others in her time, essentially feminine. The virtues of this alternative feminine value system are often illustrated and promoted in scenes depicting different characters reading. I will argue that through scenes of reading, Stowe seeks to show how a masculine value system has allowed slavery to continue, and offers an alternative, feminine value system that would abolish slavery by redeeming sympathetic shared experience as a superior foundation for moral society.
I sincerely hope to see you there. In fact, I hope to see you there more than any of the other times I have said that to you. Please come.
Best,
Kit