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Uncle Tom's Cabin
Background Information
There has never been any question about the power of Harriet Beecher
Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) as a literary
document and cultural phenomenon. In the first week of publication, 10,000
copies of the book were sold; 300,000 were sold by the end of 1852, making
it the most successful bestseller of the nineteenth century. Soon after
its publication, theatrical versions of the book were produced across
the country, thus popularizing Stowe's story and characters, several of
whose names—Uncle Tom, Simon Legree, Topsy—became common expressions
in the language. Furthermore, particular episodes in the novel—Eliza
crossing the Ohio River on ice floes while clutching her baby, Little
Eva dying, Uncle Tom enduring a beating that proves fatal—became
iconic. President Lincoln allegedly told Stowe when he met her in 1862,
"So you're the little woman who wrote the book that started this
great war!" And when the contemporary critic John W. DeForest in
1868 coined the phrase "the great American novel," he named
Uncle Tom's Cabin as the strongest candidate
to date.
While there has never been any doubt of its influence on American culture
and history, Uncle Tom's Cabin, like other
so-called women's novels of the nineteenth century, failed to make it
into the canon of American literature, as selected by professors and critics
who downplayed its literary merit. Stowe's depiction of slavery, her conviction
about the centrality of the family, and her employment of the rhetoric
of sentimentality were all factors in the novel's resounding commercial
success and political impact in the mid-1850s, but less than a century
later, in 1948, the book was out of print. Only in the last thirty years,
after the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s and the Women's
Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, has Stowe's book been reevaluated.
Daughter of a nationally famous preacher, Lyman Beecher, sister to six brothers—all preachers—and married to a preacher, Stowe became a writer so that she could use the novel as a pulpit. In the preface to Uncle Tom's Cabin, Stowe makes it clear that her intention is not to entertain but to enlighten. Motivated by the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 and informed about the issue during her residence for several years in Cincinnati, Stowe's main purpose in writing the novel is to instruct her readers about the cruel and unjust institution of slavery. Stowe judges the United States a failed Christian democracy and enjoins revolution in overturning a system that creates both victims and victimizers, oppressors and oppressed, and is thus harmful to both masters and slaves in both the North and South.
Questions for Reflection
If Stowe's intent is to preach about the iniquities of American slavery
and the blessings of Christian brotherhood, what examples of the latter
does she offer the reader? Are there any alternatives to the patriarchal
system of slavery? Do any characters undergo a conversion in the course
of the novel?
Stowe's domestic ideology may be described as moral authority assigned
to women who therefore have a certain power over men and are thus obligated
to motivate them to do good in the world outside the home. What examples
of this influence occur in the text?
Uncle Tom's Cabin is an unabashed sentimental
novel. Stowe set out to elicit feelings from her audience in general and
in particular she sought to bring her readers to tears with the staging
of Little Eva's death. What effect does Little Eva's death, situated in
the middle of the novel, have on particular characters? On the audience
in general?
Because Uncle Tom's Cabin was so popular, it must have fairly accurately reflected the society Stowe lived in, which suggests that despite Stowe's radical views about certain issues such as gender, she was still fairly conventional about others. In what ways is Uncle Tom's Cabin conventional? How is it radical? Does it promote racial equality, for example? Simon Legree and Tom come across as stereotypes, the former representing pure evil and the latter symbolizing pure good. How does Tom as a character, though, compare to the expression, an "Uncle Tom"? How does Stowe use the more subtly portrayed characters such as Augustine St. Clare and Cassie? Who might Stowe's audience be for her characterization of St. Clare? Critics have called Cassie the unsung heroine of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Why did Stowe not end her novel with Tom's death but with Cassie's escape? How is Cassie different from Tom?