ABSTRACT

This chapter expresses that it is precisely within this colonizing episteme that Harriet Beecher Stowe's domestic theology pictures Grace as a graceful whiteness moving in corrective opposition to an ungraceful blackness, which, under the racialized sign of Topsy, shows up as both a heathen disruption and a hauntingly hard-to-see nothing. Essential to Stowe's evangelical designs for Topsy's (spiritual-political) liberation is her view of the relationship between Grace, understood specifically as salvation, and gracefulness, understood as refinement and aesthetic beauty, particularly in one's way of movement. Eva's whiteness is essential to Stowe's picture of Eva's gracefulness as inextricable from God's Grace in her. On the one hand, Eva's inner Grace is linked to the color white because of western society's history of associating holiness and purity with whiteness. On the other hand, Eva's outer graces are attributed to the white skin and fine features she inherits from her father's rich Saxon bloodline.