"Masculinity" in Uncle Tom's Cabin

Abstract

IN HIS ANALYSIS OF THE THREE THOUSAND PAGE BEECHER TILTON adultery trial (1875), historian Richard Wightman Fox comments upon the difficulty of retrieving meaning from this Victorian discourse of sentiment and gender: Both the spoken and written word meant something different to them than they do to us.1 And if the language of 1875 is opaque to a modern reader, the language of 1852-1853carrying as it does the freight of confusion, fear, and factionalism that followed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850-is even more so. Uncle Tom's Cabin was written in the immediate wake of that act and was a direct consequence of it. Thus, whatever our ultimate judgment of Mrs. Stowe's immensely popular antislavery novel, we must recognize the extent to which its discourse is encoded by the dense semiotics of this singular historical moment. From the beginning, Uncle Tom's Cabin was controversial; one of Stowe's consistent responses to her critics was to cite the novel's polemical aim. It was intended neither as entertainment nor as a realistic portrayal of slavery: slavery, in some of its workings, is too dreadful for the purposes of art, the author observed bitterly. A work which should represent it strictly as it is would be a work which could not be read.2 In fact, this piece of propaganda became so much more popular than any other narrative of slavery that its discourse must have