Harriet Beecher Stowe : Three Novels : Uncle Tom's Cabin Or, Life Among the Lowly; The Minister's Wooing; Oldtown Folks (Library of America)

Rating:
Summary: Uncle Tom is the most important book in US History
Review: A central text in American Literature and History, January 7, 2005
Reviewer: Tony Thomas (North Miami, FL USA) - See all my reviews
Uncle Tom is probably the most important single book written in the United States of America. No one is really familiar with American culture, literature, relgion, and history if she or he has not read Uncle Tom.

To understand this book, I would urge people to consult Eric J. Sundquist's book New Essays on Uncle Tom's Cabin (The American Novel) and Jane Tompkin's Sensational Designs. The 19th Century world and reader that Stowe aimed at read and understood things so differently, that you will miss much without knowing how to look at this book the way Stowe wrote to them and the way they read.

This book has a broad purpose: literary to decide what is wrong with the entire world and present an answer. If you follow the sweep of the book you will find Stowe takes on everything from whether the issues of the 1848 revolutions can be resolved on the side of Democracy, to the question of marital relations amogn the free and the white. The issue of slavery is not the book's only focus. It is, in fact, the solution.

Stowe's real thesis here is that American Chattel slavery is the number one evil in the world, that this evil corrupts every institution in society North and South and corrupts far beyond the borders of the United States, and that no compromise with it or avoidance of it is possible.

To Stowe, slavery is an abomination not just because of the cruelty, savagery, exploitation, and degradation involved, but above all, it is an abomination against God, the most unChrist-like behavior possible.

Thus the relgious solution she offers is to become more Christlike in your opposition to slavery and to finally undergrow the Christic experience of dying for your sins and being reborn in Jesus Christ. That's right, in Stowe's time evangelical Christianity, rather than being a fob for right-wing politics, was practiced by some of the militant and serious opponents of slavery.

Stowe creates figures that are Christlike who like Christ die rather than yield to sin and influence the others in their faith. The supreme figure is of course Uncle Tom. Uncle Tom, as a a pejorative, comes not from this novel, but from the Tom shows that blossomed in the late 19th century which were a presentation of a mock version of this story with racist minstrel like charicatures of the African American characters.

In this book, Uncle Tom is a physically majestic, heroic, dignified person, whose faith and dignity are never corrupted, whose death is shown as a parallel to that of Christ in the resurrection of the souls of all around him required to eliminate Slavery. If he is passive, never disobeys his masters, and seems to have not much of a material interest of his own in life, it is because to Stowe this a reflection of his Christic nature.

No doubt at best Stowe sees him as a "noble savage" at Best. There is no doubt if one reads this book and even more clearly STowe's Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin which provided documentation for this book's depiction of slavery, that it is clear that Stowe did not believe African Americans were equal to whites. Her then-current immigrationist views are expressed in the way the one intelligent independently acting Black couple presented here leave the US for Canada once they escape slavery.

Yet, this book accomplished the purpose it had. It galvanized millions of Americans and more millions around the world to dramatically oppose slavery. Uncle Tom was one of the first true international best sellers. In a smaller country, where literacy was lower, and when many people bought books through private libraries where families shared books and the book was often read to family gatherings rather than by one person, Uncle Tom sold two hundred thousand copies in its first year and sold a million copies between its publication and the civil war.

Stowe was honest in her afterward and in other writings to say that her description of slavery in Uncle Tom is much prettier and more nicer than slavery was. She believed an accurate depiction of slavery--Stowe had lived in Cincinatti on the board with slaving Kentucky and traveled through the South--would be so revolting that her target audience of Northern whites would not read this book.

Her book launched a torrent of responses from white southerners as could be expected. However, the popularity of her book encouraged white authors, but especially Black authors to write antislavery books that responded to Stowe. Some of the foundations of Black American literature by authors like Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, Harriet Jacobs, and Martin Delany are essentially response to Uncle Tom.

Perhaps the most dramatic is Delany's Blake or the Huts of America whose character is a double to Uncle Tom. However, Delany's hero does not submit to being sold "down the river." He instead runs away and travels throughout the US following the same course as the travels in Uncle Tom showing how slave conditions are so much worse than Stowe showed. Finished with that business, Blake leaves the United States for Cuba where he becomes part of a group of Afro-Cubans unwilling to suffer like Christ and Uncle Tom. Like the current leaders of Cuba, they start to organize an international revolution of Slaves and the oppressed!






