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On this day in 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe published her antislavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The book, which already had been serialized in an abolitionist newspaper, made an immediate splash, selling out its initial print run and capturing international attention. Just a year later, readers had purchased more than 300,000 copies of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, vaulting it toward its destiny as the nineteenth century’s most widely read work of fiction.
Truth be told, Stowe’s work hasn’t aged gracefully. Its sentimental tone and stereotypical portrayals of African-Americans now make it hard to read and something of a distraction in the classroom. Unlike Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl or Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Stowe’s is a mediated portrait of slavery’s impact, at best a step removed from the suffering it describes.
On the other hand, many contemporary observers hailed Uncle Tom’s Cabin for mirroring the era’s cultural and political concerns. As the nation rushed pell-mell toward armed conflagration, Stowe dressed up radical didacticism in an accessible narrative. She imbued her story with the spirit of the Second Great Awakening, the evangelical zeal sweeping the country, suggesting that slavery would rot the nation’s collective soul. And her book indicted all Americans, northerners and southerners alike, for their complicity in upholding the peculiar institution’s cruelty.
Although Stowe warned the entire nation of God’s impending judgment, many southerners still loathed the book and its author. Slaveholders, especially, viewed Stowe as the worst kind of rabble-rouser: a sectional propagandist who had managed to repackage a fringe ideology, abolitionism, in a universal tragedy peopled with sympathetic characters. It may be that Stowe’s became a self-fulfilling prophecy by pushing the nation toward civil war. Lincoln apparently believed that was the case. Upon meeting Stowe in the summer of 1862, after Shiloh and the Seven Days had taught both the Union and Confederacy that the conflict would be bitter and bloody, Lincoln supposedly said to Stowe: “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.” The quote may be apocryphal — I with I could say for sure — but its sentiment seems to have captured the mood of the day.
The Edge of the American West 
12 comments
March 21, 2008 at 4:35 am
bw
now make it hard to read and something of a distraction in the classroom. Unlike Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl or Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Stowe’s is a mediated portrait of slavery’s impact, at best a step removed from the suffering it describes.
First time commenter here. I really dig this site.
This isn’t my experience as an Am Lit professor at all, though. The sentimental forms Stowe trafficked in are still very much part of our culture. (Baby Elliot on this week’s American Idol, anyone?) I find myself having to resist the seductive pull of Stowe’s fiction and find that students get into it pretty easily, too.
The real question is, what are you using it for? To show the “truth” about slavery, as she hoped to? It works much better to show the history of the things doing the mediating, to pick up on your term: cultural movements and sensibilities — sentimental fiction, abolition, Christianity, female influence, Northern middle-class gender ideals, even her form of benevolent racism.
Jacobs and Douglass may be closer to the “truth” in that their narratives are grounded in autobiographical experience, but they’re no less mediated. Both were vetted by white abolitionists, both wrote to white abolitionist audiences, both were heavily influenced by the same literary culture that produced Stowe. It’s important to see how generic and cultural conventions shape their texts too. In fact, the best work on Douglass points to the revisions between the 1845 and 1855 versions of his autobiography with questions of genre and audience in mind.
Thanks for the post.
March 21, 2008 at 5:41 am
PigInZen
But wasn’t such a book really necessary to bridge the gap between the hardcore portrayals evident in Douglass’ or Jacobs’ works and the 1857 political reality of Dred Scott? Those points are irreconcilable and absolute opposites. I would imagine that many Americans would simply avoid either position and accept the status quo through a sort of benign ignorance rather than self-identify as an Abolitionist or Slavery supporter. Stowe’s ability to make the Abolitionist case more palatable to the general populace in no doubt prepared many of her readers for outright confrontation.
Isn’t this generally the case for most politically and socially difficult changes that occur? Messages are refined and “mediated” (to borrow your term, bw) in order to sway that vast quantity of benign ignorants. Stowe’s example is especially profound since the issue which she addressed had vexed the nascent American republic for the whole of its prior 80 year history. I’m not saying that in one fair swoop support for the Abolitionists was galvanized but Uncle Tom’s Cabin certainly did clarify the situation for many at the time. And such was its intent.
March 21, 2008 at 9:18 am
The Constructivist
There’s been a lot of research done the last couple of decades on the culture of sentiment in mid-19th C America which suggests that there’s much more of a rhetorical/affective continuum linking Jacobs, Douglass, and Stowe than we previously thought. Even her weird colonizationist ending was part of a dialogue that includes Delany’s Blake; or, the Huts of America.
