Thursday
At the moment, as I slog towards the end of my current book project (Better Living through Literature: A 2500-Year-Old Debate), I am using blog deadlines as book deadlines—which means subjecting you, dear reader, to various stages of the revision process. Today I’ll share my meditations on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which I’m including in my chapter on popular or culinary literature. I include it there with a caveat, however, because I’m not entirely sure whether the novel appears in the lesser or greater literature category. I lean towards the second but hear me out on the matter.
One of the questions I address in my book is whether great literature has a greater impact than lesser literature and, if so, whether great literature is good for us and lesser literature bad. Or if not bad, at least not so good. Since most of my book points in a “yes” direction, then Uncle Tom’s Cabin, if it is no more than a melodramatic potboiler, presents me with a particular challenge. After all, it helped bring about the end of American slavery.
Of that, there’s little doubt. In his book Mightier than the Sword: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Battle for America, Davis S. Reynolds makes a compelling case that Stowe tilted the playing field in abolition’s favor.
She did so in various ways. First, the novel rejuvenated and united the abolition movement, which until publication had been scattered. It also made it more likely that an anti-slavery candidate would be elected president (which contributed to the outbreak of hostilities) and hardened southern attitudes (which did the same). After the war had started, the novel, which was wildly popular in Britain, undermined British sympathy for the southern cause. It also may have helped stiffen Lincoln’s spine so that he signed the Emancipation Proclamation.
From a political science point of view, Uncle Tom’s Cabin can be said to have shifted the Overton window, which is the range of policies deemed politically acceptable at the time. Before the novel, many abolitionists were regarded as wild-eyed radicals. After the novel, it became respectable to debate the evils of slavery.
The novel’s power lay foremost in its emotional appeal. Reynolds describes the reception:
Sympathetic readers were thrilled when the fugitive slave Eliza Harris carried her child across the ice floes of the Ohio River and when her husband George fought off slave-catchers in a rocky pass. They cried over the death of the angelic Eva St. Clare and the fatal lashing of the good Uncle Tom. They guffawed at the impish slave girl Topsy and shed thankful tears when she embraced Christianity. They loved to hate the selfish hypochondriac Marie St. Clare and the cruel slave owner Simon Legree. They were fascinated by the brooding, Byronic Augustine St. Clare. They were shocked by the stories of sexual exploitation surrounding enslaved women like Prue and Cassy.
Reynolds notes novelist Henry James’s response when reading it as a boy:
[The novel] knew the large felicity of gathering in alike the small and the simple and the big and the wise, and had above all the extraordinary fortune of finding itself, for an immense number of people, much less a book than a state of vision, of feeling and of consciousness, in which they didn’t sit and read and appraise and pass the time, but walked and talked and laughed and cried. . .
Part of the novel’s effectiveness, Reynolds notes, lies in the skillful way that Stowe merges two strains of popular fiction, the sensational and the sentimental. Sensational writings, he notes, were usually published as pamphlet novels and featured “criminals, pirates, or other social outcasts involved in nefarious deeds that were often bloody or transgressive.” Sentimental fiction, meanwhile, often was about people who had visions of angels and heaven. Stowe herself had written stories about sinless children whom she regarded as “living examples of Christian love.” Reynolds observes that Stowe was the first writer in American history to effectively combine the two.
That Stowe draws on these strains doesn’t automatically mean that Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a work of lesser or culinary fiction. In my chapter on the subject, I note that great authors will often plug into the energies of lesser authors to produce great works. Kurt Vonnegut draws on the pulp sci-fi magazines of the 1950s, many featuring bug-eyed monsters, in Slaughterhouse Five, and Margaret Atwood borrows from 19th century penny dreadfuls and the sensationalist press in her award-winning Alias Grace. That Uncle Tom’s Cabin has elements of the sensational and the sentimental doesn’t automatically make it a lesser work.
What is determinative is whether the work plays mostly on the emotions or whether the head gets involved. Thomas Dixon, a racist author who hated Uncle Tom’s Cabin, used many of its techniques, including the merging of the sensational and the sentimental, in composing The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden, 1865-1900 (1902)and The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905). These are novels that have done a great deal of damage, solidifying Jim Crow segregation, resurrecting the KKK, and promulgating the noxious myth of “the lost cause,” with the damage compounded further by D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, a film version of The Clansman. Plato, who fears how fictional immersion will unleash unruly passions, would be justified in excluding Dixon from his ideal republic.
In my eyes, however, Stowe’s use of sensation and sentiment is mixed with thoughtful reflection. Many of her characters are three-dimensional—including Uncle Tom, who in the novel is not the caricature he later came to be seen as—and her handling of different types of slavery and slave owners, not to mention northern liberals, is often nuanced. Earlier in my book I note that Friedrich Engels, while inveighing against literature with a political agenda, says that it’s not necessarily bad that poets are partisan, as Stowe undeniably is. It’s only bad when they can’t separate their political agendas from their responsibility to accurately describe reality.
If Stowe had given us nothing but sentimental caricatures of African Americans, then she would have denied their humanity no less than Dixon with his demonic depiction of Gus, the former slave who rapes the pure-of-heart Marion. (“A single tiger spring, and the black claws of the beast sank into the soft white throat and she was still.”) Whatever short-term good Uncle Tom’s Cabin did would be offset by a different kind of stereotyping.
In “note to self” Lucille Clifton describes this trap, talking of how “the merely human/is denied me still/and i am now no longer beast/ but saint.” In my view, Stowe does not show us saints (well, except for Little Eva) but three-dimensional people wrestling for their humanity within an evil system. When she shared this vision with the world, the world changed.