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^^^^^^^^^^HARRIET BEECHER STOWE: THE AUTHOR AND HER TIMES
Isabella Jones Beecher was furious. ... In Boston, where Isabella lived with her husband, the Reverend Edward Beecher, everyone was talking about the awful new law. ... Thinking about what she could do to protest this new outrage, Isabella Beecher sent a letter to her sister-in-law, Harriet Beecher Stowe, a housewife with six children who occasionally wrote for magazines. ... " As Charles Stowe tells the story, his mother read the letter aloud to her children in their parlor in Brunswick, Maine. ...
Stowe intended to write a tale of slavery in three or four episodes, and she arranged for publication in the National Era, an antislavery paper that had printed some of her earlier work. ... Readers couldnt get enough of it, and protested to the editors on the rare occasions when Stowe missed a weeks installment. ...
In some ways, Harriet Beecher Stowe seemed like an unlikely person to produce such a phenomenon--an extremely popular book on an extremely serious issue. ... "
But in other ways, Stowe was ideally placed to write about the great issue of her time. ... Her father, Lyman Beecher, had a considerable reputation as a Protestant preacher when she was growing up. ... Although Lyman Beecher differed from Finney on some points--he was much closer to the mainstream of the Presbyterian Church--Beecher, too, was a stirring revival preacher. ... Moving from Litchfield to Boston when Harriet was in her teens, Beecher campaigned against what he considered the overly liberal Unitarians.
Beecher communicated his interests to his children. ... Harriet was four when her mother died, and she was raised by aunts and a stepmother. ... Eventually Harriet and her younger brother, Henry Ward Beecher, came to believe in a God more loving and accessible than their fathers.
In 1832 Lyman Beecher became president of Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati, Ohio. ... A large group of students left Lane for newly established Oberlin College, and neither Beecher nor Lane Seminary ever quite recovered. ... These people were called antislavery rather than abolitionist, and Harriet Beecher Stowe could be characterized as one of them. ...
Harriet Beecher Stowe had a ringside seat for the religious and political agitation of her day. In 1836 she married Calvin Stowe, a Professor at Lane Seminary. In addition to her exposure to religious and moral reform currents through her father, and to abolitionism through her connection with Lane, Stowe remained close to her sister Catharine, at whose school in Cincinnati she had taught before her marriage. Catharine Beecher was not a feminist in the mold of the womens rights activists who met in the pathbreaking convention at Seneca Falls, in 1848. ... Catharine Beecher saw childrearing and home management as sciences worthy of respect, and she wrote many books (one, The American Womans Home, in collaboration with Harriet in 1869) to that effect. ... The feminists of the late twentieth century are the descendants of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the women of Seneca Falls, not of Catharine Beecher, and they argue over whether Catharine and her sisters were feminists. ...
In Cincinnati, Harriet Beecher Stowe had a closer view of slavery than she would have had back in Connecticut. ... In conversations with black women who worked as servants in her home, Stowe heard many stories of slave life that found their way into Uncle Toms Cabin. ... Learning several months later that the young womans former master was looking for her, Calvin Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher took her to a safe house in the country in the dead of night. ... In its last chapter Stowe attempts to prove the capability of black people by listing the free blacks of Cincinnati with whom her husband had dealings. ...
In writing about slavery Stowe went beyond what was acceptable for a woman novelist in the United States. ... " Like them, Stowe focused on female characters and values. ... " Stowe got around the point by insisting that she wasnt really the author of Uncle Toms Cabin. ... Like much of what Harriet Beecher Stowe said, that statement contains two messages: "Im not much, Im just writing this down for God," on the one hand, and on the other--"Listen to me, God speaks through my voice. ... Stowe found a way of disclaiming responsibility for her success and glorifying it at the same time. ... Enthusiastic letters poured in to Stowe from around the country and the world. ... Although abolitionists were not satisfied with Uncle Toms Cabin because it endorsed sending free blacks to Africa, leaders of the movement like William Lloyd Garrison and Thomas Wentworth Higginson told Stowe they were glad she had written it. ... Millions of Americans saw the play--even more than read the novel--but as the years passed, the drama had less to do with either Stowe or her original story. ... The influence of Uncle Toms Cabin is reflected in the story (probably apocryphal) that President Lincoln greeted Stowe in 1863 by saying, "So this is the little lady who made this big war. ... Stowe, who had tried to make the book accurate and fair to the South--Mrs. ... The year after it was published, Stowe produced A Key to Uncle Toms Cabin, which answered the critics point by point and supplied further documentation for her stories. ... Like Stowe, modern historians acknowledge that slaveowners treatment of their property varied enormously, and that masters as cruel as Simon Legree were rare. But most of them would agree with Stowe that the possibility of being sold to a Simon Legree weighed heavily on the minds of slaves. ... Shelby and between Uncle Tom and his wife Aunt Chloe and young George Shelby, Stowe shows the warm mutual feeling that could develop between slaves and masters. ... Another way in which Stowe attempted to engage her readers sympathies was by making two of her leading characters, George and Eliza Harris, light-skinned enough to pass for white. ... But in their characters, Stowe associates lightness of skin with attractiveness, intelligence, and energy. ...
