Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 16: Harriet Beecher Stowe and her famous novel


David Bromwich discusses Harriet Beecher Stowe and her antislavery classic Uncle Tom's Cabin in the The Fever Dream of Mrs. Stowe New York Review of Books 10/25/07 edition (behind subscription), a review of The Annotated Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Bromwich argues that the picture of Uncle Tom as submissive, nonviolent and even passive until he is beaten to death was not meant to be a statement on Stowe's part discouraging active opposition and resistance by slaves against their masters. Instead, she sets little Eva and Tom up as Christ-like innocents who are sacrificed:

The Underground Railroad may save a few of the fortunate, like George and Eliza Harris; but Tom and Eva are proofs of the rule that slavery kills. In the moral scheme of Stowe's novel—though not in any strict relation of cause and effect—these two must die so that George and Eliza can live. Both sacrificial heroes are Christlike; and they are felt to be so by the other characters. A white female could not safely be taken to embody a goodness like Eva's except in her childish state: a full-grown Eva, after all, would have derived her guilt-ridden privilege from the profits of slavery, or else would have devoted an active life to opposing the evils of slavery, and neither position is suited to the patient suffering of a Christian saint. Similarly, a proud and energetic Tom could not have turned the other cheek forever.

These two between them exemplify the mystery of atonement. They exist in order to forgive; and if one asks what must be forgiven, the answer is the crime of slavery itself. Yet strong as the resemblance is, Tom and Eva differ in the manner of their deaths. Eva passes away decorously, from a wasting sickness. Tom, on Simon Legree's Louisiana plantation, is tortured to death—punished beyond the reach of a reason for the sake of inflicting pain—after he has refused to flog a fellow slave and refused to assist in the hunt for two escaped slaves. (He also declines an opportunity to murder his vicious master, saying, "Good never comes of wickedness. I'd sooner chop my right hand off.") As Stowe presents it, torture is a physical intensification of slavery, as slavery itself is a drawing out, over time, of the domination made manifest in torture. Before he dies, Tom asks Legree to spare his body in order to save his own soul from eternal damnation: "My troubles'll be over soon; but, if ye don't repent, yours won't never end." Legree, who hates Tom with "the native antipathy of bad to good," for a moment hesitates but he does not relent...
He describes Stowe's attitude as follows:

Stowe deplored all violence, and argued against slavery as a system of hidden and endless violence. Does that mean that a slave has a right to rebel? The character of Uncle Tom subtly evades the question. Again, are all protesters also obliged to follow the code of self-sacrifice? "We are curious to know," wrote William Lloyd Garrison, "whether Mrs. Stowe is a believer in the duty of non-resistance for the white man, under all possible outrage and peril, as well as for the black man." This raises a fair question, since, presumably, an abolitionist in 1852 has a duty to resist the law of the slave hunter. But to the extent that Garrison meant to suggest a larger right of resistance, he was looking beyond the range of choices offered in Uncle Tom's Cabin. Most of all, Stowe succeeds in demonstrating that the highest moral virtues - patience and courage under duress, and charity in answer to insult - can be found among blacks as among whites. If this is so, she would have wanted her readers to conclude, not only is slavery wrong but every act that perpetuates slavery is a crucifixion.
Bromwich reminds us that Stowe published a non-fiction work the year following Uncle Tom's Cabin, titled A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin; Presenting the Original Facts and Documents upon which the Story is Founded, Together with Corroborative Statements Verifying the Truth of the Work. That work showed her to be the possessor of a "keen sociological intelligence" and "both an imaginative and a scrupulous interpreter of documents". She didn't make up the scenes of mistreatment of slaves, how a slave auction works and so forth. She based them on the real life of slaves.

That climactic scene with the sadistic Simon Legree relates to a theological question that challenge the author, according to Bromwich:

Simon Legree belongs with St. Clare among the more humanly realized of the novel's characters. He is not a devil but a coarse and common man, possessed by the sadism that comes from the lust for power when it has no worldly force to restrain it. Legree is what many men would be if their mastery were unlimited and if they cherished no interest besides mastery. What can moral judgment do with such a person? The scene in which Tom begs him to repent has hidden under it a broader theological issue. Stowe herself, and the Beecher and Stowe clans in their sermons and letters, had wondered whether in the afterlife a man like Legree was to be punished everlastingly. Close to that question lay a practical concern about worldly conduct. Could such a man be reformed without the fear of eternal punishment? For one of the differences between Uncle Tom and Simon Legree is that Tom is a believer. Without the urgent reality of religious faith supported by the threat of damnation, would there not be more Simon Legrees?
Bromwich argues that the emotional appeal of her case against slavery in the novel has to do with her use of family imagery:

Stowe in general presents a family and a home as sufficient to redeem all the sufferings with which society afflicts the helpless. These possessions become the sentimental proof of the claim that slaves are human: they, too, want families, and they can make happy families.
But he contrasts this focus with the contemporaneous work of the great Herman Melville:

The completeness of Stowe's conformity to the domestic ideology of her time stands in a curious tension with her political dissidence. One can see the difference plainly if one compares Uncle Tom's Cabin with a novel that came out the following year, Melville's Pierre. This story about incestuous desire and thwarted love shows the dutiful affections of a man to a family as at once inescapable and poisonous. "Melville," Ann Douglas has accurately commented, "makes the sentimental domestic romance into a cage in which he deliberately confines his main character - and himself - both to define the limits of the form and to test the possibility of breaking out and destroying it."

By contrast, Stowe turns the tragedy of slavery into the drama of the breakup of a family; and she resolves the moral problem by the device of the double reunion of a husband and wife (George and Eliza Harris) and a mother and child (Cassy and her daughter Eliza). Thus, black and white people are unified most of all by their desire to become members of a family. The strength of Stowe is that she recognizes the precariousness of this device. Her characters wonder incessantly whether the influence of sentiment on character and opinion can do much to resolve a crisis as heated as the sectional contest of the 1850s. They are not sure that feelings are enough; and Stowe herself was not sure.
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