Fighting Slavery by “Presenting Facts in Detail”: Realism, Typology, and Temporality in Uncle Tom’s Cabin

In what has become a standard approach to its genre, Jane Tompkins attributes Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s success in advocating that the nation be governed on sentimental and domestic rather than political principles to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s use of typological characterization.¹ This reading effectively explains how some of the novel’s central characters function, most notably the evangelist little Eva, whose witnessing and death prompt a series of conversion experiences such as that of her father St. Clare, and the Christlike martyr Uncle Tom, whose sufferings, among their other effects, enable the salvation of the malignant Quimbo and Sambo. Tompkins contends that these characters’ tribulations moved an antebellum readership that identified with Christian values and narratives. To an audience possessing this “storehouse of assumptions,” Tompkins claims, “[s]tories like the death of little Eva are compelling for the same reason that the story of Christ’s death is compelling; they enact a philosophy, as much political as religious, in which the pure and powerless die to save the powerful and corrupt.”² As such, Stowe designed Biblically intoned moments to prompt her readers to act against slavery, just as Uncle Tom’s death prompts young George Shelby to free his family’s slaves.

While this argument remains valuable for elucidating the novel’s typological dimension and for its revolutionary claims for Stowe’s canonical status,³ Tompkins’ position leads her to understate the novel’s realism. She pays lip service to its more verisimilar qualities, but she determines that Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s “distinguishing features, generically speaking, are not those of the realistic novel, but of typological narrative. Its characters, like the figures in an allegory, do not change or develop, but reveal themselves in response to the demands of a situation”⁴ and, moreover, that “[t]he setting does not so much describe the features of a particular time and place as point to positions on a spiritual map.” She elaborates that

what pass for realistic details—the use of dialect, the minute descriptions of domestic activity—are in fact performing a rhetorical function dictated by the novel’s ruling paradigm; once that paradigm is perceived, even the homeliest details show up not as the empirically observed facts of human existence but as the expressions of a highly schematic intent.⁵

Tompkins here responds to a challenge the novel presents: how could Stowe desire to reveal the truth of slavery, while her novel contains such non-realistic elements? She concludes that the novel’s realism services a superseding typological argument against slavery.⁶

However, only by underestimating the power of the novel’s realism can that realism be subjugated to typology. Although some readings have addressed realism in Uncle Tom’s Cabin,⁷ better understanding the issue remains a pressing task because scholars have tended to follow Tompkins’ perspective.⁸ I here argue that Uncle Tom’s Cabin juxtaposes a realist narrative representing a national community of historical actors against spiritual intimations evoked through typological characterization. Instead of subjecting one genre to another, the narrative evinces a more subtle relationship between realism and typology by shifting between the two to show the depravity of a realistically depicted nation that does not live up to spiritual models. The relationship between the two registers takes the form of defamiliarization: typology functions to defamiliarize the conventionality of what Stowe views as a corrupt nation. Stowe’s national realism is key here. Her novel utilizes a specific set of realist tactics to evoke the characteristics and practices of her nation at her particular place and time. Recognizing how Stowe utilizes realism to unmask the failings of this specific social field through her defamiliarizing use of typological characterization reveals the connection between the novel’s form and its critique.

Benedict Anderson’s understanding of national temporality and its relation to the novel provides a useful conceptual framework here. Anderson has argued that the nation’s rise as the modern world’s principle “imagined community” occurred via historical changes in how people narrativize experience. Prior to this shift, the...