By Eunice Masunungure
THE horror of slavery, the impact of what one hears regarding resistance efforts and the importance of who writes your story comes to the fore in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a 19th Century text about the horrors of slavery in America, published in 1852 by Harriet Beecher Stowe.
Stowe’s most widely read and hotly disputed American novel, which was translated into 60 languages, was profoundly influenced by the author’s reading of slave accounts, to which she owed many graphic incidents and the models for some of her most memorable characters.
What makes the text very applicable to the study of slavery in the modern day is that it looks into the evil and inhumanity of American slavery.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin captures the unjust and immoral issues surrounding slavery of Africans in America.
It also helps readers to empathise with enslaved characters.
The text evoked intense memories about slavery and stirred outrage among many young people who read or watched the film based on it.
The National Era (1851), the publisher of the abolitionist newspaper averred that Uncle Tom’s Cabin ‘paints a word picture of slavery’.
The text also captures how slavery has been a common practice in the US by graphically painting out how enslaved African-Americans helped build the economic foundations of the ‘new nation’ and were a driving force growing their economy.
At the backdrop of the American Revolution, in which the US Constitution had tacitly acknowledged slavery by counting each enslaved person as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of taxation and congressional representation, Stowe’s text provoked hostile responses North and South, including violent mobs agitating for the consideration of the antislavery petitions in the US House of Representatives.
The text portrays how slavery was destructive to families, incompatible with Christian values and tore apart the social fabric.
For example, when Uncle Tom, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, sadly leaves his family and Mars George, Shelby’s young son and Tom’s friend, as Haley takes him to a boat on the Mississippi to be transported to a slave marketplace.
The text opens on the Shelby Plantation in Kentucky as two enslaved people, Tom and four-year-old Harry, are sold to pay the Shelby family debts.
It focuses on Tom, a strong, religious, dignified man living with his wife and three young children, and Eliza, Harry’s mother.
When Tom is sold away and is transported by boat to auction in New Orleans, Tom saves the life of Little Eva, whose grateful father then purchases Tom.
This part only portrays the injustices of slavery and pushes back against dominant cultural beliefs about physical and emotional capacities of black people.
Eva and Tom soon become great friends.
Always frail, Eva’s health begins to decline rapidly, and on her deathbed she asks her father to free all his slaves.
He makes plans to do so but is then killed and the brutal Simon Legree, Tom’s new owner orders that Tom get whipped to death after he refuses to divulge the whereabouts of certain runaway slaves.
The way Tom maintains a stoic attitude toward his own suffering reflects the same attitude of many slaves as they went through slavery.
Scholars say Uncle Tom’s Cabin was adapted for theatre between 1852 and 1930 and there were many versions of it, some of them exemplified as melodramas and film adaptations.
To the mid-19th Century American readers, for whom slavery was a current and heated political issue, Uncle Tom’s Cabin spawned resistance and a desire for liberation.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin is presented as catalyst behind the American Civil War.
This is because the text evokes a critical analysis of why slavery took place; whether it was necessary and if the perpetrators had humane feelings at all.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin stirs anger and desire to change the status quo.
This is rooted in a statement by Daniel R. Vollaro citing President Abraham Lincoln to Stowe in December 1862: “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this Great War!”
Whether Lincoln said or did not say these words has not prevented them from being cited repeatedly as Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s legacy.
Therefore, Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is believed to have stirred the resistance efforts that resulted in war against slavery for it captures the feeling that the status quo had to change.
Northerners, Southerners and the international community had varying perspectives on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s abolitionist novel.
The novel’s reputation became problematic during the 20th Century.
In a 1952 introduction to the novel, Langston Hughes referred to Uncle Tom’s Cabin as ‘a moral battle cry’, but his effort to redeem the novel came after Richard Wright and James Baldwin, among other black writers, had attacked it during the 1930s and 1940s.
The text is believed to have complicated issues regarding race because it does not evidence the author’s belief in racial equality, especially when she suggested that emancipated slaves should be sent to Africa, and used derogatory terms when describing black servants.
Pundits argue that it contradicts Stowe’s antislavery commitment but the text captures how even the white abolitionists believed that slavery was unjust while also believing that white people were intellectually, physically and spiritually superior to black people.
This criticism is premised on Stowe’s Northern origins as a white woman writing an expose of slavery.
People of the 19th Century and today question whether she had the ability to speak for the black people of African descent.
The term Uncle Tom also became an insult used to describe a black person who shows subservience to whites or supporting oppression of blacks by whites.
Today Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s depiction of its black characters is seen as racist and demeaning because it is written by a non-black woman.
Stowe’s reliance on racial stereotypes exposed her misconceptions about black people, discrediting her authority even more and leaving room for the blacks who ought to speak about slavery from elsewhere.
As such, Uncle Tom’s Cabin also applies to the modern analysis of slavery because its minute error on naming exemplifies the misnaming that takes place when another person’s experiences are told by another, an issue which post-colonial thinkers dwell on.
For example, Post-Colonial Studies Reader by Bill Ashcroft et al. (2003) dwells a lot on this idea of representation and resistance in ‘Orientalism’ by Edward W. Said and that to be spoken for is to be silenced in Gayatri Chakravortry Spivak’s ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’
American Melodrama, Performing Arts Journal Publications by Gerould Daniel (1983) argues Uncle Tom’s Cabin was impactful because it was translated into 60 languages which allowed it to put under the spotlight American slavery.
On the other hand, the white southern Americans believed the text to be an indictment on them since they upheld that slavery was a driving force in the sense that it promoted economic welfare and maintained social order.
They counter-scribed their own anti-Tom novel called Aunt Phillis’ Cabin, which presents opposing themes that laud slavery.
Of course, slavery has always been analysed differently by different institutions and anti-slavery narratives have always faced resistance.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin is believed to be the author’s voice in the anti-slavery movement but the extent it goes towards summing up slavery and stirring outrage, of course, must be treated cautiously since it is presented from the point of view of a white woman.