A comparative study between Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Zhang Ailing’s love in a fallen city

Shi, Shaohua

Abstract

Harriet Beecher Stowe and Zhang Ailing are two renowned female writers who enjoy highly comments in the history of female feminism literature. They are writing from their own experiences and female perspectives to awaken the females and common people to pursue personal happiness and freedom. Besides, they advocated to transfer feminist ideas into daily behaviors. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s advocation of abolishing slavery promoted the large-scale social thinking, echoing the abolition movements in Britain and France. Her feminist ideas not only broke the shackles from being male’s attachments of females, but also changing the weak and fragile images of females. What’s more important, she led the American society to rethink about slavery and female position. However, the Chinese female writer, Zhang Ailing, as one of the “Four Female Talents “her feminist ideas are still restricted to be a fancier attachment to males. The ultimate goal of females’ fighting and calculating lays on male for financial support again. From her masterpiece, Love in a Fallen City, the heroine still puts great efforts on entertaining males for material’s sake. From the spiritual level, females are still inferior to males, even with the strong and harsh words in the novel. The feminist ideas of Zhang Ailing represented the conflict and struggle of Chinese females of that era between feudal thoughts and modern thinkings. This essay explores the two female writers’ feminist ideas on comparative literary criticism. The similarities and differences between them were also identified through comparison between feminist ideas and leading figures of the novels. Keywords: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Love in a Fallen City, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Zhang Ailing

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