I always teach Stowe alongside Melville’s “Benito Cereno”–and would, if it were anthologized, add Douglass’s “The Heroic Slave” as a second mid-1850s response to the popularity and influence of her novel (and so much more)–so students can explore the debates among anti-slavery writers themselves. Sometimes I even teach Morrison’s Beloved in that class as a kind of oblique commentary on Stowe’s working with gothic and ghost story conventions in the haunting of Simon Legree–as well as other ways in which Stowe deals with race in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. FYI, Chesnutt’s and Hurston’s ghost stories can also be read productively alongside Stowe’s treatment of haunting in her novel.
In short, I don’t think the novel/slave narrative distinction worth pursuing is degrees of mediation, nor the opposition between white and black writers in terms of authenticity. The point is not how well antebellum writing ages, but how in learning about the complexities and tensions in that time’s intertextual dialogues we might get a fresh perspective on our own.
March 21, 2008 at 9:42 am
Vance Maverick
Is it too simplistic to read this exchange as expressing the difference between teaching a novel “as history” and “as literature”?
March 21, 2008 at 10:27 am
The Constructivist
What’s not historical about what I wrote? Besides the fact that I managed to get through my entire post-secondary education without ever taking a history course? (The irony irons: my research is historicist.)
March 21, 2008 at 10:34 am
Rob_in_Hawaii
“Is it too simplistic to read this exchange as expressing the difference between teaching a novel ‘as history’ and ‘as literature’?”
Not overly simplistic at all, Vance, I think you hit it squarely. But I don’t think we should limit ourselves to choosing one way or the other to look at a text. That’s why I got into American studies, an interdisciplinary approach that allows you to do BOTH.
Two systems in one! Kind of like the Wrigley Doublemint Twins’ slogan, “Two mints in one!”
March 21, 2008 at 10:37 am
bw
I think it would be a bit too simple. For one thing, we’re talking about a novel that had extraordinary historical significance and is invariably taught that way, whether it’s used in a history or lit classroom. But, as constructivist says, to teach something “as literature” is often to approach it as an historicist, meaning your “literary” analysis aims to have some sort of historical payoff. My caveat is that you’re not going to read it to understand the history of slavery, per se, but the history of *writing* about slavery, esp from the perspective of Northern white female abolitionists with an enormous audience? Sure, it’s a hell of a literary-historical starting point in that case.
March 21, 2008 at 11:38 am
Vance Maverick
Constructivist, one sense in which your comment immediately above mine is not “historical” is that you’re discussing only narrative. True, it’s all politically and historically engaged narrative, and you’re discussing its history; but you’re not treating the narratives as artifacts on a par with the shackles and cannonballs and case law. I don’t personally have a stake in this (other than having read less history than criticism, and hardly any historicist crit), but it does seem to me there’s a sort of continuum here, and that you’re not at the history-most end of it.
March 21, 2008 at 1:16 pm
ari
This is a great thread. Thanks, everyone, for your comments.
That said, but they’re no less mediated confuses me. Surely, the white abolitionist who grew up in the evangelical household had a more mediated experience of slavery than did the former slaves. Right? At the same time, it’s not really a question of truthiness for me — that’s not what I’m after — so much as students’ ability to immerse themselves in the material. When I’ve taught Stowe, my students have wanted to talk about treacle and stereotypes. Getting them to cultural context has been a chore. By contrast, when I’ve taught Douglass and Jacobs, they’ve immediately jumped into discussions of evangelical religion, gender dynamics, and power.
Maybe this is a question of history vs. literature — though not for me. In other words, maybe the students are more willing to read about slavery, and engage issues of context, when the author was a slave. When they read fiction, then, they want to talk about it like it’s literature. Those distinctions don’t mean much to me, at least most of the time, but they’re important to the students. If that’s the case, obviously, we’re onto a slippery slope about authenticity and authorship. But the question of mediation still seems pretty much settled to me.
Also, PigInZen, yes. Not much more to say than that. I was going to do a post about the way in which difficult ideas are transmitted through the culture. But then I didn’t.
Finally, Constructivist, you say: In short, I don’t think the novel/slave narrative distinction worth pursuing is degrees of mediation, nor the opposition between white and black writers in terms of authenticity.
This brings us back to mediation. And although I’m pretty steeped in literary theory — at least for a historian — I’m now wondering if I know what mediation means. I’m not being flip, by the way. I’m just a bit confused.
March 21, 2008 at 1:22 pm
The Constructivist
What would it mean to teach a narrative as an artifact? Perhaps look at its making? Get Foucauldian with the author-function? Maybe that would help me articulate why I disagree a bit with bw’s perspectivalist approach to literary-historical criticism–my point in my first comment is that Stowe’s perspective is not hers alone, but is formed in her readings of and interactions with former slaves (cf. A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin).
