Abstract
This chapter examines the marriage plots running through Harriet Beecher Stowe's antislavery trilogy. Relying on the slave-marriage between George and Eliza, Uncle Tom's Cabin establishes two distinct marital categories: legal and nonlegal. Reading the opposition between slave and legal marriage plots in her subsequent antislavery novels, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856) and The Minister's Wooing (1859), with a particular emphasis on the former, the chapter examines the ways in which Stowe's novels posit the slave-marriage as a method of reforming conventional religious-legal marriage. Wedding her argument against slavery to her critique of marriage, Stowe aligns her antislavery principles with her proto-feminist ideas.
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