The Poison of the Gift, the Race of the Gift

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter focuses on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) in discussing the interrelation of sentimentality, slavery, and race. It asks what happens when a slave himself or herself becomes a gift, touching upon one of the novel’s important and precarious themes—the distinction between persons and things. While pursuing a sentimental ideology of the gift that comes to support racialist implications of its abolitionist rhetoric, Stowe’s novel also contains a radical potential of its critique embodied in the image of the poisonous gift of a slave child, Topsy, who figures as an unwelcome, wasteful, and repellent present. Concurring with critical opinion that Stowe’s racism is in the sentiment, this chapter suggests that the novel’s unsentimental, explicitly racist metaphors paradoxically inform one of Stowe’s strongest anti-slavery arguments.Keywords Uncle Tom’s Cabin SlaveryPoisonous giftHarriet Beecher StoweSentimental racialismKeepsake