We could just as easily turn the question around and go in a Hayden White direction–what would it mean to teach history as a narrative?–but again that depends upon a distinction between history-as-stuff and literature-as-stories I don’t see as hard-and-fast. Think of the artifacts in Beloved that are tied to trauma (Sethe’s “I made the ink”/Paul D’s tobacco tin) and violation of bodies (Sethe’s “they took my milk”/Beloved’s monologues).
Sure, we can say the dialogues and debates I kept referring to are just talk, just discourse, just linguistic idealism, but they are one of the ways in which our minds (brains) get changed. If ideas have consequences, so do words, spoken or written, for bodies and things. Your example of case law is a particularly charged example of the connection between discourses and institutions, the power of some words over others (think of the slaveowner’s response to Sixo’s cleverness [“improving your property, sir”] in Beloved).
That said, you’re right that I only focused on a few literary genres and movements in my comment. Still, a lot of the scholarship I was referring to at the start of my first comment examines how certain kinds of discourses (sentimentalism, gothic) show up in and across a variety of genres, media, and institutions, and questions what’s at stake in that.
Historians and literature people have borrowed each other’s methods and theories so much in the past generation I wonder why it matters that we make the distinction you propose….
March 21, 2008 at 1:36 pm
The Constructivist
Aargh, posted that comment before yours showed up–sorry, Ari! I think bw covered what I was trying to get at in the comment about the revisions between the 1845 and 1855 narratives of his life that Douglass wrote before and after his break with the Garrisonians. The slave narrative is a highly mediated genre–as all genres, even autobiographical ones, being artificial constructs, made up of conventions and revisions and responding to authorial and readerly expectations, are. So I’m talking about mediation in terms of writing and representation, while it seems to me that you are talking about it in terms of life experiences.
Let’s put it this way: Morrison wrote Beloved, she says, to try to speak to the silences in the slave narratives; what follows from her attention to what the slave narrators leave out and how what they put in is shaped by their political project and sense of audience is the gap between what Douglass and Jacobs experienced and what they wrote.
And yet, it makes all the difference that Stowe wasn’t a slave (although all kinds of people were making analogies to being enslaved to convey the injustice of their own particular set of oppressions, from the founding fathers’ generation to antebellum feminists and working class activists) and that Douglass and Jacobs were. That’s not to say she didn’t experience slavery, but that’s where your sense of mediation kicks in–she was positioned differently in the slavery system, neither slave nor slaveowner nor mistress of a plantation, but still shaped by it, affected by it, indirectly, as it were. Seeing as how her novel was a response to the Fugitive Slave Act, you could say that her understanding of her own complicity in the evil of the slavery system was something she was trying to convey and transmit to her readers.
Ah! Too interesting. Now I’m late to pick up the girls from day care. Gotta run!
March 22, 2008 at 6:19 am
bw
Sorry I’m late picking this up. That whole East/West timezone thing.
C said more or less what I would have, though I have a feeling my self-identification as a literary historian puts a little more weight on the historian side, i.e. I’m trying not simply to think about how the works I study participate in webs of intertextual discourses but how books are produced, by whom they’re read, and whether or not they had any specific effect beyond preserving a mess of information about the culture that produced it.
That said, but they’re no less mediated confuses me.
C’s last comment on mediation got my sense of the term — drawn from both the Raymond Williams sense and the McLuhan sense. At the most basic level it’s about *media*, not experience. What are the forms, cultural and literary and material, by which something is communicated? One other thing 1855 Douglass usefully demonstrates is how he had to negotiate his own story with Stowe’s overwhelming success in UTC. That version is a bit more novelistic than the 1845.
My guess is that you’re right, ari, about your students being impatient with Stowe because it’s fiction. What I would do is use it to demonstrate how important fiction — imagination, vicarious identification — could be in the culture of evangelical abolition in the north. If I were using Stowe in a history class I’d probably limit it to the Quaker household chapter and the two big death scenes (Eva’s and Tom’s). If they can’t get to the relationship between literary form and “evangelical religion, gender dynamics, and power” from those set pieces I don’t know what would get them there — and I think it’s important to suggest that it’s not only the “authentic” slave narratives that did that sort of cultural work in the first place. For all Jane Tompkins’s faults as a historian, the one thing she really got right (in her mid-80s effort to revitalize UTC’s reputation) is that the stereotypes are *precisely* what matter: they may be the clearest window into the cultures that produced and consumed that novel.
Anyway, back to the meta conversation currently in progress in the recent comments column …