![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
19th century books - *Uncle Tom's Cabin*
Jul. 31st, 2010 07:50 pmApocryphally, when Lincoln met Stowe he said: ‘So this is the little lady who started the big war’.
*Uncle Tom’s Cabin* is now read mostly as a historical curiosity, as a book that polarised opionion before the American civil war. At the time it was enormously successful. It made Stowe $30,000 in the first quarter, and she was voluntarily given $20,000 in a penny per edition from readers in the UK where her copyright did not extend.
I was pleasantly surprised when I reread it. My chief memory is that the death of Little Eva was so bad it was funny and featured pages of hymn singing. This time round I found several things I like.
Firstly, I like the unabashed emphasis on emotions, on sentiment, on getting people to ‘feel right’.
There is also a curious form of female empowerment in which women have all the moral power. Eliza is the one who saves her son; Mrs Bird is completely meek except that she gets her own way all the time.
Also, Harriet Beecher Stowe herself claimed the power to speak publicly so long as she did so on behalf of others. She wrote:
‘I wrote what I did because as a woman, as a mother I was oppressed & broken-hearted, with the sorrows & injustice I saw, because as a Christian I felt the dishonor to Christianity - because as a lover of my country I trembled at the coming day of wrath. It is no merit to the sorrowful that they weep, or to the oppressed & smothering that they gasp & tremble, nor to me, that I must speak for the oppressed - who cannot speak for themselves.’
As a sidenote, Stowe struggled with the issue of speaking publicly. She justified herself as speaking for others, but she literally did not speak when she was on tour. She sat at the tables while her husband read a speech she had written or, more often, gave his own speech.
And it was striking that she was often criticised for speaking at all. The harshest review said: ‘Mrs Stowe betrays a malignity so remarkable that the petticoat lifts, of itself, and we see the hoof of the beast under the table.’ The wrong was not slavery but denouncing it; just as modern writers are often criticised for mentioning domestic violence rather than the problem itself being seen as the wrong.
What I disliked was really the reverse side of these positive elements. The novel is overly sentimental. I cannot tell which death scene is more over the top.... Eva’s ‘Love! Joy! Peace! or St Clare’s ‘MOTHER!’ or Tom’s ‘Who - who - who shall separate us from the love of Christ?’.
But, having said this, I must acknowledge that I was more able to tolerate this sentiment after reading Stowe’s biography and learning of the strict codes of good death in the nineteenth century. Protestants removed all the Papist rituals, and then codified their own rituals of death, wherein the dying person had to profess their faith, bless those left behind, and look forward to the future of heaven. When Stowe’s mother died, for instance, she told her children (who were brought into the deathbed as was the custom) that she had never prayed not to leave them.
Also, Stowe claimed authority to speak on behalf of others who were suffering, a strategy which allowed her to write but one which limited the way she could portray the slaves. Within this schema, Uncle Tom has to suffer passively and nobly so she can point to his noble, passive suffering. Uncle Tom makes my skin crawl at times, especially the point when he forgives Legree.
Also, Stowe’s proposed solution to slavery was to ship freemen back to Africa, regarded even in the nineteenth century as a reactionary position. So it’s not just that she doesn’t meet twenty-first ideas of racial equality; even in the nineteenth century she was in the less progressive camp.
*Uncle Tom’s Cabin* is now read mostly as a historical curiosity, as a book that polarised opionion before the American civil war. At the time it was enormously successful. It made Stowe $30,000 in the first quarter, and she was voluntarily given $20,000 in a penny per edition from readers in the UK where her copyright did not extend.
I was pleasantly surprised when I reread it. My chief memory is that the death of Little Eva was so bad it was funny and featured pages of hymn singing. This time round I found several things I like.
Firstly, I like the unabashed emphasis on emotions, on sentiment, on getting people to ‘feel right’.
There is also a curious form of female empowerment in which women have all the moral power. Eliza is the one who saves her son; Mrs Bird is completely meek except that she gets her own way all the time.
Also, Harriet Beecher Stowe herself claimed the power to speak publicly so long as she did so on behalf of others. She wrote:
‘I wrote what I did because as a woman, as a mother I was oppressed & broken-hearted, with the sorrows & injustice I saw, because as a Christian I felt the dishonor to Christianity - because as a lover of my country I trembled at the coming day of wrath. It is no merit to the sorrowful that they weep, or to the oppressed & smothering that they gasp & tremble, nor to me, that I must speak for the oppressed - who cannot speak for themselves.’
As a sidenote, Stowe struggled with the issue of speaking publicly. She justified herself as speaking for others, but she literally did not speak when she was on tour. She sat at the tables while her husband read a speech she had written or, more often, gave his own speech.
And it was striking that she was often criticised for speaking at all. The harshest review said: ‘Mrs Stowe betrays a malignity so remarkable that the petticoat lifts, of itself, and we see the hoof of the beast under the table.’ The wrong was not slavery but denouncing it; just as modern writers are often criticised for mentioning domestic violence rather than the problem itself being seen as the wrong.
What I disliked was really the reverse side of these positive elements. The novel is overly sentimental. I cannot tell which death scene is more over the top.... Eva’s ‘Love! Joy! Peace! or St Clare’s ‘MOTHER!’ or Tom’s ‘Who - who - who shall separate us from the love of Christ?’.
But, having said this, I must acknowledge that I was more able to tolerate this sentiment after reading Stowe’s biography and learning of the strict codes of good death in the nineteenth century. Protestants removed all the Papist rituals, and then codified their own rituals of death, wherein the dying person had to profess their faith, bless those left behind, and look forward to the future of heaven. When Stowe’s mother died, for instance, she told her children (who were brought into the deathbed as was the custom) that she had never prayed not to leave them.
Also, Stowe claimed authority to speak on behalf of others who were suffering, a strategy which allowed her to write but one which limited the way she could portray the slaves. Within this schema, Uncle Tom has to suffer passively and nobly so she can point to his noble, passive suffering. Uncle Tom makes my skin crawl at times, especially the point when he forgives Legree.
Also, Stowe’s proposed solution to slavery was to ship freemen back to Africa, regarded even in the nineteenth century as a reactionary position. So it’s not just that she doesn’t meet twenty-first ideas of racial equality; even in the nineteenth century she was in the less progressive camp.
