Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 175revolution is the principal subject and aim of Uncle Tom’s Cabin; and that project is
specifically and consistently associated with the feminine.
The counsel of patience embodied in its hero has earned Stowe’s novel opprobrium
in many quarters: “Uncle Tom,” after all, has become a term of abuse, a dismissive label
stuck on any African-American seen to be too servile, too compliant, too foot-
scrapingly eager to please the white community. And there is no doubt that Uncle
Tom’s Cabin often resorts to racial stereotypes, typified by the moment when Eva
St. Clare is compared to her companion Topsy. “There stood the two children,
representatives of the two extremes of society,” the narrator intones. “The fair, high-
bred child, with her golden head, her deep eyes, her spiritual, noble brow, and prince-
like movements; and her black, keen, subtle, cringing yet acute neighbor.” “They stood
the representatives of their races,” she goes on, “the Saxon, born of ages of cultivation,
command, education, physical and moral eminence; the Afric, born of ages of
oppression, submission, ignorance, toil, and vice!” Reflecting many of the prejudices
of her time, Stowe tends to present her black characters as emotional, spiritually alert,
loyal, and essentially childlike. Only characters with some significant white ancestry,
like George Harris, are allowed to deviate from this pattern. She is also inclined to
some familiar types and tropes of plantation fiction. There are comic minstrels, comic
cooks, and tumbling picanninies, there are romantic mulattoes who combine the
sensitivity of their mothers with the strength of their fathers. There are spoilt servants,
who snobbishly identify themselves with the families who own them; there are brutes,
like the two black assistants of Legree, Sambo and Quimbo, who offer what is termed
“an apt illustration of the fact that brutish men are lower even than animals.” Stowe
extenuates all this, a little, by emphasizing the destructive influence of training in
making her black characters what they often are. But training is clearly not everything
here; and, in any event, as her description of Topsy shows, she is inclined to slip rather
too quickly and easily from comments on education to comments on racial character –
from extenuation or explanation to what looks suspiciously like wishing to patronize
her black subjects, to generalize in genetic terms and even to blame.
Still, the force of the attack on slavery in Uncle Tom’s Cabin remains. And, looking
at both its form and approach, its imaginative idioms and its dramatic argument, it is
easy to see why it made such an enormous impact on contemporary readers. Stowe
took the aesthetic weaponry of several popular genres – the plantation romance,
sentimental fiction, the slave narrative – and she then used them to show how the
slave system violated the most sacred beliefs of her culture – the sanctity of the family
and the individual soul. How far she did this knowingly it is impossible to say, and in
any case hardly matters. What is clear is that she felt inspired as a writer and moved as
the first reader of her work: she wrote the account of the killing of Uncle Tom, she
said, with tears streaming down her face. Stowe drew on the wealth of feeling she
herself had concerning the home and family, Christian womanhood, and the Christian
soul; she then appealed to that same wealth of feeling in her readers. In the process,
she wrote what is, by any standards, one of the most important American books.
For a while after Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe continued to write about slavery. In
1853 she wrote A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, designed to defend the accuracy of herGGray_c02.indd 175ray_c 02 .indd 175 8 8/1/2011 7:54:42 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 42 AM