Critical Responses to Uncle Tom's Cabin

"Everybody's Protest Novel" (1955) by James Baldwin

"Uncle Tom's Cabin is a very bad novel, having, in its self-righteous,virtuous sentimentality, much in common with Little Women. Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty. Uncle Tom's Cabin--like its multitudinous, hard-boiling descendants--is a catalogue of violence. This is explained by the nature of Mrs. Stowe's subject matter, her laudable determination to flinch from nothing in presenting the complete picture; an explanation which falters only if we pause to ask whether or not her picture is indeed complete; and what constriction or failure of perception forced her to so depend on the description of brutality--unmotivated, senseless--and to leave unaswered and unnoticed the only important question:  what it was, after all, that moved her people to such deeds" (496).

". . . she could not cast out the blacks--a wretched, huddled mass, apparently, claiming, like an obsession, her inner eyes-she could not embrace them either without purifying them of sin. She must cover their intimidating nakedness, robe them in white, the garmets of salvation . . . . Tom, therefore, her only black man, has been robbed of his humanity and divested of his sex. It is the price for that darkness with which he has been branded" (498).

Sensational Designs (1985) by Jane Tompkins

• Great literary texts do not have to be "works of art embodying enduring themes in complex forms"
  but "attempts to redefine the social order" (xi).
• The literary goal is not "to escape the limitations of their particular time and place"
  but "offer powerful examples of the way a culture thinks about itself, articulating and proposing solutions for the problems that shape a particular historical moment" (xi).
  

"Sentimental Power"

• "[Works like Uncle Tom's Cabin] enact, in short, a theory of power in which the ordinary or 'common sense' view of what is efficacious and what is not (a view to which most modern critics are committed) is simply reversed, as the very possibility of social action is made dependent on the action taking place in individual hearts" (128)
• '...not words, but the emotions of the heart bespeak a state of grace, and these are known by the sound of a voice, the touch of a hand, but chiefly in moments of greatest importance, by tears. When Tom lies dying on the plantation on the Red River, the disciples to whom he has preached testify to their conversion by weeping" (131).
• ". . . when Stowe asks the question that is in every reader's mind at the end of the novel--namely, 'what can any individual do?'--she recommends not specific alterations in the current political and economic arrangements, but rather a change of heart" (132).
• "Uncle Tom's Cabin. . . was spectacularly persuasive in conventional political terms: it helped convince a nation to go to war to free its slaves. But in terms of its own conception of power, a conception it shares with other sentimental ficiton, the novel was a political failure. Stowe conceived her book as an instrument for bringing about the day when the world would be ruled not by force, but by Christian love" (141).
• '... by resting her case, absolutely, on the saving power of Christian love and on the sanctity of motherhood and the family, Stowe relocates the center of power in American life, placing it not in the government, nor in the courts of law, nor in the factories, nor in the marketplace, but in the kitchen. And that means that the new society will not be controlled by men, but by women" (145).

Frederick Douglass writes (29 April 1853): "The touching, but too truthful tale of Uncle Tom's Cabin, has rekindled the slumbering embers of anti-slavery zeal into active flame. Its recitals have baptized with holy fire myriads who before cared nothing for the bleeding slave. Where is the heart it has not roused into indignation or melted into tears?"

In The War Before the War (2018), Andrew Delbanco writes, "Stowe wanted to believe that slave owners could be shamed by sin and moved by love. Yet Uncle Tom's Cabin was ultimately an argument against itself. From the opening chpaters, in which Tom's owner, a decent man who feels real affection for this faithful slave but nevertheless sells him under financial duress, she shows again and again that conscience is not match for the coercive force of the market. . . . [She] was a proto-Marxist in the sense that she recognized that in the war between conscience and material interest the latter is most likely to prevail. The whole structure of racial ideology (the natural dependency of blacks, the superiority of whites, the dignity of slavery, and all the rest) was nothing but a veneer of rationalization pasted onto an economic foundation. . . . In spite of herself, Harriet Beecher Stowe saw no way out of the slavery impasse short of the violent destruction of the slave economy and forcing southern society to reorganize itself. She was not ready to concede this truth explicitly, but it was implicit in every word of her devastating book" (307-308).