Uncle Toms Cabin changed Harriet Beecher Stowes life. ... Although she completed a fine novel about life in New England, The Ministers Wooing (1859), the noted critic Edmund Wilson had a point when he wrote, "If there is something to be said for the authors claim that Uncle Toms Cabin was written by God, it is evident that the nine novels which followed it were produced without divine intervention by Harriet Beecher Stowe herself." After her husbands death, Stowe returned to Hartford, Connecticut, where her house today is open to visitors. ... Stowe believed--and frequently announced in the novel--that blacks were morally superior to whites, and that their acceptance of their oppression would earn them a place in heaven. ... Stowe probably wished other slaveowners would follow Georges example. ... But Stowe (and a number of characters in the book) points out that slave-traders couldnt stay in business if nice people didnt buy slaves. ... As she did with Tom, Stowe calls Augustine womanish; his elegance and love of finery make him seem effeminate. ... Clare seems in some ways to be Harriet Beecher Stowes favorite character, and many readers are fond of him as well. ... Stowe uses Legrees memories of his mother to explain why he is so superstitious--a weakness on which the plot depends. ... In general, Stowe is not especially interested in physical description, although she pays more attention to characters appearance than to setting. ... Stowe shows not only the horrors that slaves endure--the separation of husbands and wives and mothers and children, overwork, physical punishment--but also the effect of slavery on the characters of the masters, like Alfred St. ...
The worst thing about slavery, as Stowe points out, is that it destroys the family. ...
Although she indicts slavery as evil, Stowe also has harsh words for the Northerners who are unwilling to accept black people. ... Stowe appeals to the mothers among her readers to have sympathy for slave women. ...
The beliefs and qualities that Stowe values most--kindness, generosity, gentleness--were associated with women in the nineteenth century. ... ) Stowe portrays women as being morally superior to men. ... If Harriet Beecher Stowe ran the world, men would be much more like women.
Although Stowe places female values at the center of her novel, how much power do the women characters in Uncle Toms Cabin really have? ... Stowe demonstrates the effect Toms beliefs have both on his life and on those of the people around him. ...
Stowe distinguishes Christianity both from the nonreligious attitudes of characters like George Harris and Cassy, who are bitter and potentially violent, and from the false Christianity of ministers who follow popular fashions, like "Dr. ... Some readers feel that Harriet Beecher Stowe equates being a good mother with being a good Christian. ... For Stowe, home was the most important place on earth, the place where people learn to love each other and to love God.
In Uncle Toms Cabin, Stowe contrasts good homes--the Shelby plantation, the Birds, the Hallidays, the Harris Montreal apartment--with bad homes like the St. ... (Stowe suggests they have a greater claim to heaven than whites. ... For Stowe, slavery was an evil that poisoned personal relationships. ... Stowe doesnt think so. ...
Neither does Stowe seem interested in social movements or religious institutions. ... It seems to Stowe that people cant act responsibly in groups. ...
