【英文原声版59】Robin Bernstein: Uncle Tom’s Cabin

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英文文稿+中文翻译 

Zachary Davis: From the early 1600s to 1865, roughly 4 million people were enslaved in the United States. By the early 19th century, slavery was outlawed in the North but still a brutal reality in southern states. But a growing movement to abolish slavery nationwide was taking hold. One member of this movement was a woman named Harriet Beecher Stowe. In 1851, she published her first novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It became a national sensation and helped accelerate the campaign to end slavery.

扎卡里·戴维斯：16世纪初到1865年，美国约400万人都是奴隶。19世纪初，奴隶制在北方是非法的；但在南方各州，这项残忍的制度仍然延续着。不过在整个美国，废除奴隶制的运动日益高涨。参与这一运动的人当中，有一位叫哈丽叶特·比切·斯托的女性。1851年，她出版了第一部小说《汤姆叔叔的小屋》。这本书轰动了整个美国，推动了奴隶制的废除。

Robin Bernstein:It's a very complex novel. It is a very deep and layered novel. And I know that no matter how often I read it, I notice new things in it. My name is Robin Bernstein, I am a professor of African and African-American studies and studies of women, gender and sexuality at Harvard University.

罗宾·伯恩斯坦： 这本小说非常复杂，深刻且层次分明。而且我发现，无论我多么经常读它，每次读的时候我都会发掘出新的东西。我叫罗宾·伯恩斯坦，是哈佛大学非洲和非裔美国人研究以及女性、性别和性向研究的教授。

Robin Bernstein: I think where I got really excited about this book was when I came to understand how it intersected with U.S. popular culture and in particular material culture: stuff, stuff around us. So, I was at graduate school at Yale, and I was very fortunate that the Harriet Beecher Stowe House was in Hartford, Connecticut, which was not far from New Haven. So, I learned that the Harriet Beecher Stowe house had a very large collection of what we're called Tomitudes, which were material, you know, junk, basically, consumerist junk that related to Uncle Tom's Cabin.

罗宾·伯恩斯坦：当我了解到这本书是如何影响到美国的大众文化、尤其是我们周围的物质文化时，我对这本书真正起了兴趣。我毕业于耶鲁大学，碰巧哈丽叶特·比切·斯托的故居就在康涅狄格州的哈特福德，离纽黑文不远。我听说她的故居里摆放着许多和汤姆叔叔有关的衍生产品，其实就是和《汤姆叔叔的小屋》有关的、供人把玩的玩意儿。

Robin Bernstein:So, I made an appointment with a curator there who was incredibly generous, and what she did was she set up this very large table with Tomitudes and then welcomed me in to just walk through them and talk about them. And I saw such amazing things. I saw jigsaw puzzles with the characters. I saw jam jars. I saw figurines. I saw hook rugs. I saw doilies. I saw, you know, music. I saw sheet music.

罗宾·伯恩斯坦：我和旧居的馆长预约了一下。她很大方，布置了一张很大的桌子，上面摆满了这部名著的衍生文化产品和消费品。她招呼我进去，带我走到桌边，跟我聊起这些衍生产品。这些东西太棒了！我看到了印着小说人物图案的拼图、果酱罐、小雕像、钩针编结地毯、桌布还有乐谱。

Robin Bernstein:And it just blew my mind that people wanted to surround themselves, people wanted to live with these characters. They didn't just want to read the book and then put the book on the shelf. What they wanted to do was surround themselves with this story. They wanted to live in the story and that just blew my mind. So that was where I started to realize that this book was very special and very much unlike most other books of the 19th century and of today.

罗宾·伯恩斯坦：我没想到的是，人们竟然想让自己沉浸在这个小说的氛围中，希望在日常中看到这些小说人物的影子。他们不想读完书后把它合上、放回书架就了事，而是想在生活中感受到它。这点让我很惊讶。那时候我开始意识到，这本书非常特别，与19世纪乃至如今的大多数书都不一样。

Zachary Davis: Uncle Tom’s Cabin was intended to be an anti-slavery book, to provide a positive view of Black people in America. But it also has another, more complicated legacy. As the story became embedded in American culture, it unintentionally birthed new racist stereotypes. Uncle Tom’s Cabin today means something very different than it did when Stowe first published the story. And the way those meanings developed can help illuminate many of the racial challenges we continue to face.

扎克里·戴维斯：《汤姆叔叔的小屋》原本是一本反对奴隶制的书，塑造了正面的美国黑人形象。但它也带来了另一个更复杂的影响。这个故事在融入美国文化的过程中，也在无意间催生出了新的种族刻板印象。了解这些刻板印象的形成过程有助于我们看清如今仍然存在的许多种族问题。

Zachary Davis: Welcome to Writ Large, a podcast about how books change the world. I’m Zachary Davis. In each episode, I talk with one of the world’s leading scholars about one book that changed the course of history. For this episode, I sat down with Professor Robin Bernstein to discuss Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

扎卡里·戴维斯：欢迎收听：100本改变你和世界的书，在这里我们为大家讲述改变世界的书籍。我是扎卡里·戴维斯。每一集，我都会和一位世界顶尖学者探讨一本影响历史进程的书。在本集，我和罗宾·伯恩斯坦教授一起讨哈丽叶特·比切·斯托的《汤姆叔叔的小屋》。

Zachary Davis: Harriet Beecher Stowe was born in Litchfield, Connecticut in 1811. She was raised in a deeply religious household and she received a traditional academic education full of Greek, Latin and mathematics—a rare opportunity for women of this time. When she was 21, she moved from Connecticut to Cincinnati, Ohio to join her father, who ran the Lane Theological Seminary. Cincinnati sits on the Ohio River, which at that time was an important trade route and supported a large shipping industry. This brought workers from all around the country, including escaped slaves and bounty hunters searching for them.

