Harriet Beecher Stowe and Uncle Tom’S Cabin Background

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Harriet Beecher Stowe and Uncle Tom’S Cabin Background Harriet Beecher Stowe and Uncle Tom’s Cabin Background • Reaction to Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 • Death of Stowe’s own young son, Charly Background, cont. • Begun in 1850, when Stowe was 39, living in Maine • First serialized in anti-slavery newspaper, The National Era Publication • Finished book published in its entirety on March 20, 1852 • By June, selling 10,000 copies a week • By October, American sales alone were 150,000 • By the end of the year, easily THE bestseller of the 19th Century European Publication • Also immensely popular in Europe • First American book in history to sell over a million copies • Stowe never became rich, due to unwise initial contract with John P. Jewett of Boston Reaction • Both intensely favorable and intensely negative (still true today!) • Tolstoy: “One of the greatest productions of the human mind.” • Lincoln: Allegedly greeted Stowe in 1862 as “the little woman who made this great war.” Apocryphal? Anti-Tom Literature • Spawned a whole genre of anti-Tom literature in the 1850’s, including titles such as: – Aunt Phillis’s Cabin – The Cabin and the Parlour – The Lofty and the Lowly – Uncle Robin in his Cabin in Virginia, etc. etc. Anti-Tom Literature • Major figure a benign & patriarchal slavemaster who is a wealthy plantation owner • Includes kind-hearted masters & mistresses who read Northern accounts of the cruelty of slavery and are bewildered because no one they know treats slaves that way Anti-Tom Literature • Argue that slaves’ value as property prevents mistreatment • Abolitionists are villains; force innocent slaves to lie about their treatment • Slaves themselves play very minor roles; argue slavery saves them from want and deprivation More Recent Views • Writers such as James Baldwin critique the novel for being overly sentimental; for being racist; for attempting to convey a social “message” Jane Tompkins • Recent feminist critics, such as Jane Tompkins, re- examine sentimental literature • Argue that this literature did important cultural work and SHOULD be read and studied More Recent Views • Writers such as Jane Smiley defend the novel for offering a nuanced treatment of slavery back in 1852 • In a controversial article in Harper’s Magazine in 1996, argues that Uncle Tom's Cabin is powerful because it marries "brilliant analysis" to "great wisdom of feeling," and that it presents a “hard-nosed, unsentimental dialogue about race.” • American literature might have done better to pay more attention to the lessons taught by Stowe's novel than those taught in Huckleberry Finn. Romantic Racialism from “Uncle Tom and the Anglo-Saxons: Romantic Racialism in the North” by George M. Frederickson • In American literature, historical writing, and science in mid-19th C, there was a new emphasis the peculiarities of diverse peoples and nations, which suggested an explanation of social and cultural differences based on race. Enlightenment vs. Romanticism A phenomenon associated with a Romantic turning away from the Enlightenment principles of Universalism and the “blank slate.” Anglo-Saxons vs. Celts Ethnic chauvinism first began in an attempt to glorify the Anglo-Saxon over the Celtic or Iberian stock Initially, not racist • Initially, did not lead to ethnic chauvinism • In fact, early attempt to celebrate diversity as it showed the richness of the human spirit • Human diversity appreciated as one could appreciate the diverse beauties of nature Anglo-Saxons vs. Celts • Anglo-Saxon represented as “carrying in his blood” a love of liberty, individual enterprise and resourcefulness, and a capacity for practical and reasonable behavior • These qualities were seen as lacking in his rivals • Yet, later, Anglo-Saxon and Celt often lumped together as “Anglican” or “Caucasian” African as the Anti-Caucasion • Heightened awareness of what it meant to be Anglo-Saxon, coming at the time of the national debate on slavery, helped make it easy for many, on both sides of the debate, to accept a stereotype of the African or African American as the “anti-Caucasion” A Change in Ideology • In 1830’s, dialogue • By 1840’s and had been primarily 1850’s, between defenders conversations of a universal tended to start from human nature and the assumption that proponents of the races were racially different fundamentally humans different Stereotypes of African Americans Like women, Africans Americans often stereotyped as: • Child-like • More religious • Feeling over intellect Negatively: • Non-intellectual • Lacking enterprise • Incapable of self-governement, etc. Stowe and Romantic Racialism • While many viewed these stereotypes as negative, “romantic racialism” was widely espoused by Northern humanitarians who were mostly anti-slavery. • Those who believed in feeling over intellect (a view sanctioned both by romanticism and evangelical religion) saw Negro “differences” as positives • Shares with racism a kind of racial determinism, but has very different implications • In its most extreme, this view argued that blacks were, in fact, better than whites, because they were less power-hungry, less war-mongering, more moral, more religious • The African American as the ideal Christian • Stowe? .
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