Working Machines versus Living Organisms: The “Man-Woman” in Stowe’s Oldtown Folks
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This essay explores how Stowe employs the contrasting images of machines and living organisms in Oldtown Folks to represent various types of manhood and womanhood in post-Revolutionary War New England. She compares more self-assertive and oppressive male and female characters to steam engines or working machines; in contrast, she associates more sympathetic, harmonious, and communal characters, who keep the balance between masculinity and femininity or cross over the boundary between them, with plants or livestock. Through these analogies, Stowe not only criticizes belligerent masculinity, which was valorized in the post-Revolutionary period and intensified in her contemporary America by machine-based industrialization and the bloodshed of the Civil War, but also embodies a vision of the organic harmony between ideal manhood and ideal womanhood in characters such as Miss Randall, Parson Avery, and Harry who unify both sexes’ virtues. Demonstrating how Sam Lawson, the village do-nothing, personifies Stowe’s ideal of public mothering and parenting by crossing over the boundaries between socially constituted binaries such as work versus leisure and masculinity versus femininity, I also read the novel as a satirical indictment of a society in which these social constructions serve to justify and disguise the selfish, violent, and exploitative traits of aggressive masculinity and materialistic industrialization in the Reconstruction era.
Abstract
This essay explores how Stowe employs the contrasting images of machines and living organisms in Oldtown Folks to represent various types of manhood and womanhood in post-Revolutionary War New England. She compares more self-assertive and oppressive male and female characters to steam engines or working machines; in contrast, she associates more sympathetic, harmonious, and communal characters, who keep the balance between masculinity and femininity or cross over the boundary between them, with plants or livestock. Through these analogies, Stowe not only criticizes belligerent masculinity, which was valorized in the post-Revolutionary period and intensified in her contemporary America by machine-based industrialization and the bloodshed of the Civil War, but also embodies a vision of the organic harmony between ideal manhood and ideal womanhood in characters such as Miss Randall, Parson Avery, and Harry who unify both sexes’ virtues. Demonstrating how Sam Lawson, the village do-nothing, personifies Stowe’s ideal of public mothering and parenting by crossing over the boundaries between socially constituted binaries such as work versus leisure and masculinity versus femininity, I also read the novel as a satirical indictment of a society in which these social constructions serve to justify and disguise the selfish, violent, and exploitative traits of aggressive masculinity and materialistic industrialization in the Reconstruction era.
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