Uncle Tom's Cabin in the National Era : An Essay in Generic Norms and the Contexts of Reading

How we can become accustomed to anything!

—Harriet Beecher Stowe¹

Surprisingly little attention has been paid to the interplay between Uncle Tom's Cabin and the material that surrounded it when it first appeared as a series of installments in the free-soil weekly the National Era.² Publishing in that context, Stowe faced a formidable challenge: how to shape an account of slave culture that would have a greater impact than the antislavery discourse already typical of the abolitionist press. In representing slavery during the 1840s, writers of slave narratives, sermons, poems, and other texts often sought to elicit empathy from their readers. But it was Uncle Tom's Cabin that established sympathetic identification as a widespread reading practice for consuming the story of slavery. How did Stowe's tale accomplish that end?

Stowe was well aware that neither her facts nor her arguments would be new to readers of the Era. Indeed, in a sense they were all too familiar. By 1851 every edition of the National Era included images of fugitives as well as political discussions, religious appeals, and other well-rehearsed attacks on slave culture. William Lloyd Garrison and other abolitionists complained that this flood of print was often greeted only by the "apathy of the people."³ In designing her narrative, Stowe took up the rhetorical challenge that the Russian formalist critic Victor Shklovsky later called "defamiliarization": how to tell a well-known tale so as to "make it new."⁴

As we know from recurrent scenes of violence in today's news, outrages that cannot easily be remedied can often be ignored. "The best we can do is to shut our eyes and ears and let [slavery] alone," St. Clare remarks in chapter 19 of Uncle Tom's Cabin.⁵ Earlier in the novel, when Haley the slave trader is unmoved by "the wild look of anguish" on the face of a slave mother whose child he has sold, Stowe's narrator adds, "You can get used to such things too my friend" (208). The numbing of sensibility required to "let [slavery] alone" is a recurrent emphasis in the novel; it was a specific obstacle to response that Stowe set out to overcome.

Abolitionist discourse itself unwittingly contributed to the making familiar that allows one to "get used to" atrocities. In composing Uncle Tom's Cabin, Stowe was determined to break through what she saw as the defenses of readers who could hear about slavery every day and never "listen." In the novel's own words, Stowe asked herself what the point was of telling "the story, told too oft,—every day told ... the weak broken and torn for the profit and convenience of the strong! It needs not to be told" (202). Stowe may have felt that the story of slavery was "told too oft" to bear repeating, but she was still impelled to publish her own version of the tale. While composing her novel, Stowe gave careful thought to the problem of rhetoric: how could she subvert the complacency of contemporary readers, indifferent to sentimental appeals on the one hand and abolitionist arguments on the other?

Discussions of Stowe's novel over the past twenty-five years have emphasized the common ground between Uncle Tom's Cabin and other sentimental forms of middle-class culture. As the common ground has become increasingly visible, some significant differences in emphasis have been lost.⁶ Uncle Tom's Cabin echoed, even epitomized, the ubiquitous themes and images of sentimental print culture;⁷ but at the same time it modified firmly established rhetorical conventions. The unprecedented success of Uncle Tom's Cabin implies that there was a great deal of pleasure for readers in finding their generic expectations not only confirmed but also upset and remade.⁸

Stowe wanted her readers to see slavery with "new eyes."⁹ We...