论文《汤姆叔叔的小屋》第三部分

论文《汤姆叔叔的小屋》第三部分 Èý Stowe's Dramatization of Christianity Power to Redem the Fallen World As a pious Christian,Mrs.Stowe held the belief that each man is born to be equal and should enjoy freedom,so she was strongly against slavery,which betrayed the ideas in Christianity.In Christianity,people are equal in soul and should enjoy freedom.She often tried to do something about changing the conditions of slaves. To learn more detail about slavery,she even went to the South to see the miserable conditions of slaves with her own eyes.Especially when the enactment of the "Fugitive Slave Act"in 1850.Mrs.Stowe was infuriated and influenced by the innumerable antislavery event and persons.Influenced by the idea in Christianit that people are equal in soul and should enjoy freedom and the belief that slavery should be abolished,she decided to compose a novel to lash the slavery.Thus,in Uncle Tom's Cabin,Mrs.Stowe described that Christianity can actually be used to fight slavery. 1 The Incompatibility of Slavery Christian Vaules Writing for a predominantly religious, predominantly Protestant audience, Stowe takes great pains to illustrate the fact that the system of slavery and the moral code of Christianity oppose each other. No Christian, she insists, should be able to tolerate slavery. Throughout the novel, the more religious a character is, the more he or she objects to slavery. Eva, the most morally perfect white character in the novel, fails to understand why anyone would see a difference between blacks and whites. In contrast, the morally revolting, nonreligious Legree practices slavery almost as a policy of deliberate blasphemy and evil. Christianity, in Stowe??s novel, rests on a principle of universal love. If all people were to put this principle into practice, Stowe insists, it would be impossible for one segment of humanity to oppress and enslave another. Thus, not only are Christianity and slavery incompatible, but Christianity can actually be used to fight slavery. 2 Redemption Through Christianity Christianity is a very important theme in Uncle Tom's Cabin,which turns it into a spiritual novel.For Stowe, Christian love and self-sacrifice is the sole answer to the reformation of the degenerate world.Just as Jane Tommpkins points out in (DesignÓÐ??×?µÄ),"The notion that historical change takes place only through religious conversion,which is a theory of power as old as Christianity itself,is dramatized and vindicated in Uncle Tom's Cabin by the novel's insistence that all human events are organized,clarified,and made meaningful by the existence of spiritual realities."(??×?16)In the novel,we see countless references to the four last things-Heaven,Hell,Death,and judgemnt-references which remind us that historical events can only be seen for what they are in the light of eternal truths. As a spiritual story,it "is to show how Jesus Christ,who liveth and was dead,and now it alive and forevermore,has still a mother's love for the poor and lowly'"(??×?17)Stowe declared it a couple of years after its publication.In this novel,this feminized Christ is Eva,a female Savior-Evangeline,who embodies Stowe's concept of the"mother's love"of Christ. First,Eva is a pure symbol.As Stowe tells us ,Evangeline St.Clare has "an undulating and aerial grace such as one might dream of for some mythic and allegorical being"(148Ò?)Her face has a "dreamy earnestness,"her hair floats"like a cloud,"her eyes shine with a"deep spritual gravity";clearly,she is marked "out from other children"(148).Tom gazes on this ethereal child who glides,flies,floats,and wafts,and he sees"something almost divine...he half believed that he saw one of the angles stepped out of his New Testament"(149).Named for the mother of the race,this golden-haloed Eve-angel/Evangel,who always appears in whie and remains too pure to survive in this world,embodies the essence both of motherhood and of Christianity as Stowe defines them in the novel. Second,with angelic purity and remarkable susceptibility towards the Bible,she is more like a "chidld Jesus"(257).To Tom,she seemed "something almost divine;and whenever her golden head and deep blue eyes peered out upon him from behing some dusky cotton-bale,or liked down upon him over some ridge of packages,he half believed that he saw one of the angles stepped out of his New Testament"(149).Her divinity is all the more remarkable because of the fact that she grows up in a place where no positive influence can be found,as if she were a God-sent gift for the world,"this is one of the roses of Eden that the Lord has dropped down expressly for the poor and lowly, who get few enough of any other kind"(181). Third, we can see the figure of Christ in her benenvolence and selfless love.Named Evangeline,one that bring God's love and message to the world,Eva gives to people,not only her"candy,nuts"(149),but also her hair,which like the bread Christ distributes to his disciples at the Last Supper,contains love and hope of salvation in it. Last but not the least,the child's being focused on self-sacrifice,which is more like Jesus Christ's self-sacrifice for the sake of the happiness and benevolence of the whole beings in the world.When she is dying,she tells Tom that she can understand why Jesus wanted to die for his people.She expressed her wish of voluntary martyrdom that is exactly what Jesus did."I've felt that I would be glad to die,if my dying could stop all this misery.I would die for them,Tom,if I could"(282).She does.She is the second Eve-second and sinless mother of the race,who personifies for Stowe the spotless motherly Christ came to redeem the world from the sins of the fathers.Thus,death,in Uncle Tom's Cabin,is the equivalent not of defeat but of victory;it brings an access of power,not a loss of it;it is only the crowning achievement of life,it is life, the supreme from of heroism.