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Authors
Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896)
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The Writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe (1896, 1967), in sixteen volumes, though not complete, is comprehensive enough to represent Stowe’s literary range. The Library of America’s volume contains Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Minister’s Wooing, and Oldtown Folks (1982). Elizabeth Ammons edited a Norton Critical Edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1994), and Joan D. Hedrick edited The Oxford Harriet Beecher Stowe Reader (1999). Stowe’s second antislavery novel, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856), is available in an edition edited by Robert S. Levine (2006). Bibliographical resources include Margaret Holbrook Hildreth’s Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Bibliography (1976) and Jean Ashton’s Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Reference Guide (1977). Joan D. Hedrick’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (1994) is now the standard biography. Hedrick concentrates on Stowe as a literary professional; two earlier biographies focusing on her religious ideas remain useful: Robert Forrest Wilson’s Crusader in Crinoline (1941) and Charles H. Foster’s The Rungless Ladder: Harriet Beecher Stowe and New England Puritanism (1954, 1970). An excellent family biography is Milton Rugoff’s The Beechers: An American Family (1981), which should be supplemented by Barbara A White’s The Beecher Sisters (2003). Thomas R. Gossett’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and American Culture (1985) is invaluable; see also Sarah Meer’s Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy, and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s (2005). Good collections of critical essays include Elizabeth Ammons’s Critical Essays on Harriet Beecher Stowe (1980), Eric Sundquist’s New Essays on “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (1986), Mason L. Lowance Jr., Ellen E. Wesbrook, and R. C. De Prospo’s The Stowe Debate: Rhetorical Strategies in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (1994), Ammons and Susan Belasco’s Approaches to Teaching “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (2000), and Cindy Weinstein’s The Cambridge Companion to Harriet Beecher Stowe (2004). Specialized critical studies dealing wholly or in part with Stowe include Edwin Bruce Kirkham’s The Building of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (1977), Gillian Brown’s Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America (1992), Marianne Noble’s The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature (2000), and Susan M. Ryan’s The Grammar of Good Intentions: Race and the Antebellum Culture of Benevolence (2003). Stephen Railton has developed a superb website, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture.
Born in Litchfield, Connecticut, her father the eminent minister Lyman Beecher, Stowe grew up in an orthodox Calvinist family. She attended Sarah Pierce's girls' academy, one of the first institutions to educate young women, and later taught at a school founded by two of her sisters. She became a supporter of abolitionism after hearing her brothers' sermons against the Fugitive Slave Act, reading antislavery literature, and losing her infant son, whose death inspired her deep sympathy for slave mothers whose children were sold. Understanding that forging emotional links between people is an effective strategy for achieving social change, in Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) Stowe attempted to engage her readers' hearts by depicting the suffering and oppression slaves endured. The novel was enormously popular, selling 350,000 copies during the first year and prompting some thirty anti-Uncle Tom novels in reaction. Stowe's other works include the nonfiction A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853), which provided case histories to document the novel; Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856), and regional writing such as Oldtown Folks (1869)
Questions for Discussion and Writing
Uncle Tom's Cabin was a "big" book by any measure, a smash best-seller that is credited with having a major impact on Americans' public opinion of slavery. We need to understand why this novel had such a lasting and deep effect and why the canon has opened only lately to admit (after a long lapse) a book which plays by so many of the rules of popular fiction.
1. Read about the Hoe Rotary Press and the development of the American railroad system in the late 1840s. These innovations had enormous impact on the printing and marketing of books. How did these technological changes alter the potential market for a novel about race slavery in the United States?
2. How does Uncle Tom's Cabin work within and against the popular romantic or sentimental narrative? Can you draw on your own experience with popular novels to discuss the ways in which these representative chapters both exploit and resist a reader's expectations?
3. Where does the moral fire of this novel come from? Uncle Tom's Cabin can be read as a point of arrival in a long American quest to evolve a morality out of the Puritan heritage, the words of the chartering documents of the Republic, the ethos of the Enlightenment, and the values of Transcendentalism. Where does Stowe's moral fervor seem to be based? In latter-day Calvinism? In Franklinian rationalism and self-reliance? In Concord-style ethics? Or in some fusion of all these sources?
4. Consider the characterization of Tom, who has been variously admired and vilified for his temperament. This may be a complex topic: you may have personal experiences with "Uncle Tom" as an epithet and may be surprised and bothered by the way that Stowe lauds him in this novel. Consider why this kind of character is placed in the foreground at this particular historical moment.
5. The final chapters of Uncle Tom's Cabin contrast the stoic and saintly Tom with the Satanic Simon Legree. But earlier in the novel, Stowe spends a great deal of time developing other white characters. Why does she pay so much attention to genteel whites who carry no whips and do no violence themselves? Think particularly about Shelby, St. Clare, Marie, and Miss Ophelia. How do such characterizations advance major themes in the novel?