Rating:
Summary: Outmoded fiction, but interesting nonetheless
Review: This is a compilation of three novels written by Harriet Beecher Stowe. These books are together considered by the editor to be her most important works, so they are grouped together in this volume. While Uncle Tom's Cabin is probably the most influential novel in American history, I doubt many readers have ever heard of The Minister's Wooing or Oldtown Folks. The rating then can't involve just Uncle Tom's Cabin, but must discuss all three books.

Uncle Tom's Cabin, as noted above, is the most influential novel in American history. There's a famous anecdote, repeated in slightly different forms in different places, that President Lincoln, upon being introduced to her, referred to her as "the little lady who started the big war" or something to that affect. Uncle Tom's Cabin opened the world of slavery (in a somewhat homogenized form) to Northern readers who objected to slavery but were convinced it wasn't their problem. The book itself is rather sly: it puts a very good man who's a slave in a series of situations, and it's not until the last portion of the book that his slavery becomes intolerable. The trick is that within the world of "acceptable" slavery, the situation is intolerable, with families being split and various other calamities. The result is to make the reader oppose slavery, even in situations when the master of the slaves were good-natured, compassionate people.

The Minister's Wooing is a different sort of story. It's set sometime just after the American Revolution in New England, and the main characters are a woman of middle years and her teenaged daughter, who have a boarder, the Minister of the title. The mother sets her heart on getting the Minister to marry her daughter, and off we go for a 300 page romance novel. The romantic aspect of the novel is very very tame by our modern standards, but the worst part of the book is the treacly religious fervor that pervades every page of the book. I think most modern fundamentalists would think it overdone. One odd circumstance is the appearance of Aaron Burr (prior to his shooting Alexander Hamilton) as a secondary character in the book: the author doesn't approve of Mr. Burr.

Oldtown Folks is set similarly to The Minister's Wooing, in New England at about the turn of the 18th Century. The book is told in the first person, with the narrator being the son of a widow. They befriend a pair of orphans from a neighboring village, and the bulk of the book surrounds one of the orphans, a young girl named Tina who bewitches everyone who knows her with her bright personality and wonderful demeanor. Some of the characters in this novel are especially well-drawn: one old woman is so hateful that you just despise her, more than the characters in the book do. The problem, again, is that the book just goes on and on, for almost 600 pages, and it takes forever to run to its conclusion.

All three novels deal with the inequities of society in the period in which they are set, and all three have the aforementioned religious overtones that are completely overdone by modern standards. If you can overcome the latter, the former are interesting, but I can't recommend either The Minister's Wooing or Oldtown Folks. Uncle Tom's Cabin is of course required reading for anyone interested in American history, and frankly is the best book of the three anyway.

Rating:
Summary: A great interpretation of a Christian man in shackles.
Review: Uncle Tom's Cabin, written by a woman who appalled slavery, has touched the hearts of many readers. Wanting to change and affect public opinion on the concept of slavery, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote a novel, a dramatic, engaging narrative that claimed the heart, soul, and politics of many fellow Americans. It was propaganda and an attempt to make whites in the North and South see slaves as mortal human beings with Christian souls.
Uncle Tom's Cabin is the story of the slave Tom. Strong and loyal as he is, his "good" master, Mr. Shelby, sells Tom to Mr. Haley, a slave trader, to pay off a debt. Mr. St. Clare then purchases him as an act of gratitude for saving his daughter's life. After St. Clare's death, his wife goes against his wishes and sends him to a slave warehouse where he is bought by the "bullet headed" Mr. Simon Legree. Here, Tom endures brutal treatment at the hands of his master. By exposing the extreme cruelties of slavery, Stowe explores society's failures and asks, what is it to be a moral human being?"
The novel was revolutionary for its passionate indictment of slavery and its presentation of Tom, "a man of humanity." Labeled racist and condescending by some contemporary critics, Uncle Tom's Cabin still remains a shocking, controversial, and powerful piece of literature--exposing the attitudes of white nineteenth century society toward the institution of slavery, and documenting the tragic breakup of black Kentucky families.
I would definately recommend this novel to all well-informed readers looking for literature with much diction and imagery. It would also suit the needs of those looking for a great plot. However, I caution those sensitive to great detail of torture because this novel is very strong and graphic on the broad issue of slavery.