扎卡里·戴维斯：1811年，哈丽叶特·比切·斯托出生在康涅狄格州的利奇菲尔德。他们家宗教氛围非常浓厚，她还接受了传统的学术教育，学过希腊语、拉丁语和数学——这对当时的女性来说是实属罕见。21岁时，她的父亲被任为莱恩神学院的院长，于是她随父亲从康涅狄格州搬到了俄亥俄州的辛辛那提。辛辛那提坐落在俄亥俄河畔，而俄亥俄河是当时一条重要的贸易航线，河上的航运非常繁忙。随之而来的便是来自全国各地的工人、逃亡的奴隶和追捕他们的赏金猎人。

Zachary Davis: Seeing the abuse that escaped slaves and free Blacks’ experience in this area became a huge influence on her later work. After Cincinnati, Stowe moved to Brunswick, Maine, where her husband taught at Bowdoin College. One day while she was in church, something strange happened.

扎克里·戴维斯：斯托目睹了黑奴在这儿逃亡、获得自由，这些经历深深地影响了她日后的作品。后来，她的丈夫受聘去鲍丁学院任教，于是他们从辛辛那提搬到了缅因州的布伦瑞克。有一天，她在教堂里遇到了一件怪事。

Robin Bernstein:Harriet Beecher Stowe was in church, and she was hearing a sermon, and as she described it later, she suddenly had a vision of what she referred to as a slave, an enslaved man being whipped. And she was a white Northern woman, and she had this very vivid image, according to her. And she went home and wrote the scene of Uncle Tom's Cabin in which Uncle Tom is killed. This is, of course, her narrative of how it happened, but that is what we have. And the rest of the novel flowed from there. She often said that she felt like God wrote it and that God wrote the novel through her.

罗宾·伯恩斯坦：据斯托夫人后来描述，她当时正在教堂聆听布道，突然间眼前浮现出一个正在被人鞭打的奴隶。这个北方白人女性眼前浮现出了这样的画面。回家后，她写下了《汤姆叔叔的小屋》中汤姆叔叔被折磨死的那段故事。当然这是她·口中的创作灵感的由来，不过我们也只了解到了这一种说法。小说的其他情节则从这段小故事发展而来。斯托夫人经常说，她觉得这本小说像是上帝借由她的手写的。

Zachary Davis: Was she a writer before she got the inspiration for this book?

扎克里·戴维斯：在有这本书的创作灵感之前，她写过什么作品吗？

Robin Bernstein: She was a writer, but she had not before written any novels. This was her first novel. She was not any kind of a famous writer. She was a relatively unknown person who really sat down to write this epic novel, and immediately got it serialized. It was serialized in The National Era, starting in 1851, and she was very much making it up as she went along. She didn't really know where it was going to go. She knew that at some point Uncle Tom was going to be whipped to death. But beyond that, she didn't exactly know what she was going to write next. So, she was letting the story unfold in real time.

罗宾·伯恩斯坦：《汤姆叔叔的小屋》是她的第一部小说，之前她没有写过任何小说，也不是什么著名作家。这个看起来默默无闻的人写下了这部史诗般的小说，很快就把它放到杂志上连载了。1851年起，小说开始在《国家时代》上连载。她写的时候信马由缰，只知道在某个时候汤姆叔叔会被鞭打致死。至于故事该如何继续，接下来要怎么走，她也一无所知。于是她就在写作中让故事一步步展开。

Zachary Davis: Stowe started writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1850. That same year, Congress passed the Second Fugitive Slave Act. Starting in 1774, northern U.S. states began to abolish slavery. Some enslaved people in the South tried to escape bondage by running away to free states in the North and even Canada.

扎克里·戴维斯：1850年，斯托夫人开始写《汤姆叔叔的小屋》。同年，美国国会通过了第二部《逃亡奴隶法》。1774年起，美国北部各州开始废除奴隶制。南方一些奴隶试图逃往北方自由州甚至加拿大来获得自由。

Zachary Davis: In 1793, the first Fugitive Slave Act was passed. The law said that any runaway slave captured in a free northern state must be returned to their slave master. But, even though this was law, it wasn’t strictly enforced in many northern states.

扎克里·戴维斯：1793年，国会通过了第一部《逃亡奴隶法》。该法案规定，任何在北方自由州抓获的逃亡奴隶都必须交还给他们的奴隶主。但是，即使法律这么规定，北方许多州也没有严格执行。

Zachary Davis: By 1804, all northern U.S. states had abolished slavery. Any slave that was able to escape the South and make it to the North had a good chance of staying free. This aggravated southern slaveholders, and so in 1850, the second, stricter Fugitive Slave Act was passed. This act required the North to return runaway slaves. Any official who avoided arresting an alleged runaway slave was subject to a $1,000 fine, which would be about $30,000 today.

扎克里·戴维斯：到了1804年，美国北部所有州都废除了奴隶制。任何能成功从南方逃到北方的奴隶都有了获得自由的机会。南方奴隶主被惹怒了，于是1850年，第二部更加严格的《逃亡奴隶法》在国会通过。该法案强制北方归还逃亡的奴隶。任何拒绝逮捕涉嫌逃亡奴隶的官员将被罚款一千美元，大约相当于如今的三千美元。

Robin Bernstein: So, it put free people in the North of all races in a terrible position of having to collude with slavery, having to support slavery, or having to break the law. And what it also did was it defined, it redefined people who had freed themselves from slavery in the South and who had run to the free North who were then free people. What it did was it redefined them as inherently enslaved and only temporarily free until they got caught and returned.

