Uncle Tom's Cabin
Place on List:
IV. Special Area: Literary
Social Criticism
1. Primary Texts: Narrative Prose
Harriet
Beecher Stowe. Uncle
Tom's Cabin.
Supporting References:
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- Wagner, Wendy. "Uncle Tom's Cabin." The Oxford Companion to United States History. : Oxford University Press, 2001. Oxford Reference. 2004. Date Accessed 3 Sep. 2013
“Uncle Tom's
Cabin (1852), antislavery
novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896).
“Though Stowe famously said that “God
wrote it,” she is nonetheless credited with the authorship of this
best-selling work that galvanized opposition to slavery
in the 1850s. Written in the aftermath of the Fugitive
Slave Act of 1850, Uncle Tom's Cabin: or,
Life among the Lowly was first serialized in the National
Era (June 1851–April 1852) and then published in book form. It
sold more than 10,000 copies in the first few weeks after publication
and some 300,000 in the first year.
“Based on various slave narratives,
including those of Henry Bibb and Josiah Henson, the novel primarily
focuses on the title character, a slave who is sold by his owner and
torn from his home and family. Tom is first purchased at the New
Orleans slave market by Augustine St. Clare as
a companion for his daughter Eva, who shares Tom's devotion to
Christianity. After Eva and St. Clare tragically die, Tom is sold to
a plantation owner who turns him over to a vicious and cruel
overseer, Simon Legree. Repelled by Tom's innate goodness and enraged
when Tom refuses to reveal the hiding place of two slaves seeking to
escape, Legree beats Tom savagely. Tom dies just as his former owner,
George Shelby, arrives to purchase him.
“Stowe's novelistic blend of history,
personal experience, politics, law, and religion
captured the public imagination and moved many northerners to a more
vocal opposition to slavery. Even President Abraham Lincoln
acknowledged Stowe's role in escalating tensions that led to the
Civil
War, calling her “the little lady who started
the big war.” Southern whites' response was predictably negative.
In the face of southern criticism that she had misrepresented the
reality of slavery, Stowe in A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853)
collected historical and legal records documenting events similar to
those in her novel.
“The power and interest of Uncle
Tom's Cabin endured long after the Civil War ended and the
slavery issue was resolved. Uncle Tom, Simon Legree, Little Eva, and
Eliza Harris, the courageous slave mother who escapes the slave
catchers by jumping across ice floes on the Ohio River, became
familiar archetypes. Dramatizations of Uncle Tom's Cabin were
frequently staged and immensely popular with nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century audiences. Always recognized for its political and
cultural importance, the novel by the late twentieth century had also
come to be recognized as a major literary classic.
- Hart, James D., and Phillip W. Leininger. "Uncle Tom's Cabin, Or, Life among the Lowly." The Oxford Companion to American Literature. : Oxford University Press, 1995. Oxford Reference. 2004. Date Accessed 3 Sep. 2013
“Uncle Tom's
Cabin, Or, Life among the Lowly, novel by Harriet
Beecher Stowe, published serially in the
National Era (1851–52) and in book form in 1852. During
its first year after publication, more than 300,000 copies were sold,
and it became the most popular American novel, having a powerful
antislavery influence. Attacks upon its truth caused Mrs. Stowe to
publish A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853), defending the
accuracy of its facts. The story was frequently translated and
republished and was successfully dramatized by George
Aiken (1852), without Mrs. Stowe's consent.
“Uncle Tom is a noble, high-minded,
devoutly Christian black slave in the kindly Shelby family. The
Shelbys, in financial difficulties, are about to sell their slaves,
and the mulatto girl Eliza and her child escape across the frozen
Ohio River, but Tom remains because he does not wish to embarrass his
master. Separated from his wife and children, he is sold to a slave
trader, and young George Shelby promises some day to redeem him. On
the voyage down the Mississippi, Tom saves the life of little Eva,
the daughter of St. Clare, who in gratitude purchases him as a
servant for his New Orleans home. Tom is happy for two years with the
easygoing St. Clare, the angelic little Eva, and her mischievous
companion, the black child Topsy, who, when questioned about her
family, says: “Never was born, never had no father, nor mother, nor
nothin' …I 'spect I growed.” Eva's delicate constitution fails,
and she soon dies. St. Clare is accidentally killed, and Tom is sold
at auction to Simon Legree, a brutal, drunken, degenerate planter.
