(First published at Desicritics)
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a book about the lives of Tom and many other slaves in pre Civil War America. Through Tom’s fortunes, his various masters, and those of his other black friends, we get a sense of those terrible times in American history.
The best parts are those involving women and their kitchen politics. Clearly, the Southern kitchen is a world Stowe knew intimately and remembered fondly. The corn cakes, the “poetry” (Aunt Chloe’s pronunciation of “poultry”), the pies and the women are vivid and oddly cute. Stowe’s kitchen becomes a microcosm of the slavery-days America. The territorial conflict for kitchen dominion between Dinah, the disorderly black cook, and her master’s propriety-personified Northern cousin, Miss Ophelia, at once captures all the nuances of North-South, black-white, slave-master politics; and it does so with all the humor of a good old who-owns-the-kitchen feud.
But Stowe is too sharp a writer to leave it at that. A few pages down the line, after a stunningly perceptive tirade against slavery, the cynical St. Clare likens slavery to Dinah’s kitchen: you love what comes out of it, but you wouldn’t if you saw the mess inside. What a sophisticated, damning and clever observation!
Uncle Tom is a deeply religious book. Much before Stowe makes it explicit, you know that little Eva, the daughter of Tom’s new master, is divine. What starts out as a Christian undercurrent, gradually becomes a full blown Biblical allegory. The early references to Christian love are ennobling; they remind you of the humanist sense in which (of all people) Bertrand Russell advocated it. But somewhere down the line, Stowe’s missionary zeal gets the better of her. It is one thing to use a Christian allegory as a literary device, but when it usurps the human story, it can be troubling. Surely, Tom’s death and the subsequent gift of freedom to the other slaves is sufficient to tell us that Tom is the adult Christ who bears his country’s cross (the cherubic Eva is baby Jesus).
Left at that, this is a brilliant and daring (remember, Tom is black) characterization. At least, it lifts Tom above the “noble savage” image of slaves in American writing of the time. But Stowe wants more. She wants us to think that Tom’s heart wrenchingly tragic end is something to be celebrated as his union with God. The problem is that this, unwittingly, makes slavery a part of the Divine Plan and somewhat minimizes the serious human damage it did. It also takes some of the bite out of Stowe’s criticism of churches that assured divine sanction to slavery. So strong is Stowe’s agenda that the skeptical St. Clare and the freethinking George Harris must be hastily made to accept Christ, lest they come across as happy/good heathens. Even if we grant Tom’s divinity as an allegorical necessity, it’s a pity that, in her final strokes, Stowe paints the other human characters in one hue. Her bending over backwards to exalt the virtues of the “African race” is also quite unnecessary. The way Christianity morphs in the book-from an ennobling and humane philosophy into the absolute and only truth-eerily foreshadows the trajectory it has taken in American politics.
None of this takes away from the powerful pang of the story. We weep for Tom in his horrifying last days. But we weep because his story is far too achingly real to offer any redemption in an imagined afterlife. For collecting such histories and weaving them into a single, beautiful narrative, Stowe deserves to be read.
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a book about the lives of Tom and many other slaves in pre Civil War America. Through Tom’s fortunes, his various masters, and those of his other black friends, we get a sense of those terrible times in American history.
The best parts are those involving women and their kitchen politics. Clearly, the Southern kitchen is a world Stowe knew intimately and remembered fondly. The corn cakes, the “poetry” (Aunt Chloe’s pronunciation of “poultry”), the pies and the women are vivid and oddly cute. Stowe’s kitchen becomes a microcosm of the slavery-days America. The territorial conflict for kitchen dominion between Dinah, the disorderly black cook, and her master’s propriety-personified Northern cousin, Miss Ophelia, at once captures all the nuances of North-South, black-white, slave-master politics; and it does so with all the humor of a good old who-owns-the-kitchen feud.
But Stowe is too sharp a writer to leave it at that. A few pages down the line, after a stunningly perceptive tirade against slavery, the cynical St. Clare likens slavery to Dinah’s kitchen: you love what comes out of it, but you wouldn’t if you saw the mess inside. What a sophisticated, damning and clever observation!
Uncle Tom is a deeply religious book. Much before Stowe makes it explicit, you know that little Eva, the daughter of Tom’s new master, is divine. What starts out as a Christian undercurrent, gradually becomes a full blown Biblical allegory. The early references to Christian love are ennobling; they remind you of the humanist sense in which (of all people) Bertrand Russell advocated it. But somewhere down the line, Stowe’s missionary zeal gets the better of her. It is one thing to use a Christian allegory as a literary device, but when it usurps the human story, it can be troubling. Surely, Tom’s death and the subsequent gift of freedom to the other slaves is sufficient to tell us that Tom is the adult Christ who bears his country’s cross (the cherubic Eva is baby Jesus).
Left at that, this is a brilliant and daring (remember, Tom is black) characterization. At least, it lifts Tom above the “noble savage” image of slaves in American writing of the time. But Stowe wants more. She wants us to think that Tom’s heart wrenchingly tragic end is something to be celebrated as his union with God. The problem is that this, unwittingly, makes slavery a part of the Divine Plan and somewhat minimizes the serious human damage it did. It also takes some of the bite out of Stowe’s criticism of churches that assured divine sanction to slavery. So strong is Stowe’s agenda that the skeptical St. Clare and the freethinking George Harris must be hastily made to accept Christ, lest they come across as happy/good heathens. Even if we grant Tom’s divinity as an allegorical necessity, it’s a pity that, in her final strokes, Stowe paints the other human characters in one hue. Her bending over backwards to exalt the virtues of the “African race” is also quite unnecessary. The way Christianity morphs in the book-from an ennobling and humane philosophy into the absolute and only truth-eerily foreshadows the trajectory it has taken in American politics.
None of this takes away from the powerful pang of the story. We weep for Tom in his horrifying last days. But we weep because his story is far too achingly real to offer any redemption in an imagined afterlife. For collecting such histories and weaving them into a single, beautiful narrative, Stowe deserves to be read.
