This Curse of Slavery Book Review by Andrew Delbanco
The Impact of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin'
No less an authorization than Leo Tolstoy included "Uncle Tom's Cabin" on his short list of "examples of the highest fine art flowing from beloved of God and human." Fifty years later, James Baldwin chosen the same volume a "very bad novel" full of "excessive and spurious emotion." What goes on here? The question belongs in the present tense because information technology is by no ways settled.
There's nothing unsettled, however, about "Mightier Than the Sword," David Due south. Reynolds's informative account of the writing, reception and modernistic reputation of "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Reynolds unstintingly celebrates its writer, Harriet Beecher Stowe, as a jumbo writer who mobilized public opinion confronting slavery, and proved, confronting long odds, "a white woman's chapters to enter into the subjectivity of blackness people."
The novel began to germinate in Stowe's mind while she was living in Cincinnati in the 1830s and '40s, where she met fugitive slaves who had escaped through or from Kentucky, and where, equally Reynolds puts it, "she loved spending time in the kitchen with servants like the African-American Zillah." In the spring of 1850, having moved to Maine, where she followed the Congressional debates over a proposed new law that would deny fugitive slaves bones rights while imposing new penalties on anyone harboring them, she wrote to a mag editor that "the time is come when even a adult female or a kid who tin speak a give-and-take for liberty and humanity is bound to speak." The result was a series of fictional sketches of slaves nether physical or psychological assault — among them, the cute Eliza, who escapes from bounty hunters by leaping from ice floe to ice floe across the Ohio River with her baby in her arms; the brooding Cassy, who belongs to the cruel Simon Legree; and Tom himself, whose gentleness and generosity grow apace every bit he is sold farther and farther south, somewhen to Legree, who torments and tortures him earlier ordering his overseers to beat him to expiry.
When the magazine pieces were gathered and published in 1852 as "Uncle Tom'due south Cabin; Or, Life Among the Lowly," the first print run was 5,000. Within a year, the volume had sold 300,000 copies in America, and over a million in Great britain. Every bit Reynolds points out, a gimmicky journal noted that the number of people who encountered the story may take been 10 times the number who bought the volume — since it came out in an era when reading aloud was a common practice among family and friends.
If ever there was a publishing event to prove the principle that timing is everything, "Uncle Tom'due south Cabin" was it. On both sides of the exclusive divide the timber was dry — and Stowe struck the igniting spark. In the North, Frederick Douglass rejoiced that she had "baptized with holy fire myriads who before cared goose egg for the bleeding slave." In the South, her indictment of slavery through the odious figure of Legree was likened to a "cancerous" assault on the establishment of spousal relationship, as if she had chosen a wife-beater to represent "the normal condition of the relation" between loving spouses.
Prototype 
A decade afterward the book appeared, Abraham Lincoln is said to have received Stowe at the White House with the greeting, "Is this the little woman who made this great war?" No one knows if Lincoln really said that, and as the historian David Potter once put it, "history cannot evaluate with precision the influence of a novel upon public opinion." Merely Reynolds is sure that the influence of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was immense.
Not but, he says, had Stowe "paved the way" for Lincoln'southward election, only later on her death she may have helped Lenin, who admired her novel, evade the czar's agents by escaping from Finland over "the breaking ice of the moderately frozen Orfjarden Sound." Through phase versions of the novel, she helped Henry James develop a sense of "homo feelings as performative and theatrical." Through Chinese and Portuguese translations, she inspired anticolonialism in China and emancipation in Brazil, and she taught the advert business firm J. Walter Thompson how "great masses of people can exist influenced through their emotions."
Reynolds is a rewarding researcher. He illuminates the innumerable "Tom shows" that became a staple of American popular amusement, as well as the utilise of Uncle Tom's prototype to sell jigsaw puzzles, dolls, card games, stockings and — grotesquely enough — licorice. He identifies phase and screen stars who accustomed (Betty Grable, Judy Garland) or refused (Lena Horne, Paul Robeson) roles based on Stowe's characters. 1 motion picture operation is surely still worth watching: Little Eva — the angelic white girl who dies afterwards befriending Tom — as played by Lou Costello.
Reynolds has insightful things to say near Stowe's efforts "to present Southerners as favorably as possible" even as she excoriated their peculiar institution. And in surveying Uncle Tom's postpublication career, he makes a number of hitting points. He suggests, for case, that it may accept been Frederick Douglass who first used the term "Uncle Tom" as a pejorative epithet denoting the shuffling docility of a submissive blackness human, and he traces the ups and downs of the novel's reputation — high in the Ceremonious War years, low during much of the 20th century, when the romanticized business relationship in Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With the Wind" (1936) largely supplanted Stowe's version of the antebellum South. Today, Reynolds says, "Uncle Tom'southward Motel" is again "one of the must-reads of American literature."
s such, it is a challenging book with which to come to terms. In my experience, students can be embarrassed past it. They recognize it as a valuable document for understanding the history of what we now phone call the "conversation" almost race in America. In response to the prevailing view of black people every bit inferior beings (a view long held in the Northward also as the South), it lifted its black characters to the status of impossibly virtuous victims — only the superlative that James Baldwin felt was a kind of contempt. When Baldwin called Stowe less a novelist than an "impassioned pamphleteer," he meant, in part, that her characters don't seem capable of selfishness besides every bit cocky-sacrifice, or of pettiness and jealousy forth with piety and wisdom. In brusque, they don't seem human. Reynolds calls Baldwin's a "blinkered critique," though he concedes that Stowe trafficked in the clichés of "romantic racialism" while reminding us, fairly plenty, that what now seems "like racial stereotyping" was "progressive" in her day.
Withal, we are left at the cease of this book with the unsettling question of how to think about "Uncle Tom's Cabin" as part of our cultural inheritance. The case for it every bit a literary work of depth and nuance is dubious. Yet it belongs to the very short listing of American books (including, say, "The Other America" past Michael Harrington and "Silent Spring" by Rachel Carson) that helped create or consolidate a reform movement — in Stowe'due south example, the most consequential reform motion in our history. Maybe the fact that readers today accept trouble taking seriously its heroes and villains is a tribute to its achievement — since, in some immeasurable manner, it helped bring on the war that rendered unimaginable the world that Stowe attempted to imagine.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/books/review/book-review-mightier-than-the-sword-by-david-s-reynolds.html
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