Uncle Tom’s Cabin or, Life Among the Lowly by Harriet Beecher Stowe is one of those tremendously important novels that I never wanted to read. Yes, Lincoln greeted Stowe with the remark, “Here is the little lady who made this great war,” and it incited the howling protest of the south (as well as scores of ‘rebuttals’), but I expected a melodramatic and not very satisfying literary experience. I was wrong. The book is suspenseful, direct, and extremely powerful. As an American, that is a person who lives with the political and social legacy of centuries of slavery and Jim Crow all around me, it is at times, a harrowing read.
In American English, an Uncle Tom is a black man who is compliant and subservient to his masters, often in an obsequious and fawning manner – that’s the cliché. The character of Tom in the novel, however, is not like this at all. In the introduction to my edition, and this NYTimes piece on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the book, the writers account for this contradiction by pointing out that the novel, which was incredibly popular, was immediately copied, parodied, adapted to the stage, and eventually found its way into, of all things, Minstrel Shows. Along the way, a novelistic broadside against racism and slavery became a comedic entertainment perpetuating racist stereotypes. Such is the wending path of culture.
The book is sentimental at times, particularly in two areas: the description of the slaves; and the treatment of religion. Stowe portrays the slaves almost always a fine souls, at the worst, a little ridiculous: not genuine people who will be good, bad, or indifferent. They are filled with noble sentiments, and their faults are only the product of their degraded state in life. They are described often as having the positive attributes of childhood: sincerity, directness, empathy. Whether this was Stowe’s actual view or a means to make her characters more attractive to her readers I do not know. As the editor remarks in the introduction, this sentimentality has a radical element in that directing such feelings toward African slaves involved contradicting their status as chattel, often regarded as members of a non-human or sub-human species.
The treatment of religion, especially in the depiction of the death of the little angel, Eva, is a fine example of Victorian religious sentimentality, and might bring to mind Oscar Wilde’s quip about Dickens: One would have to have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without dissolving into tears…of laughter. But it is sincere nevertheless: Stowe was serious in her belief that adherence to Christian teaching would make the institution of slavery impossible.
Abolitionists, of which Stowe was one, sometimes criticized Uncle Tom for being too light in its criticism of slavery. This may have to do with the fact that the slaves are, for the most part, house servants and higher level members of the plantation staff, and have relatively good masters. Perhaps Stowe felt she could not write convincingly of the thoughts and feelings of workers spending their days toiling in sugar cane and the like, and in this, she followed an important writers’ guideline: write what you know. By focusing on the hardships of slaves under benign masters, who nevertheless face servitude and the potential breakup of their families, she opens, but leaves unanswered the question, how much worse would it be for those with hard masters? The slaves live in fear of “being sold down the river,” (I never knew the origin of that phrase!) i.e. shipped off to plantations further south where the hard labor kills them off quickly. Then she brings that about for Tom, who is sold to the vile Simon Legree.
Stowe is not the least sentimental when she skewers the hypocrisy, intellectual, theological, and political, that surrounds the peculiar institution. A lengthy section in which Tom is owned by Augustine, a jaded and refined member of the plantation élite, provides a stage to walk on and dismantle all sorts of notions that were argued about slavery in the pre-Civil War days. Augustine knows all the arguments, and dismisses them all as humbug. He knows it’s wrong, and that slavery is based on nothing but might and self-interest, but he does nothing about it – does not free his slaves – because he claims to be lazy and indifferent, but he is kind and thoughtful to his human property. His cynicism masks the corruption and despair of a soul polluted by the institution that makes his leisured affluence possible. His wife, a clear ancestor of Tennessee Williams’ neurotic belle, Blanche Dubois, spends her days in bed with headaches and complaints, and has nothing but contempt for her servants. Augustine is also an atheist, which Stowe sees as the cause of his moral inertia, but with the death of his daughter, he is shaken loose of his torpor, but too late.
Augustine, a typical Victorian ideal figure – he has a Grecian profile, alabaster skin, golden curls, and a noble temperament – may represent the class of people Stowe was trying to influence. Certainly the grim and vulgar Simon Legree is a species of the white trash, in the North and South, with whom she would not bother. Ophelia, Augustine’s Yankee cousin who comes to stay with him, represents a properly religious northerner. Although she is abolitionist to the core, she is stung when Augustine truthfully points out to her that she is disgusted by the Africans in her midst. As always, the southerners claim that you northerners don’t know how to treat our negroes. Ophelia, in touch with her Christian faith, changes however, and repents of her moral error.
Very often, Stowe points out with brutal clarity how what would be considered immoral and intolerable among whites is considered perfectly normal for whites to inflict on the slaves: breaking up families and selling them off like horses at auction, for example. In one stunning passage, she explicitly compares an escaped slave, George, who holds off his pursuers with a rifle, to Hungarian freedom fighters opposing Austrian oppression, a cause supported by many Americans. What is the difference, she asks, other than color? So much for sentimentality.
In many passages of the novel, Stowe references the sexual degradation that awaits pretty girls sold to less than humane masters, something which brought to my mind the statue The Greek Slave Girl by Hiram Powers, one of the most popular pieces of art in the 19th century. Copies were made and widely distributed, and crowds lined up to see it. The press did not often make the connection between Greeks sold into slavery by Turks and American enslavement of Africans, but some people did. Moreover, literary accounts of ‘white’ girls, i.e. women who were legally black although of very light skin and hair, and were sold as slaves, were sometimes a sensation: perhaps a truly white girl could, by mistake, find herself enslaved? The knot of social/sexual issues surrounding all this is so huge, how can one hope to cut through it? It is just this sort of mental/moral frisson, if not outrage, that Stowe calculated on producing in her readers. Her armory was large: if expositions of intellectual hypocrisy don’t convince try religion; If appeals to religious truth and values doesn’t work, try sex and violence; If that doesn’t work, try the sentimental. They all lead to the same place – abolitionism.
I’m nearly through with the book, and I still don’t know why it’s called Uncle Tom’s Cabin…
Posted by Lichanos 