^^^^^^^^^^UNCLE TOMS CABIN: STYLE
Many readers think Harriet Beecher Stowes writing style is the greatest weakness of Uncle Toms Cabin. ... Stowe makes some effort to distinguish the speech of her characters. ... The authors son, Charles Stowe, called the novel "an outburst of deep feeling" and explained that "the writer no more thought of style or literary excellence than the mother who rushes into the street and cries for help to save her children from a burning house. ... Stowe wanted to convince people that slavery was wrong, to engage their emotions. ... It is hard not to respond when Stowe asks you,
If it were your Harry, mother, or your Willie, that were going to be torn from you by a brutal trader, tomorrow morning. ... Does Stowe write more feelingly about some subjects, or some characters, than about others? ... If these broad hints are not enough, Stowe addresses you, in aside after aside, telling you what you should think and feel about what you are reading. There is no question--as there is in some novels--that the voice of the narrator belongs to the author. ... None of the characters, however, represents Harriet Beecher Stowe. ... If Stowe had been writing a play, she might have brought down the curtain after chapter 41, where Uncle Tom dies and George Shelby knocks Legree to the ground and then vows to devote his life to fighting slavery. Instead, Stowe spends the next four chapters resolving her subplots and lecturing about the novels authenticity. The book ends on a dramatic note, however, as Stowe imagines what will happen to this country if slavery is not abolished. ... SHELBY AND THE SLAVE-TRADER Stowe lets you know from the start that Haley, the slave-trader, is a villain. ... Yet the worst thing about him is what Stowe shows you rather than tells you--he puts a cash value on the most important human qualities. ... Shelby seems to be a better man than Haley (at least, Stowe tells you, "he had the appearances of a gentleman"--which may mean that he really isnt one either), you can see that he has many failings. ...
NOTE: THE EVILS OF SLAVERY In her first chapter, Stowe points to some of the worst aspects of slavery. ...
NOTE: RACIAL STEREOTYPES Some black readers have criticized Stowe for making two of her main characters, Eliza and George, light-skinned. ... Stowe remarks that light-skinned women like Eliza are often especially pretty and refined. ... Do you think thats the only reason Stowe described them that way? ... On a visit to the factory, Georges owner was furious to see George so successful and proud--it made him conscious, Stowe says, of his own inferiority. ...
NOTE: THE REALISM OF UNCLE TOMS CABIN Stowe takes pains in this chapter, and throughout the novel, to assure you that her story is true. Living for years in Cincinnati, just across the Ohio River from Kentucky, Stowe met many former slaves. ... In response, Stowe published The Key to Uncle Toms Cabin (1853)--a collection of stories and documents to prove the novels accuracy. ... "The husband and wife were parted," Stowe recounts, letting you know that she considers George and Eliza as husband and wife, even if the law doesnt. ... Stowe wants you to recognize them as a happy family.
NOTE: AT HOME WITH UNCLE TOM AND AUNT CHLOE Harriet Beecher Stowe was extremely interested in the way people lived. With her sister, Catharine Beecher, she would later write The American Womans Home, or Principles of Domestic Science (1869). ...
Stowe pokes gentle fun at Aunt Chloe and her surroundings. ... Describing the religious singing in the cabin, Stowe explains that "the negro mind, impassioned and imaginative, always attaches itself to hymns and expressions of a vivid and pictorial nature. ... "
Stowe asks you to identify with the slaves on the basis of your own family feelings. ... Stowe explicitly compares Sams self-interested posturing to that of white politicians in Washington. ...
The force that drives Eliza, Stowe tells you, is "maternal love. ... " Stowe also appeals to the readers parental feelings: "If it were your Harry, mother, or your Willie, that were going to be torn from you by a brutal trader. ... As Stowe wrote to her youngest son, twenty-five years later, "I well remember the winter you were a baby and I was writing Uncle Toms Cabin. ... " Stowe cannot help emphasizing the point: "So spoke this poor, heathenish Kentuckian, who had not been instructed in his constitutional relations, and consequently was betrayed into acting in a sort of Christianized manner. ... " Tom claims a spiritual superiority over Haley, telling Chloe that he would rather be sold ten thousand times over than to have to answer to God for Haleys sins. ... In another swipe at the Fugitive Slave Law, Stowe suggests sardonically that if the whole country has become a slave market, the trader and catcher may form a new aristocracy. ... Stowe, in her best schoolmarm manner, announced that "the Negro mind, impassioned and imaginative, always attaches itself to hymns and expressions of a vivid and pictorial nature. ... "
Stowe tells you that Tom sings "about the New Jerusalem and bright angels, and the land of Canaan" to little Eva; one of the first signs of Evas impending death is that she tells Tom that shes seen the sights he sings about. ... "
Stowe shows you almost nothing of life in the slave quarters. ... Bird are discussing is an Ohio version of the national law that prompted Harriet Beecher Stowe to write Uncle Toms Cabin. ...
