(In) Famous Spirituality: Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom

This essay explores the interrelatedness of spirituality, manhood, and race in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s most famous character Uncle Tom. While Uncle Tom has become a cultural type with many negative connotations, recent studies have re-evaluated Stowe’s achievement. This is the context to this essay’s central question: whether—and to what extent-- Stowe’s fictional creation achieved the ideal of a “fullness of self,” as formulated by W.E.B. Du Bois’ in his Souls of Black Folk (1903). In exploring this question, parallels are drawn with thoughts on the interrelations of gender and spirituality by Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James.