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LECTURE 10
L
ITERATURE OF THE USA
1.
Slavery in the novel of Harriet Beecher Stowe “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”.
2.
Literary activity and world outlook of Henry Longfellow. Criticism of racial discrimination
and slavery.
3.
The Indian topic in the novel “The Song of Hiawatha”
KEY WORDS
MARTYR
n. 1 a person killed for persisting in a belief. b person who suffers for a cause etc. c person who
suffers or pretends to suffer to get pity etc. 2 (foll. by to) colloq. constant sufferer from (an
ailment).
1.
Slavery in the novel of Harriet Beecher Stowe “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”
Harriet Beecher Stowe's (1811-1896) novel ‘Uncle Tom's Cabin’ or, ‘Life among the Lowly’ was the most popular
American book of the 19th century. First published serially in the National Era magazine (1851- 1852), it was an
immediate success. Forty different publishers printed it in England alone, and it was quickly translated into 20 languages,
receiving the praise of such authors as Georges Sand in France, Heinrich Heine in Germany, and Ivan Turgenev in Russia.
Its passionate appeal for an end to slavery in the United States inflamed the debate that, within a decade, led to the U.S.
Civil War (1861-1865).
Reasons for the success of
Uncle Tom's Cabin
are obvious. It reflected the idea that slavery in the
United States, the nation that purportedly embodied democracy and equality for all, was an injustice of
colossal proportions.
Stowe herself was a perfect representative of old New England Puritan stock. Her father, brother,
and husband all were well-known, learned Protestant clergymen and reformers. Stowe conceived the idea
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of the novel -- in a vision of an old, ragged slave being beaten -- as she participated in a church service.
Later, she said that the novel was inspired and "written by God." Her motive was the religious passion to
reform life by making it more godly. The Romantic period had ushered in an era of feeling: The virtues of
family and love reigned supreme. Stowe's novel attacked slavery precisely because it violated domestic
values.
The Uncle Tom of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
is a devout Christian
slave, owned by the kindly Shelby family. When financial difficulties
make it necessary for the Shelbys to sell their slaves, Tom is
purchased by a dealer and taken to New Orleans. On the way there
he saves the life of Eva, the daughter of the wealthy St. Clair family,
and in gratitude St. Clair purchases him. Tom now lives happily for
two years with the angelic little Eva and her black companion, Topsy,
but when Eva dies and St. Clair is killed in an accident, Tom is sold
again. This time he is sold to the cruel Simon Legree, who, when Tom
refuses to divulge the hiding place of two runaway slaves, flogs him
to death. As Tom is dying, George Shelby, son of his old master,
arrives and vows to devote himself to the cause of abolition.
Slavery is depicted as evil not for political or philosophical reasons but mainly because it divides
families, destroys normal parental love, and is un-Christian. The most touching scenes show an agonized
slave mother unable to help her screaming child and a father sold away from his family. These were crimes
against the sanctity of domestic love.
Stowe's novel was not originally intended as an attack on the South; in fact, Stowe had visited the
South, liked southerners, and portrayed them kindly. Southern slave-owners are good masters and treat
Tom well. St. Clare personally hates slavery and intends to free all of his slaves. The evil master Simon
Legree, on the other hand, is a northerner and the anti-hero. Ironically, the novel was meant to reconcile
the North and South, which were drifting toward the Civil War a decade away. Ultimately, though, the book
was used by abolitionists and others as a polemic against the South.
Born in Connecticut, on June 14, 1811, Harriet Elizabeth Beecher was the daughter of the liberal
clergyman Lyman Beecher and the sister of five clergymen, including the popular preacher Henry Ward
Beecher. In 1832, she moved to Cincinnati, where her father had been made president of Lane Theological
Seminary. Here she gained her first direct knowledge of slavery. Here, also, in 1836 she married scholar and
educator Calvin Ellis Stowe, who had encouraged her writing.
Her first published work, a textbook called ‘
A New Geography for Children’
(1833), was co-written
with her sister, Catharine Esther Beecher. Her next book,
The Mayflower
, or ‘
Sketches of Scenes and
Characters Among the Descendants of the Pilgrims’
, appeared in 1843. In 1853, Stowe issued
A Key to Uncle
Tom’s Cabin
, containing an impressive array of documentary evidence in support of her attack upon
slavery. She returned to the attack in
Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp
(1856). Stowe’s later fiction
was great in volume but uneven in quality, her best work lying in her stories of the local life of her own
Puritan New England.
The Minister’s Wooing (1859), The Pearl of Orr’s Island (1862),
and
Oldtown Folks
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(1869) are acute psychological and spiritual studies of real people. Stowe also wrote short stories and
religious poetry. She died on July 1, 1896, in Hartford, Connecticut
“Uncle Tom’s Cabin” convinced many Americans, especially in the northern United States, to support
the Abolitionist movement against slavery. The sentimental novel is a major form of American fiction that
grew out of the responses of white writers to the abuses of slavery. In Stowe's novel and in novels that
followed in this tradition, pity for the oppressed did not necessitate revolutionary change but rather called
for an outpouring of Christian love. Sentimental fiction elicited this “Christian” sympathy from Northern
white women in particular by demonstrating how the slave system violated the most basic bonds of
humanity, such as that between mother and child. By 1850, when her husband accepted a position at
Bowdoin College in Maine, Harriet Beecher Stowe was the mother of seven children. Back in the New
England atmosphere of rising religious abolitionism, she poured her own indignation over the Fugitive Slave
Law of 1850 into
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
. It did much to crystallize militant antislavery sentiment in the North,
and therefore was an important factor in precipitating the American Civil War (1861-1865).
Uncle Tom’s
Cabin
, like most of Stowe’s novels, is rambling in structure, but rich in pathos and dramatic incident.
2.
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