One More Trip To the Quarters: Uncle Tom‘s Cabin Revisited With Toni Morrison

Sabine Broeck,

Doctor of Philology, Professor

University of Bremen, Germany

American Cultural Studies /American Literatures and Cultures / Black Diaspora /Gender

E-mail: broeck@uni-bremen.de

The article looks at Harriett Beecher Stowe's famous anti-slavery  novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. Published first in serial installments in an anti-slavery paper in 1851, one year after the passing of the Fugitive Slave Law, the novel not only joined in the heated political controversy the abolitionist movement had instigated in the pre-Civil War United States, it defined its terms to no small extent. After decades of feminist instruction about the “cultural work” of fiction it has become possible again to appreciate the novel‘s articulateness, its genre-rich versatility, and its overwhelming sentimentality in terms other than trivia. The article focuses on the tension between, on the one hand, Beecher Stowe's early feminist and abolitionist sincerity in her propagandistic fight against slavery, and on the other hand, her white racism in her refusal to grant her black characters an agency of their own.

Keywords: Harriett Beecher Stowe, slavery, Tomi Morrison, African-American fiction, abolitionism, textual cultural work, feminism.

References

1. Baldwin, James. “Everybody’s Protest Novel” Ammonds, ed. UTC, pp. 532—537.

2. Beecher Stowe, Harriett. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Elisabeth Ammons, ed., New York / London: 2010 (1852).

3. Brion Davis, David. Slavery and Human Progress, New York: Oxford UP, 1984.

4. Castronovo, Russ. “Radical Configurations of History in the Era of American Slavery”. Michael Moon, Cathy Davidson, eds. Subjects and Citizens, Durham: Duke University Press, 1995, pp. 169—194.

5. Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel, New York: Stein and Say Publishers, 1960 (1966).

6. Fiedler, Leslie. The Inadvertent Epic: From UTC to Root, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979.

7. McDowell, Deborah and Arnold Rampersad, eds. Slavery and the Literary Imagination. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.

8. Morrison, Toni. Beloved, New York: Knopf, 1987.

9. Sundquist, Eric. ed. New Essays on Uncle Tom‘s Cabin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

10. Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs. The Cultural Work of American Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989 (1985).