174 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865book. Slavery is shown to be a violation of the American principle of freedom and
the higher law of conscience. It is also, of course, identified as the cause of many
individual acts of dispossession, division, sexual deviance, and mental and material
oppression. But what Uncle Tom’s Cabin concentrates on here are two, related issues:
slavery as a system that denies and destroys the family, and slavery as an institution
that seems to reduce a human being to a thing. Stowe repeatedly returns to incidents
in which parents like Uncle Tom are separated from their children, wives like Eliza
Harris are separated from their husbands, and slave women are betrayed by the
white men who profess to love them. In doing so, she slyly subverts the familial
language of the pro-slavery argument; and she appeals to the reader’s own experience
of familial love to measure the difference between a true family and what is on offer
in the South. The emphasis is on the domestic pieties here, understood with special
clarity by true Christian women. But it is also on slavery as a sin. Stowe insists, as
well, that what is wrong with chattel slavery is that the souls of slaves are placed at
the disposal of whoever is able to purchase their bodies: so the soul of the slave is
endangered, while the soul of the master is almost certainly consigned to damnation.
Of course, a sense of sin is no more a monopoly of Stowe’s female readership than
an appreciation of the domestic virtues and family ties is. But it is noticeable that
Stowe does tend to focus her writerly attention on her white female readers, to
appeal to their knowledge and agency. And, given the contemporary cult of true
womanhood, that is perhaps neither surprising nor unwise.
To an extent, in fact, Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a document testifying to female power
as well as black possibility: the condition of women as well as that of slaves. Females
are consistently better managers than men, in the novel. It is the females who offer
the most fully realized vision of a redemptive society: in the Quaker settlement
where George and Eliza Harris shelter – where everything runs “so sociably, so
quietly, so harmoniously” thanks to the women, who run it on matriarchal and
communal lines. And it is the principles identified with the feminine in the novel
that we are invited to admire: the organic, creative, supportive, sympathetic impulses
associated with Eva St. Clare and her “misty, dreamy” father, Angel (who is said to be
more like his mother than his father). The principles identified as masculine are, by
contrast, shown to be mechanized, destructive, oppressive – associated with Angel’s
twin brother Alfred St. Clare (who, like his father, believes in “the right of the
strongest”) and, even more, the brutal Simon Legree. Here, the contrast between
Uncle Tom and George Harris is relevant. George resists, invoking the Declaration
of Independence, and he is certainly admired for doing so. He is not, however, the
emotional center of the novel. That is supplied by “the hero of our story,” the gentle,
unresistant, and feminized Uncle Tom, who invokes the Bible and only resists doing
wrong – refusing to whip a fellow slave, to betray the whereabouts of two other
slaves, and refusing even the chance offered him to kill Simon Legree. George is a
political exemplar of a kind, illustrating Stowe’s interest in the idea of the removal of
emancipated slaves to Africa – where, as she puts it in the preface, “an enlightened
and Christianised community” could be “drawn from among us.” But Tom is a saint,
compared eventually to Christ, ready to be killed, but not to kill. Conversion notGGray_c02.indd 174ray_c 02 .indd 174 8 8/1/2011 7:54:42 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 42 AM