NOTE: "A LITTLE GRAVE" Stowe has frequently urged her readers to identify with Eliza on the basis of their feelings for their own children. ... Stowe herself lost her infant son Charley during a cholera epidemic in 1849. ... " Driving the point home, Stowe says that black people "are not naturally daring and enterprising, but home-loving and affectionate. ... Harriet Beecher Stowe knew firsthand the religious debate over slavery, since some of it had been conducted in her own home. Lyman Beecher, Stowes father, opposed slavery. ... In 1834, most of the students became abolitionists and withdrew in protest from Lane Theological Seminary, which Beecher ran.
Harriet Beecher Stowe was not a thoroughgoing abolitionist like Theodore Weld, one of the ministers who left Lane but she strongly believed that slavery was un-Christian. ...
As the daughter, sister, and wife of ministers, Stowe struggled all her life with these questions. ... " However, Stowe remarks sarcastically, if Tom had "only been instructed by certain ministers of Christianity," he might have seen the slave trade as "the vital support of an institution which some American divines tell us has no evils. ... A few Quaker radicals became prominent, among them Isaac Hopper of New York; Lucretia Mott of Massachusetts; Levi Coffin of Indiana; poet John Greenleaf Whittier; Elias Hicks, who led a Quaker boycott of crops and goods produced by slave labor; and Thomas Garrett of Wilmington, Delaware, who helped 2700 slaves escape and was claimed by Stowe as one of her models for Simeon Halliday. ...
Stowe presents the St. ... Clare family in Vermont--and having Augustine spend part of his boyhood there--Stowe points out that Northerners and Southerners are literally brothers. ...
Stowe, who grew up in Connecticut, writes about New England villages with love. ... In November 1861--some ten years after Uncle Toms Cabin appeared--Mary Boykin Chesnut contrasted the experience of Southern women with that of Northerners like Harriet Beecher Stowe. ... Stowe [and other antislavery writers]. ... His Underground Railroad station was probably known to Harriet Beecher Stowe in nearby Cincinnati. ... One of them was Harriet Tubman, who fled to Pennsylvania from Maryland in 1849. ... (Stowe remarks that a Hungarian youth defending freedom as George did would be considered a hero by most Americans; a fugitive slave doing the same thing was not. ... Although Stowe fusses about the comparative skin color of slaves, even the darker characters in Uncle Toms Cabin--Chloe and Tom, Sam and Andy, Dinah and Mammy--work inside the house. ... But the characters Stowe focuses on--Tom, Cassy, Emmeline, and Lucy--formerly worked in houses, and all but Tom are city-bred. ... )
The former slaves whom Harriet Beecher Stowe met had probably been house servants. ... Do you think he speaks for the author? ... "Though he has fallen on democratic times, and embraced a democratic theory, he is to the heart an aristocrat, as much as my father. ...
NOTE: "SHE WAS DIVINE" Harriet Beecher was only four years old when her mother died. ... Henry Ward Beecher, Harriets younger brother, once wrote--in a phrase that Augustine St. ... Ophelia learns, as Stowe intends you to also, that many theories may not be workable in reality. ... " Stowe asks. ... However, such ideas were just beginning to be heard at the time that Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Toms Cabin. The New England Calvinism that dominated the countrys religious life during its first two centuries--and that Stowes father, Lyman Beecher, still preached in its third century--imposed more rigorous standards than simply "loving Christ most of all. ... Harriet Beecher Stowe was part of that shift. ... (Stowe claimed that writing little Evas death scene so exhausted her that she spent the next two days in bed.) How can you tell when Stowe is writing sentimentally? ... Thus, as Stowe continually points out, the North as well as the South profits from slavery. ... Stowe repeats this story in the novels final chapter. ... Even the road approaching it sounds, as Stowe describes it, as if it leads to hell. ... STOWE DID NOT HIT THE SOREST SPOT" Cassys story of being bought by a white man who made her his mistress may sound familiar to you, for many of the slave women in Uncle Toms Cabin--especially young, pretty, light-skinned ones--report the same experience. ...
Certainly many of Harriet Beecher Stowes contemporaries believed that such relationships constituted one of the worst abuses of slavery. ...
In the last chapter of Uncle Toms Cabin, Stowe cites similar evidence. ... Stowe did not hit the sorest spot. ... Stowe explains by telling you his life story. ...
Why does Harriet Beecher Stowe make so much of mothers? ... They laugh at the way Stowe uses the image of the fair-haired woman (Mrs. ... Although all of Harriet Beechers brothers became ministers like their father, that career was not open to her. ...
