Setting a Bad Example

Any week's bestseller list offers a bounty of bad books. Though hardly as bad as some, the best-selling novel of the nineteenth century earned the opprobrium it once attracted. In 1949, when Harriet Beecher Stowe's literary tour of what her subtitle calls Life Among the Lowly was out of print, James Baldwin encountered scant argument for writing: "Uncle Tom's Cabin is a very bad novel, having, in its self-righteous, virtuous sentimentality, much in common with Little Women." However, sentimentality has since been sentimentalized as a strategy for validating women's voices, and Stowe and Louisa May Alcott have both been canonized. A Jury of Her Peers (2009), Elaine Showalter's new history of American women's literature, pronounces Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) "an American masterpiece" and its author "a great writer, a daring and forceful architect of narrative, a gifted painter of character, and a sophisticated manager of symbolism, irony, and allegory." In his lavishly annotated edition of Uncle Tom's Cabin (2006), Henry Louis Gates, Jr. offers absolution for its racist attitudes.

Yet it is hard not to cringe when told that Tom "had the soft, impressible nature of his kindly race, ever yearning toward the simple and childlike" or that:

The negro, it must be remembered, is an exotic of the most gorgeous and superb countries of the world, and he has, deep in his heart, a passion for all that is splendid, rich, and fanciful; a passion which, rudely indulged by an untrained taste, draws on them the ridicule of the colder and more correct white race.

George Orwell called Uncle Tom's Cabin "a good bad book." It did good by targeting "the peculiar institution" that reduced human beings to chattel. But, substituting sanctimony for empathy and polemic for poetry, it set a bad example for literary art.