Jessica George, Indiana University-Bloomington
Keywords: agriculture, abolition, ecocriticism, Harriet Beecher Stowe, resilience
Please leave comments, feedback, and research suggestions below.
Keywords: agriculture, abolition, ecocriticism, Harriet Beecher Stowe, resilience
Please leave comments, feedback, and research suggestions below.
Very interesting take on these keystone works of abolitionist thought. The theme that flowers won’t grow on the property of an evil man, is a fairly common trope in protestant literature, and I wonder if Stowe highlights Legree’s inability to bring order to the nature around him, as evidence of his moral inadequacy?
Thanks for your comment! Yes, I think you are definitely right with that interpretation. There has been some great work on plant studies and Stowe recently (Mary Kuhn comes to mind), if you are interested!
Thank you for your interesting paper!! May I ask you (I’m an art historian and I did literature studies only as a minor) if there is perhaps, I don’t know, a deeper and perhaps also stereotypical pattern behind the approximation of nature and black people in general? The same stereotypical pattern which approximates women and nature? (Spontaneously, there get’s only in my mind, sorry, one example from German literature, Theodor Fontane, Effi Briest, printed as book in 1896, at first glance I found this discription in English: https://lizzysiddal.wordpress.com/2007/06/24/effi-briest-theodor-fontane/ ) In French anthropological literature of the nineteenth century there is often made the comparision between women and without differentiation black people and their alleged closeness to nature. I know absolutely few about Harriet Beecher Stowe and the context of her writing, so I’d like to ask you, if this pattern, perhaps in modifying/ changing it, could have influenced her? It’s really an open question, I don’t know.
Best
S.