罗宾・伯恩斯坦：这个法案将北方各种族的自由民置于一种可怕的境地中——他们不得不屈从于奴隶制，否则就违背了法律。它还重新定义了南方在逃奴隶的身份。从前，这些人从南方逃到了北方自由州，成为了自由人。但这部法案告诉他们：你们生来就是奴隶，如今的自由不过是昙花一现，总有一天你们会被逮捕并遣返。

Robin Bernstein:So, this was a terrible violence, and, and it was one of the factors that led to the Civil War, eventually. Of course, that was long after Uncle Tom's Cabin. So, Harriet Beecher Stowe was also responding in part to the Fugitive Slave Act. She was also responding to the abolitionist movement in general. The abolitionist movement had been picking up steam for 20 years at that point, and she was very much aware of it. She was very influenced by abolitionist tracts. She was influenced by slave narratives, which had become published in large numbers starting in about 1845.

罗宾・伯恩斯坦：这简直就是骇人的暴行，而这也是南北战争爆发的原因之一。当然战争爆发的时候，《汤姆叔叔的小屋》已经问世很久了。哈丽叶特·比切·斯托写这本书，部分也是出于对这部法案的抗议。她还参与了更广泛的废奴运动。那时废奴运动已经开展了二十年，势头很猛，斯托夫人也深知这一点。1845年起，不少关于奴隶的故事陆续出版，斯托夫人也深受它们的影响。

Zachary Davis: Slave narratives were autobiographical accounts written by enslaved people. These narratives humanized enslaved people and provided an insider view of the evils of slavery. These narratives were very popular among abolitionists and were a critical tool for winning over new converts to the movement to end slavery.

扎克里·戴维斯：这些故事往往都是奴隶们的自传。它们展现了奴隶们的人性光辉，揭露了奴隶制的罪恶面目。这些故事在废奴主义者中非常流行，常常被他们用来劝说他人参加废奴运动。

Robin Bernstein: She was also influenced by abolitionist writing, the work of Theodore Weld and Angelina Grimke and Sarah Grimke. Their book, American Slavery as It Is, was one of the texts that she read and was influenced by. So, she was part of this abolitionist culture and abolitionist movement, although she had not taken any particular strong abolitionist action before writing Uncle Tom's Cabin.

罗宾·伯恩斯坦：斯托夫人还深受废奴主义作品的影响，其中之一便是西奥多·韦尔德、安吉丽娜·格莉姆克和萨拉·格莉姆克合著的《美国的奴隶制度》。她曾读过这本书，深受触动。尽管斯托夫人写《汤姆叔叔的小屋》之前并没有过什么鲜明的废奴主义举措，但她确实身处于废奴主义文化和运动的氛围中。

Zachary Davis: Could you give us a sense of the plot as a whole and take us through the story?

扎克里·戴维斯：你能不能给我们讲讲小说的大致情节？带我们了解一下这个故事吧。

Robin Bernstein:Well, broadly speaking, the story follows Uncle Tom. It starts with him in Kentucky, where he is enslaved by what would be characterized as relatively nonviolent, well-intentioned, enslaving white people. And this is part of Stowe’s point, that even under the very best circumstances, slavery is evil. So, she starts off by showing slavery in its, relatively speaking, “best” evil circumstances.

罗宾·伯恩斯坦：总得来说，小说是围绕着汤姆叔叔展开的。小说开头，汤姆叔叔在肯塔基州一户人家做奴隶。那儿的奴隶制相对来说比较温和，白人对他们相对友好、不那么暴力。不过在斯托夫人看来，即便在这种所谓的“最好的”环境下，奴隶制仍然很差劲。于是她在一开头就展现了在相对而言“最好的”情况下，奴隶制是什么样的。

Robin Bernstein: So, he is enslaved by these well-intentioned white people, and then he is sold. And the novel basically follows him as his situation gets worse and worse and worse. He is sold from one place to another, one set of enslaving white people to another, and things get worse. And eventually he ends up with the evil Simon Legree, who is in some ways not more evil than any of the other enslaving white characters. But he's the most overtly violent, and he whips Tom to death. So, that's basically the structure of the novel.

罗宾・伯恩斯坦：他在这户善良的白人家做奴隶，后来被卖掉了。随着情节的推进，汤姆叔叔的境遇也越来越糟。他从一处被卖到另一处，主人换了一拨又一拨，情况也越来越糟。最后，他被卖给了恶棍赛门·勒格里。其实在某些方面，他不一定比其他奴隶主更坏，但显然他最暴力，用鞭子把汤姆活活打死了。这就是小说的基本情节。

Robin Bernstein:And there are many, many characters. There are... I don't even know how many characters there are. There's probably 100 characters, which is not that unusual for a big, fat sentimental novel, which is what it is. So, it has kind of an epic flow. It's also very concerned about the American landscape. So, he is in multiple places throughout the South, and he's basically going further, deeper and deeper south throughout the novel.

罗宾·伯恩斯坦：小说中的人物很多，我不记得具体是多少个了，估计有一百个。不过这对于《汤姆叔叔的小屋》这样凄婉的大部头来说也算正常。小说有一种史诗般磅礴的感觉，它还关注了美国的自然风貌。小说中，主角汤姆叔叔在南方各地辗转，越来越深入南方。

Robin Bernstein: And he is encountering many different kinds of white people and many different kinds of African-Americans. And this is, again, part of Stowe's point. What she wants to do is she wants to show how slavery is evil under all circumstances, under circumstances that are more violent, circumstances that are less physically violent. She also wants, she's very concerned with showing how slavery hurts white people.