For women in mid-nineteenth-century America--especially for white middle-class urban women like Harriet Beecher Stowe--the one place they had power was the home. ... Writers like Catharine Beecher argued that motherhood was a profession like any other, requiring special education and training. ... )
So when, in Uncle Toms Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe goes on and on about the cheery parlors and the love of mothers, she is not only being sentimental. ...
What does it mean to be free, Stowe asks you, as George and Eliza embark on the last leg of their journey. ... " To Stowe, the most important fruits of freedom are faith and home. ... " Stowe generalizes the significance of Toms remark:
And this, O Africa! ... "
NOTE: UNCLE TOMS DEATH Harriet Beecher Stowe claimed that after she had decided to write a book about slavery, the first scene she imagined was Uncle Toms death. ... Her ten-year-old and twelve-year-old began to cry, and said, Charles Stowe relates, "Oh, mama! ... " Four months later, Harriet Beecher Stowe submitted the first episode of her novel to the National Era. ...
William Still, a black Philadelphia abolitionist, had an experience as unusual as the ones created by Harriet Beecher Stowe. ... )
Stowe describes Georges future plans through a letter to one of his friends. ...
By the time Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Toms Cabin, colonization--the idea that the solution to the problem of slavery was to send blacks back to Africa--was an idea whose time had come and gone. ...
One well-known supporter of colonization was Harriet Beecher Stowes father, Lyman Beecher. ... Neither Lane Seminary nor Lyman Beecher ever fully recovered from this action. ... " A New England Congregationalist minister announced that Stowe had told him that if she had it to do over again, "she would not send George Harris to Liberia." But Stowe herself never made that statement. ... CONCLUDING REMARKS
In the last pages of her novel, Stowe addresses you in her own voice, assuring you that Uncle Toms Cabin is based mostly on fact. ...
Stowe appeals once again to mothers, who have learned through their love for their children to sympathize with others.
What, Stowe asks, can one person do about slavery? ...
NOTE: "MINE EYES HAVE SEEN THE GLORY OF THE COMING OF THE LORD" In this last chapter of Uncle Toms Cabin, Stowe explains that she wrote the book so that Northerners--especially those who supported the Fugitive Slave Law--would understand what slavery really was. ... "
Presumably, Stowe believed that once Northerners finished her novel, they would do something about slavery. ... Why doesnt Stowe urge her readers to join the local abolitionist chapter? ... Stowe really believed that in dying for his faith, Uncle Tom achieved much more than he would have had he murdered Simon Legree or escaped with Cassy and Emmeline. ...
Therefore, the only end to slavery Stowe can envision is the mass conversion of slaveowners who, like George Shelby, voluntarily free their slaves. ...
These attitudes may also explain why Stowe sends George Harris to Liberia, and why she recommends colonization in the novels last chapter. ... " If he cant forgive America for enslaving him, Christianity, as Stowe conceives it, requires him to withdraw. Stowe makes George passive--like a woman and a Christian--in his fight against slavery.
Stowe backs herself into a corner. ... To many modern readers, their position makes more sense than Harriet Beecher Stowes. ...
^^^^^^^^^^UNCLE TOMS CABIN: HARRIET BEECHER STOWE
She told the story, and the whole world wept
At wrongs and cruelties it had not known
But for this fearless womans voice alone. ...
-Paul Laurence Dunbar, Century Magazine,
November 1898
^^^^^^^^^^UNCLE TOMS CABIN: A TWENTIETH-CENTURY BLACK NOVELIST CRITICIZES STOWE
It is interesting to consider one more aspect of Mrs. ... Stowe is motivated by. ... These characters--like those of Dickens, at least in his early phase--express themselves a good deal better than the author expresses herself. ...
-Alice Crozier, The Novels of
Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1969
^^^^^^^^^^UNCLE TOMS CABIN: ON THE MEANING OF LITTLE EVA
. ... Stowe intended Little Evas patient and protracted death as an exemplum of religious faith. ...
-Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture, 1977
^^^^^^^^^^UNCLE TOMS CABIN: ON THE INFLUENCE OF UNCLE TOMS CABIN
This novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe was one of the greatest successes of American publishing history as well as one of the most influential books--immediately influential, at any rate--that have ever appeared in the United States.
Approximate Word count = 28664
Approximate Pages = 114.7
(250 words per page double spaced)
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