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by Harriet Beecher Stowe Random House, 1996 $15.99 |
According to Abraham Lincoln, it was the book that started the Civil War. Queen Victoria wept while reading it. Tolstoy included it among the greatest achievements of the human mind. Even the usually acerbic Mark Twain praised it as "a drama which will live as long as the English tongue shall live."
Today, more than 150 years after publication, Uncle Tom's Cabin rarely inspires such accolades. Indeed, if mentioned at all, the novel is likely to be derided as patronizing, racist, and overbearingly sentimental. When I finally read Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel for myself nearly a decade ago, I was astonished by its sophistication. As a political scientist, I was intrigued by Stowe's multi-layered exploration of such themes as civil disobedience, human equality, and the role of religion in politics. Given Stowe's background, I shouldn't have been so surprised. A daughter of New England preacher and reformer Lyman Beecher, Stowe grew up in one of America's most celebrated families of Christian intellectuals.
Someone once quipped that the human race was comprised of "men, women, and Beechers," and the observation was only half in jest. Lyman Beecher's children devoted themselves to transforming the culture, and they played leading parts in many 19th-century reform movements, including abolitionism, temperance, public education, and woman's suffrage. The Beechers' activism was fueled by their passionate commitment to pursue truth whatever the cost. In the Beecher family, debate was not merely tolerated, it was obligatory. As Harriet's brother Charles later recalled, "the law of [the] … ;. family was that, if any one had a good thing, he must not keep it to himself … ;. . To look upon some hotly-contested theological discussion, a stranger might have said the doctor and his children were angry with each other. Never; they were only in earnest."
Such freewheeling exchanges honed Harriet's intellectual skills, while a life full of heartache gave her skills depth. She wrestled with depression throughout her life, and in 1849 she watched helplessly as cholera claimed the life of her infant son. Her marriage to theology professor Calvin Stowe, although ultimately successful, began without enthusiasm (on her wedding day Harriet wrote to a friend that while she had been "dreading and dreading" her upcoming marriage, now she was happy to report that she felt "nothing at all"). Such troubles gave Stowe a genuine sympathy for the struggles of others, a sympathy that was on full display in her first novel.
In later years when asked how she came to write Uncle Tom's Cabin, she replied, "God wrote it!" That was the benefit of hindsight. Upon completing the novel in 1852, she fretted that no one would read it. But the book became an international bestseller and Stowe's claim to lasting fame, though she went on to write another eight novels.
In his introduction to Oxford University Press's 150th anniversary edition, the noted African American author Charles Johnson ably summarizes some of the book's literary strengths, praising the novel for its "pure storytelling" and observing that "a contemporary writer experiences Stowe's bottomless talent for invention with just a twinge of professional envy."
Nevertheless, Johnson, like many contemporary critics, finds the book unsatisfying due to its "unfortunately toxic racial thinking," which presents "a portrait of black people that, from a twenty-first-century perspective is ineluctably racist." Johnson further chides Stowe for "willfully soft pedal[ling] much of slavery's real sadism and surrealism."
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