罗宾·伯恩斯坦：他遇到了许多不同类型的白人 和许多不同类型的黑人。这儿又能体现出斯托夫人的观点。她想借此说明不论奴隶主是否对奴隶施以暴行，奴隶制在任何情况下都是残酷的。此外，她还想展现奴隶制如何伤害了白人。

Robin Bernstein: So, she takes great care to show white people who have been devastated by slavery, even though they don't realize it. So, she shows a lot of enslaving white people who think they are living moral lives but who are, in fact, depraved. So, she's very interested in using that as part of her anti-slavery argument, that slavery does not only hurt Black people, slavery hurts white people.

罗宾・伯恩斯坦：所以，她花了很多心思来展现那些不知不觉间被奴隶制摧残的白人。她描绘了很多奴隶主。他们自以为道德高尚，但其实却道德败坏。这是她的废奴思想中的一个着意强调的观点，她以此来告诉读者，奴隶制不仅伤害了黑人，也伤害了白人。

Zachary Davis: In modern parlance, an “Uncle Tom” refers to a Black man willing to do anything to please white people. Someone excessively servile and obsequious. But that’s entirely different from how Stowe wanted to depict him.

扎克里·戴维斯：在现代语境下，“汤姆叔叔”指为取悦白人什么都愿意做的黑人、一个过于奴性且过于顺从的人。但这和斯托夫人想要刻画的形象完全不同。

Robin Bernstein: The idea of this superannuated, weak, infinitely self-ingratiating character, the Uncle Tom, that is now an insult—that, actually, that character is actually not really in the novel. That character came later through popular culture.

罗宾・伯恩斯坦：“汤姆叔叔”这个词现在很有贬义色彩，成为了“老气横秋”、“软弱无能”、“无限讨好别人”的代名词。但实际上，这并不是小说中的汤姆叔叔，而是后来大众文化中出现的形象。

Robin Bernstein: So, what we have in the novel is we have a relatively young middle-aged, very strong man who is deeply Christian and who is—he does do things that we would be very uncomfortable with nowadays, like he does, in fact swear his loyalty to his enslavers — but he's doing it out of his own Christian piety, which is difficult for us to understand today. But he's not doing it out of self-hatred, he's not doing it out of internalized racism. He's not doing it out of poor self-esteem. He's doing it out of a particular theological perspective that is relatively unfamiliar to most of us now.

罗宾·伯恩斯坦：小说中的汤姆叔叔是个相对年轻的中年人，很强壮，虔诚地信仰着基督教。他确实做了一些如今我们看来不太舒服的事情，比如他曾发誓效忠于自己的奴隶主。但他这么做仅仅是出于基督教信仰，不过如今我们会很难理解这一点。他不是出于自我厌恶、种族主义倾向或者是什么可怜的自尊心。他这么做只是出于对宗教的信仰，这一点是我们如今大多数人比较陌生的。

Zachary Davis: Uncle Tom isn’t the only character from the novel that this has happened to.

扎克里·戴维斯：汤姆叔叔并不是小说里唯一这么做的人物。

Robin Bernstein:I think one of the most important characters in Uncle Tom's Cabin is Topsy. So, Topsy is another character who entered popular culture in a way that actually reversed a lot of Stowe's arguments and Stowe's characterizations. So, Topsy is the young Black girl in, the young Black enslaved girl in Uncle Tom's Cabin who is bought by St. Clare, who is the father of Little Eva.

罗宾·伯恩斯坦：我觉得《汤姆叔叔的小屋》中最重要的人物之一是托普西。托普西慢慢进入到大众文化中，在大众文化中的形象和斯托夫人原本设计的也相差很多。在《汤姆叔叔的小屋》中，托普西是小伊娃的父亲圣克莱尔买下来的一个黑奴小姑娘。

Robin Bernstein: So, in the novel, what Stowe does that is very interesting is she presents this character of Topsy, who is mischievous, who is funny, but what Stowe does—that is actually nothing short of radical for the moment—is she makes it absolutely clear that all of Topsy’s misbehavior is due to the fact that she was abused. And she is explicit about that. And she describes in detail the wounds on Topsy’s body, the terrible wounds that have been committed against her.

罗宾·伯恩斯坦：在小说中，斯托夫人做了一件有意思的事情——这件事在当时可是相当激进了。她点明了，这个女孩之所以有满身的恶习，是因为她小时候曾经遭受过虐待。她很清楚地指出了这一点，还详细地描述了托普西身上的可怕伤痕。

Robin Bernstein:And she is very clearly identifying Topsy as a poor, abused child. And that's, that's a phrase that she uses, that she calls her, “a poor, abused child.” And anything Topsy does that is naughty, anything Topsy does that is dishonest—and Topsy does do naughty and dishonest things—it is all due to her abuse. And what Stowe makes absolutely clear is that Topsy is inherently good. Topsy is inherently a good person who has been hurt by slavery.

罗宾·伯恩斯坦：她非常明确地指出，托普西是一个可怜的、被虐待的孩子。这就是她的原话。托普西也确实顽劣、撒谎成性，但这些都是因为她被虐待过。斯托夫人清楚地展现了这个孩子善良的内心。她本质上是一个被奴隶制伤害过的好孩子。

Zachary Davis: Through Topsy, Stowe attempts to show that skin color doesn’t impact a person’s character. But over time the portrayal and meaning of Topsy was completely reversed. In later adaptations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Topsy retains her sense of humor, mischief and dishonesty, but her reasons for being that way are left out. Her undesirable traits are no longer a result of slavery. Instead, she is seen as inherently flawed.

