"Uncle Tom's Cabin" and the Reading Revolution: Race, Literacy, Childhood, and Fiction, 1851-1911

1. Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the National Era: Recasting Sentimental Images

26 K 1 uncle tom’s Cabin in thenational era Recasting Sentimental Images how we can become accustomed to anything! —Harriet Beecher Stowe 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.1 Publishing in that context, Stowe faced a formidable challenge: how to shape an account of slavery that would have a greater impact than the 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 sympathy from their readers. But abolitionists did not ask their readers to collapse the distance between themselves and the objects of their sympathy. on the contrary —reformers took it for granted that a proper sense of white separateness was crucial to benevolent feelings and actions.2 Uncle Tom’s Cabin established emotional 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. in a sense they were all too familiar. By 1851, every issue of the paper included images of fugitives as well as political discussions, religious appeals, and other well-rehearsed attacks on slavery. abolitionists such as William lloyd garrison 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 L 27 Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the National Era 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 XiX of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (328). earlier in the novel, when haley the slave trader is unmovedby“thewildlookofanguish”onthefaceofaslavemotherwhosechild 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” was a specific obstacle to response that Stowe set out to overcome. abolitionist discourse unwittingly contributed to the making familiar that allows one to “get used to” atrocities. Slave narratives, as William andrews suggests , sometimes “strained for shocking effects that would demand the attention of even the most indifferent reader”;5 yet this tactic itself inured some readers to scenes of violence, while impelling others to avert their eyes. 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 words of her narrator 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 version of the tale. While composing Uncle Tom’s Cabin, she gave careful thought to the problem of rhetoric: how could she subvert the complacency of contemporary readers, “accustomed to nap and nod under the pulpit,” indifferent to sentimental appeals and abolitionist arguments?6 By the time Stowe decided to harness the power of fiction to the abolitionist cause, she had given considerable thought to the persuasive potential of imaginative texts, for good and ill. Fiction was not an inevitable choice for Stowe. indeed, in some ways it was an unexpected departure. She had produced several kinds of writing by 1851—a children’s geography, poetry, parables , sermons, literary commentary. She had often warned against the dangers of seductive, irreligious, even merely “amusing” fiction, especially for women, children, and other “impressionable” natures.7 Stowe understood the lure of exciting tales and believed that the novel was a two-edged sword. this understanding led her to grasp fiction’s latent power. 28 K Chapter 1 Stowe and American Fiction at Mid-Century Well before Stowe began to write Uncle Tom’s...