The slave's courage and religious fortitude impress his criminal
master, who becomes desperately fear-ridden. Cassie and Emmaline, two
female slaves, take advantage of his state of mind and pretend to
escape. When Tom refuses to reveal their hiding place, Legree is
furious, and has him flogged to death. George Shelby arrives as Tom
is dying, and vows to devote himself to the cause of abolition.”
- Hart, James D. "Stowe, Harriet." The Concise Oxford Companion to American Literature. : Oxford University Press, 1986. Oxford Reference. 2002. Date Accessed 19 Aug. 2013
The article offers
an overview of Stowe and less a discussion on the above-cited
text.
“Stowe, Harriet [ Elizabeth] Beecher (1811–96), daughter of Lyman
Beecher (1775–1863), a fiery Presbyterian minister, and sister of
Henry Ward Beecher (1813–87), a popular Congregational minister and
lecturer, was reared in Connecticut under the Calvinist tutelage of
her father. Her youth was one of morbid introspection, tempered
partly by the liberal beliefs of her uncle, Samuel Foote, and the
reading of such romantic fiction as that of Scott, which influenced
her own later work. In 1832 she moved with her family to Cincinnati,
where she taught at a girls' school, and began to write sketches of
New England life. In 1836 she married Calvin Ellis Stowe (1802–86),
who was then a professor in her father's theological seminary. She
observed the life of slaves during a visit to Kentucky, was
influenced by the antislavery sentiment prevailing at her father's
school, and stored impressions that she used later in fiction.
“Upon moving to
Maine (1850), she was stirred more than ever by antislavery
discussion and availed herself of leisure time to write Uncle
Tom's Cabin (1852), which brought her
nationwide prominence. Although she was not an Abolitionist, her
supporters were, and to defend herself from attacks on the accuracy
of her book she wrote A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853), a
compilation of facts drawn from laws, court records, newspapers, and
private letters. At the height of her fame, she made a trip to
England (1853), where she was enthusiastically received, and of which
she wrote in Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands (1854). To
further the antislavery cause, she wrote her second novel, Dred:
A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856), which showed the
demoralizing influence of slavery upon the whites.
“After another
trip abroad, during which she was honored by Queen Victoria, Mrs.
Stowe returned to begin the writing of a series of books set in New
England and having fiction rather than propaganda for their purpose.
The Minister's Wooing (1859) was a romance partly based on
her sister's life, and contained an attack on the injustices of
Calvinism, a religion that she eventually deserted. The Pearl of
Orr's Island (1862) was another novel using New England local
color, as was also Oldtown Folks (1869). In 1869 she again
went abroad and met Lady Byron, from whom she obtained the
information she published in Lady Byron Vindicated (1870).
Her charge that Byron had had incestuous relations with his sister
caused her to be accused of scandal mongering, and turned a great
part of the English public against her.
“She returned to
New England themes in Sam Lawson's Oldtown Fireside Stories
(1872), and in Poganuc People (1878) she wrote a novel
closely based on her own childhood. Agnes of Sorrento (1862)
is a historical novel set in Italy; Pink and White Tyranny
(1871), a social satire; and My Wife and I (1871), a
fictional essay defending woman's right to a career, which had as its
sequel We and Our Neighbors (1875). Her Religious Poems
was published in 1867, and some of her many lesser works were issued
under the pseudonym Christopher Crowfield. After the
Civil War, Mrs. Stowe lived mainly in Florida, and she described her
quiet life there in Palmetto-Leaves (1873).”
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