扎克里·戴维斯：斯托夫人试图借由托普西这个角色表明，肤色并不影响一个人的品性。但后来，托普西的形象和意义被完全颠覆了。在后来改编的《汤姆叔叔的小屋》中，托普西仍然很幽默，喜欢做恶作剧，爱撒谎，但这么做的原因却被删去了。她的不良品性不再是由奴隶制造成的，反而是与生俱来的。

Robin Bernstein: Topsy became simply the prototype for what became known as, as the so-called “pickaninny.” The pickaninny is an extremely racist anti-Black character. And the pickaninny is a Black child, in the United States, but also beyond the United States, who is defined by being impish, by being mischievous and by being wicked, but most of all by being impervious to pain.

罗宾·伯恩斯坦：她成了“黑鬼娃子”的原型。“黑鬼娃子”是一个极端种族主义的、歧视性的黑人角色。在美国乃至世界其他地方，“黑鬼娃子”指的是调皮捣蛋的黑人小孩，性情顽劣，一肚子坏水，最重要的是还不怕疼。

Robin Bernstein: So, this pickaninny character that we see in popular culture is often viciously abused, and often these characters viciously abuse each other. And this is one of the origins of some of the humor that we associate with cartoons, the cartoons that we know, the Saturday morning cartoons where it's basically just characters beating up each other all the time.

罗宾·伯恩斯坦：大众文化中的这些“黑鬼娃子”常常被人别有用心地开涮，甚至这些角色之间还会互相攻讦。很多我们熟悉的动画片都拿他们做笑料。比如在一些周六晨间档的动画片里，这些角色就不停地打来打去。

Robin Bernstein:So, this is an exact reversal. The whole idea of the pickaninny is that the pickaninny cannot actually be hurt. So, any kind of violence involving a pickaninny is just comedic. It's a way of erasing the real pain, the real abuse that is suffered by African-American children in history, which is, it's so tragic to me because that is the exact reversal of the point that Stowe wanted to make. Stowe wanted to make the point that Black children are hurt by slavery, and they are hurt by abuse. So, popular culture utterly reversed and perverted Stowe's point.

罗宾·伯恩斯坦：这跟斯托夫人塑造的形象完全相悖。大众文化中的“黑鬼娃子”完全不会真正受伤，所以任何对“黑鬼娃子”的暴行都带有喜剧色彩，但这种喜剧色彩会把黑人孩子遭受的真真切切的痛苦从大众视线中抹去。在我看来，这简直就是一出悲剧，因为它跟斯托夫人原来的意图完全相反。斯托夫人想做的是指出黑人孩子在奴隶制下所遭遇的伤害与虐待。所以说，大众文化彻底歪曲了斯托夫人的观点。

Zachary Davis: Some other characters in the story, however, have stayed exactly the same. For example, Little Eva, the daughter of one of Uncle Tom’s enslavers.

扎克里·戴维斯：不过故事中的其他人物却没有被曲解，比如汤姆叔叔一个主人的女儿——小伊娃。

Robin Bernstein: So, little Eva is the little white girl who is perfect and holy and innocent and who dies, and that character really did not get reversed at all. Later on, about 50 years after Uncle Tom's Cabin, so by the turn of the 20th century, Stowe's novel was in some ways seen as camp. And so by that time, Little Eva became a little bit campy. But we don't see a kind of reversal the way we see with Topsy and Tom.

罗宾·伯恩斯坦：小伊娃是个完美、圣洁无暇、天真无辜的白人小姑娘，最后病死了。这个角色没有出现什么反转。后来，大概是《汤姆叔叔的小屋》问世五十年后，也就是20世纪初，人们觉得斯托夫人的小说有点坎普风，于是小伊娃也变得有点坎普风。不过她的形象没有像汤姆叔叔和托普西那样完全走到了原著的反面。

Zachary Davis:I'd love to understand the immediate reception and reaction to Uncle Tom's Cabin as it came out in its time.

扎克里·戴维斯：我很好奇《汤姆叔叔的小屋》问世后，读者的反应和接受情况是怎样的。

Robin Bernstein:It was first serialized in The National Era in 1851 to 1852. It was published as a book in 1852. It was immediately very popular. It sold 3,000 copies, I believe, on the first day. And within the first year, it sold over 300,000 copies. So clearly, that was a very, very popular book. And that's just in the United States. There were many, many more copies sold in Great Britain.

罗宾·伯恩斯坦：1851年到1852年，小说首先在《国家时代》上连载。1852年，它集结成书出版。读者反响非常热烈，第一天书就卖出去了三千本，第一年就卖出了三十多万本。所以显然，这本书非常受欢迎。这还只是在美国，在英国也卖出去了很多本。

Zachary Davis: Uncle Tom’s Cabin was first available to the public as a serialized story. The abolitionist periodical The National Era published the story in installments over 40 weeks. It became so popular, the publisher John Jewett got in touch with Stowe and proposed turning the serialized story into a single book. Stowe agreed and sold Jewett the rights. It was a risky move for Jewett. He ran a relatively small publishing company and couldn’t afford for the book to fail. He had to make sure this would be a success.

