Imperialist civilizing mission of Uncle Tom's Cabin and history of itsChinese rewriting

Abstract

This thesis is a revisionist study of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a renowned American classic by Mrs. Stowe, and its Chinese translations. Thematically refreshing the novel as imperialist, I intend to therefore shed new lights in appreciating its century-long journey across China by studying two definitive rewritings of the original, heinu yutian lu （《黑奴吁天?》）from late Qing and heinu hen（《黑奴恨》）from the 1960s.

The thesis structurally contains four parts. Chapter 1 introduces the project generally. Chapter 2 studies the original text and chapter 3 and 4 the two Chinese translated texts respectively.

Re-reading of the original is crucial. Inspired by Edward Said’s efforts in connecting western culture and Imperialism, I established civilizing mission as core of the black narrative in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a novel widely celebrated as masterpiece of abolitionist literature.

My argument is based on textual analysis. I will argue that evangelization of Africa, rather than abolition of slavery, had been Stowe’s fundamental concern in building Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and it is exactly driven by this civilizing mission that she dictated the roles of the novel’s two leading black characters, Uncle Tom and George Harris. Tom, the Christian martyr, is to prove Africans’ capability of getting civilized; Harris, Stowe’s Christian patriot, is the pioneer of colonizing Africa into a new world of Christian and American civilization.

Reestablishing the original as such, I interpret the novel’s travel to 20th century China a

historical event: an Imperialist novel goes by an Imperialism-fighting country in an Imperialist age. Therefore forces a long-ignored question: how had Chinese translators responded? How the response developed?

This question can be best answered by looking into heinu yutian lu and heinu hen, two texts that represent respectively the beginning and the ending of Chinese critical treatment of the original in translating. And I will form my answer by analyzing the Chinese rewriting of the images of Uncle Tom and Harris, for they in the original are responsible for execution of the civilizing mission.

Translating under a crucial circumstance of imperial crisis, Lin Shu and Wei Yi, the producers of heinu yutian lu, aimed to promote the ideology of “ loving the country and preserving the race”（??保种）.While presenting the black sufferings as faithful even exaggerated as possible, they consistently infiltrated the novel’s Christianity. And it is this strategy of de-Christianization that undermined the original’s imperialist design. After the translation, both Tom and Harris adopted a new face. The former was still a noble Negro only based on Chinese virtues, and the latter kept well his patriotic passion, but not for Christian civilization, rather purely for Africa.

Intervention of the original’s civilizing mission climbed to a higher level as in the case of heinu hen, a drama adaptation by Ouyang yuqian in the radical 1960s. With Marxist class struggle being the guiding principle, Christian humanitarianism of the original was heavily criticized, and the black image reshaped dramatically. With Tom being portrayed as a slave that gradually woke up to his class consciousness, Harris was transformed into a revolutionary hero.