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African-American Mothers in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Toni Morrison's Beloved
Piňosová, Michaela ; Veselá, Pavla (advisor) ; Ulmanová, Hana (referee)
This BA thesis examines the concept of a black mother as a key figure in the fight for freedom as depicted in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and further explored in Toni Morrison's Beloved. Stowe's novel presents the idealized concept of motherhood in characters such as Eliza Harris, Aunt Chloe, Mary Bird and Rachel Halliday. These characters represent Stowe's ideology of Christian motherhood, in which the mother acts as a mediator of moral and religious principles in her family and community. To enable the identification of white middle-class female readers with the African-American characters in her novel, Stowe employed a distinctive method of characterization in Uncle Tom's Cabin. One of the main characteristics of her female figures is their ability to perform a maternal role. Mother love is depicted as a universal force, which is common to both white and African-American mothers, and which is equivalent to the love of Christ. Stowe believed that motherhood based on Christian values would free the United States from slavery and rebuild her society. For these reasons, Stowe encouraged white middle-class wives and mothers to present their abolitionist stances in their families and mediate them to their husbands, whose opinions might have been influential in political development in...
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Unbinding the Female Prometheus: L'Écriture féminine in Selected Poetry of Sylvia Plath
Piňosová, Michaela ; Veselá, Pavla (advisor) ; Ulmanová, Hana (referee)
The definition of one's femininity and its reflection in poetic language are two recurring issues examined by contemporary feminist critics. In their works, they consistently challenge the opinion that true poetry is essentially masculine, and that a woman poet is inevitably an inferior poet. Sylvia Plath, whose poetry represents the central subject of this thesis, could hardly be considered an inferior poet. Despite her early death, Plath's poetry continues to be immensely influential, and it tends to be adopted as an example by feminist critics who attempt to define the branch American women's poetry, reaching back to poets such as Anne Bradstreet and Emily Dickinson. From their point of view, Plath's works illustrate the fact that women's poetry has not only its history, but also its language. One may thus discover interesting parallels between the French-based concept of l'écriture féminine and Plath's poetic language. For the representatives of the l'écriture féminine movement Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, Western discourse is phallogocentric, i.e. based on the centrality of the phallus as a primary signifier. To disrupt the traditional (masculine) discourse, they neither propose a total split between the "male" and the "female" signifiers nor do they encourage women to...
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African-American Mothers in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Toni Morrison's Beloved
Piňosová, Michaela ; Veselá, Pavla (advisor) ; Ulmanová, Hana (referee)
This BA thesis examines the concept of a black mother as a key figure in the fight for freedom as depicted in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and further explored in Toni Morrison's Beloved. Stowe's novel presents the idealized concept of motherhood in characters such as Eliza Harris, Aunt Chloe, Mary Bird and Rachel Halliday. These characters represent Stowe's ideology of Christian motherhood, in which the mother acts as a mediator of moral and religious principles in her family and community. To enable the identification of white middle-class female readers with the African-American characters in her novel, Stowe employed a distinctive method of characterization in Uncle Tom's Cabin. One of the main characteristics of her female figures is their ability to perform a maternal role. Mother love is depicted as a universal force, which is common to both white and African-American mothers, and which is equivalent to the love of Christ. Stowe believed that motherhood based on Christian values would free the United States from slavery and rebuild her society. For these reasons, Stowe encouraged white middle-class wives and mothers to present their abolitionist stances in their families and mediate them to their husbands, whose opinions might have been influential in political development in...
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