扎卡里·戴维斯：《汤姆叔叔的小屋》最早以连载的形式出现在公众面前。废奴主义杂志《国家时代》在四十周内连载了这个故事。它很受欢迎，于是出版商约翰·朱厄特找到了斯托夫人，建议她将连载故事整合成一本书。斯托夫人同意了，把版权卖给了朱厄特。这对朱厄特来说算是一场豪赌。他经营的出版公司规模相对比较小，所以决不能让这本书卖不出去。他必须确保它大获成功。

Robin Bernstein: So, what he did was he launched a massive advertising campaign. He sunk so much money into advertising. He characterized his own advertising campaign as “insane”. So, what he did was, even before the book was published, he commissioned Hammett Billings, an artist, to create illustrations for Uncle Tom's Cabin. Hammett Billings created in the first round six illustrations, but the interesting thing to me is that these illustrations did not appear first in the novel. Where they appeared first was in advertisements.

罗宾・伯恩斯坦： 于是他推出了一个大型宣传活动，投入了大量广告费。他说，自己这场宣传活动 “太疯狂了”。在书出版之前，他委托艺术家哈马特·比林斯为《汤姆叔叔的小屋》创作插图。比林斯在第一轮创作了六幅插图。不过我觉得有意思的是，这些插图最开始并没有出现在小说里，而是用在了在广告中。

Robin Bernstein:So, these illustrations were circulating before the novel was published. So what this means is that even before the novel was published, it was theater, it was newspaper, it was visual culture all before it was a novel between two covers. There is no moment in which Uncle Tom's Cabin was only a book. From its very beginning, it was a serialized novel, it was a novel, and it was performance. It was on stage immediately. It was in material culture immediately.

罗宾·伯恩斯坦：这些插图在小说出版之前就已经流传开来了。这意味着在它出版成带封皮的小说前，它是戏剧、是报纸宣传画，传递的是视觉文化。《汤姆叔叔的小屋》在任何时候都不只是一本书。一开始，它就是连载故事、小说和宣传画；很快它又被搬到了舞台上；之后它又很快出现在物质文化中。

Zachary Davis: Why this story? What made it different? What made it special?

扎克里·戴维斯：为什么偏偏是这个故事呢？是什么让它与众不同、如此特别？

Robin Bernstein: Here's what I think. I think Stowe had a very particular kind of genius, and her genius was she was able to suck in, like a big giant vacuum, she was able to suck in all these elements from popular culture. So, she sucked in minstrelsy. She sucked in sentimental images of white children. She sucked in slave narratives. She sucked in all of these different elements of popular culture. And then she compressed them, and she remade them in these highly volatile forms.

罗宾·伯恩斯坦：我是这么想的。我觉得斯托夫人有一种非常特别的天赋。她就像一个巨大的吸尘器一样，能够从大众文化中汲取所需。她借鉴并吸收了黑脸秀的元素、白人孩子多愁善感的形象以及和奴隶有关的故事。在吸收完所有这些不同的大众文化元素之后，她把它们整合到了一起，用这种高度灵活的方式重塑了它们。

Zachary Davis: Minstrelsy was an extremely popular and cruel form of public theatre.

扎卡里·戴维斯：“黑脸秀”是当时公共剧院里一种非常流行、但又让人不适的表演。

Robin Bernstein: Minstrelsy was an onstage tradition in which white people, mostly at this period, almost exclusively white men, were blackening their faces with usually shoe polish or coal or something like that. They were blackening their faces. They were performing a fantasy version of what Black culture was.

罗宾·伯恩斯坦：“黑脸秀”是公共剧院的一种传统。当时，白人（大多是白人男性）会用鞋油或煤炭把脸涂黑来扮演黑人。他们表现的是白人想象中的黑人文化。

Zachary Davis: There were different forms of minstrelsy. Some were oriented toward music, others humor, but Black people were always the butt of the joke.

扎卡里·戴维斯：黑脸秀有很多不同的形式，有的是音乐剧，有的是喜剧，但嘲笑黑人是它们共同的主题。

Robin Bernstein: The basic effect of minstrelsy in this period was to denigrate Black people and also to unite white working class people. At this moment in history, it was largely, although not exclusively, a working class phenomenon. And what seems to have been the case was that white working class men were uniting with each other against Black people in general.

罗宾·伯恩斯坦：当时，黑脸秀既是为了贬损黑人，也是为了团结白人工人阶级。在那个历史时期，尽管这并非白人阶级特有的现象，但很多也都和白人工人阶级有关。总体上来看，白人工人阶级当时都在联合起来反对黑人。

Zachary Davis: The legacy of minstrel shows persist even today. The genre pioneered a form of corny humor meant to ridicule Black people, often in the form of jokes like “why did the chicken cross the road”.

扎卡里·戴维斯：黑脸秀的影响甚至还延续到了今天。这种剧开创了一种意在嘲弄黑人的无聊段子，比如“鸡为什么要过马路”这种梗。

Robin Bernstein: And we know lots and lots of other jokes, you know, “Why does the firemen wear red suspenders? To keep his pants up.” That's a minstrel joke. So, minstrelsy has not gone away. It's simply gone into other forms. But in Stowe's day, everybody would have known that those jokes were minstrel jokes. Today, those jokes’ origins are obscured, but at the time they were not.

罗宾·伯恩斯坦：还有很多别的段子，比如：“消防员为什么要穿红背带？为了把裤子挂住。”这就是黑脸秀段子。所以黑脸秀并没有消失，只是演变成了别的形式。在斯托夫人那个时代，每个人都知道这些是黑脸秀段子。如今这些段子的起源已经鲜为人知，但当时大家都知道。

Zachary Davis: Uncle Tom’s Cabin subverted minstrel tropes, but it wasn’t immune to them.

扎克里·戴维斯：《汤姆叔叔的小屋》推翻了黑脸秀对黑人的讽刺，但它也不能完全免受黑脸秀的影响。

Robin Bernstein:I think part of why Uncle Tom's Cabin was so popular when many, many other novels weren't was that, first of all, Stowe had this particular genius for taking in aspects of popular culture and crystallizing them in a newly powerful form. But then the other half of it was that these newly crystalline characters that she sent out into the world were particularly vulnerable to being remade. They were iconic, and they were reversible.

罗宾·伯恩斯坦：在我看来，《汤姆叔叔的小屋》这么受欢迎，而其他许多小说却不受欢迎，一是因为斯托夫人的特殊天赋——她能从大众文化出发，将其具体化为一种新的强有力的作品。另一个原因是，这些综合大众文化元素的人物，再次进入大众视野时特别容易被改造。他们富有标志性，而且形象可以被改造。

Robin Bernstein: So, Uncle Tom's Cabin was incredibly useful to abolitionists, but it also could be adapted to pro-slavery purposes. And that's something that some people did very unsuccessfully immediately, but in the long term, people did it very successfully.

罗宾·伯恩斯坦：所以，《汤姆叔叔的小屋》成为了废奴主义的利器，但它也可以被改编成支持奴隶制的作品。尽管在短时间内有些人在这块做得不怎么成功，但从长期历史来看，这些改编还是成功了。

Zachary Davis: Stowe was a devoted abolitionist, and she wanted Uncle Tom’s Cabin to be her contribution to the movement.

扎克里·戴维斯：斯托夫人是一个坚定的废奴主义者，她希望《汤姆叔叔的小屋》帮助推动废奴运动的发展。

Robin Bernstein: What she wanted was for white women in particular, to read her novel and weep and be persuaded that slavery was evil. That's what she wanted. For her, the way to, the primary means to getting that was to cause her readers to “feel right”. So, for her, a feeling was an absolutely necessary part of a process. And she wanted people to feel right and then be prompted to action. She didn't want that people simply to act.

罗宾・伯恩斯坦： 她希望读者读完这本小说后，可以流下两行热泪，觉得奴隶制很残忍。她特别希望白人女性读者能有这样的反应。这就是她想要的。对她来说，为废奴运动做贡献的主要方式，是让读者感觉到什么是正确的。在她看来，唤起情感共鸣是废奴运动的重要一环。她希望读者感觉到什么是正确的，然后鼓励他们积极行动。她不希望读者只是一股脑地去行动。

Zachary Davis: It’s one thing to understand something intellectually, but it’s another thing to understand it emotionally. By making people actually feel the horrors of slavery, Stowe generated greater urgency and enthusiasm among abolitionists to push for slavery’s end.

扎克里·戴维斯：从理智上理解某件事是一回事，但从情感上理解它又是另一回事。斯托夫人让人们切切实实地感受到了奴隶制的可怕之处，让人们看到了废除奴隶制度的迫切性，唤起了废奴主义者的热情，推动了美国奴隶制走向终结。

Robin Bernstein: What it did was, it made abolitionism very prominent in popular culture. It gave people an easy way to talk about slavery. It gave people an easy, accessible way to think about the evils of slavery.

罗宾・伯恩斯坦：她让废奴主义在大众文化中凸显出来，让人们得以以一种简单、方便的方式谈论奴隶制、思考奴隶制的罪恶。

Zachary Davis: One of Stowe’s tools was visual language.

扎卡里・戴维斯：斯托夫人的方法之一是视觉语言。

Robin Bernstein:Stowe said that what she wanted to do was write in pictures. She wanted to paint pictures with words, and she wanted to create these images with her words that were utterly vivid and absolutely visual. And we should remember that her initial inspiration for Uncle Tom's Cabin was her own vision—in her own retelling—of Uncle Tom being whipped to death.

罗宾·伯恩斯坦：斯托夫人说，她想用图像化的语言来写作，用文字描绘画面，创造出栩栩如生的视觉场景。别忘了，据她自己描述，她最初的创作灵感便是汤姆叔叔被鞭打致死的画面。

Robin Bernstein:She wanted the images themselves to sear themselves into people's bodies and be unremovable. She wanted her characters to be visually unforgettable, and in fact, they are. So this is another way in which her novel both galvanized feeling, but also created its own staying power. She wanted to touch people. She wanted to move people. And how she wanted to do that was by involving their bodies, but especially involving their eyes.

罗宾·伯恩斯坦：她希望这些画面能深深地印在人们脑海里，给人留下不可磨灭的印象。她希望笔下的人物能给人难以忘怀的视觉印象，事实也确实如此。这是她的小说既能感染别人、又能经久不衰的另一种方式。她想打动别人，想要通过他们的五官、尤其是双眼来打动他们。

Zachary Davis: How is it continued to be read, engaged with, and adapted until the present day?

扎克里·戴维斯：时至今日，人们又是如何阅读、评价、改编这部小说的呢？

Robin Bernstein: Uncle Tom's Cabin has never gone away. Uncle Tom's Cabin is with us still. Just the fact that, if one calls somebody an Uncle Tom, those are fighting words. And phrases from Uncle Tom's Cabin are still very commonly used, even by people who don't necessarily know what they come from. So, there's tremendous afterlife with the characters, with their reversals, with some of the things that we think we know about slavery. We got them from Uncle Tom's Cabin even if we don't realize we got them.

罗宾·伯恩斯坦：《汤姆叔叔的小屋》从来就没有远去， 仍然在我们身边。不过现实中，如果有人叫了别人一声“汤姆叔叔”，那绝对是在引战。小说中的很多短语仍然在被人们普遍使用，即使有时候人们不知道这些词的出处。小说也一直保持着的生命力——人物形象被改编或完全变成另外一个模样，也让我们看到了我们自以为了解的奴隶制的模样。也许我们没有察觉到，但我们确确实实从《汤姆叔叔的小屋》中收获了很多。

Robin Bernstein: So, every time we see an imperiled white child and we are asked to be worried about that imperiled white child more than we would be worried about an imperiled child of color; every time our sympathy, we are asked to protect an imperiled white child in a way that we are not asked to protect imperiled children of color, that is a restaging of Little Eva.

罗宾·伯恩斯坦：每当我们看到一个奄奄一息的白人孩子，比起同样奄奄一息的有色人种的孩子，人们都要求我们多替白人孩子担心担心。每当我们心怀怜悯，人们要求我们给予有色人种孩子的保护，总是比不上给白人孩子的保护。这就是对小伊娃的重新解读。

Robin Bernstein: So, it's everywhere. Just the—and this is what I have written about extensively—the idea that childhood innocence and its demands for protection are apportioned to white children and they are denied to children of color, that's something that I've written about a lot. So, so these are aspects of Uncle Tom's Cabin that are utterly alive and utterly with us.

罗宾·伯恩斯坦：没错，这种感觉贯穿整部小说。我写过很多这方面的分析——小说展现了儿童的天真无邪和需要保护的一面，但是这一面集中表现在了白人儿童身上，在有色人种小孩身上却看不到。这些便是《汤姆叔叔的小屋》鲜活且持续至今的方方面面。

Zachary Davis: Stowe was well aware of the demonizing myths and lies that white people told about Black people in America and the damaging effects it had on society as a whole. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was her attempt to show a white audience a side of Black people that popular culture did not portray.

扎克里·戴维斯：斯托夫人非常清楚白人为了妖魔化黑人而制造的那些流言蜚语，也深知这些会给整个美国社会带来怎样的影响。她试图向白人观众展现大众文化中缺失的黑人的面貌，《汤姆叔叔的小屋》便是他的一次尝试。

Robin Bernstein:The fact that has been very well documented, empirically documented, that children of color are punished more and they are subjected to more suspicion than white children who commit similar disobedience, for example. So, things like, things that are really quite normal childhood behavior, like throwing tantrums, for example. I mean, kids throw tantrums and they throw tantrums regardless of race. But Black children, for example, and Latinx children who throw tantrums tend to be much, tend to be treated like proto-criminals or actual criminals, rather than like children who are behaving in ways that are undesirable but normal.

罗宾·伯恩斯坦：事实证明，比起那些同样桀骜不驯的白人孩子，有色人种的孩子会受到更多的惩罚和怀疑。所以很多非常正常的小孩子的行为，比如发脾气，其实是不分种族的——每个种族的小孩子都会发脾气。但发脾气的黑人小孩和拉美裔小孩更容易被视为天生的犯罪分子，甚至是个真正的罪犯，却唯独不被看作一个爱惹事的正常小孩。

Zachary Davis: Uncle Tom’s Cabin contributed to this legacy of racism by giving us characters like Topsy and Uncle Tom himself—characters that were later transformed into demeaning stereotypes. But Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a radically progressive book for its time, and it had a positive impact on the abolitionist movement and on American culture as a whole. It forced every one of its readers to stare reality in the face and imagine a more just nation.

扎克里·戴维斯：《汤姆叔叔的小屋》抵制了种族主义的不良影响，向我们展现了托普西和汤姆叔叔这样的角色，但这些角色后来又催生出了新的种族主义刻板印象。不过在当时，《汤姆叔叔的小屋》是一本激进的书，对废奴运动和整个美国文化都产生了积极影响。它让每一个读者不得不直面现实，期待建立一个更公正的国家。

Robin Bernstein:Uncle Tom's Cabin created a set of icons, a set of racial icons that have simply never gone away. Uncle Tom's Cabin created a set of images that seared into the American psyche and continue to influence people who have no idea that they actually came from the novel.

罗宾·伯恩斯坦：《汤姆叔叔的小屋》创造出了很多经久不衰的黑人与白人的形象。这些形象深深地刻在了美国人的脑海中，持续影响着人们，即便有时候他们不知道这些形象其实来自于这本小说。

Robin Bernstein: Uncle Tom's Cabin contributed some of the ways that we are still thinking about race, some of the ways that we still think about who we are as Americans, and in some ways, some of the ways in which Uncle Tom's Cabin has taught us to think about ourselves and raise some of those ways are profoundly damaging and profoundly racist, and other ways that Uncle Tom's Cabin has taught us to think about ourselves have potential for social change and social justice. So, the reason we should care about Uncle Tom's Cabin is that it created a series of icons that we are still living with, for better and for worse.

罗宾·伯恩斯坦：《汤姆叔叔的小屋》提供了一些思考方式，如今我们仍然在以这些方式思考种族、思考美国人到底是什么样的。在有些方面，它教给我们反思自我并提出问题的途径很有破坏性、同时也带有种族主义色彩；不过在另一些方面，它教给我们反思自我的途径推动了社会变革、迎来了社会公平。我们之所以应当关注《汤姆叔叔的小屋》，是因为它塑造了一系列人物形象，不论是好是坏，如今它们都还没有离我们远去。

Zachary Davis: Writ Large is a production of Ximalaya. Writ Large is produced by Jack Pombriant, Liza French, and me, Zachary Davis. Script editing is by Galen Beebe. We get help from Feiran Du, Ariel Liu, and Monica Zhang. Our theme song is by Ian Coss. Don’t miss an episode. Subscribe today in the Ximalaya app. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

扎卡里·戴维斯：本节目由喜马拉雅独家制作播出。感谢您的收听，我们下期再见！