\u201cAn authentic ghost story\u201d: manipulating the gothic in Uncle Tom\u2019s Cabin

Faith Liu

doi:10.1057/palcomms.2017.41

Abstract

Perhaps the most memorable—and almost certainly the most harrowing—portions of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin occur during Tom’s time at the Legree plantation: a narrative plunge into the horrors of slavery in the Deep South, and a stylistic plunge into the realm of the Gothic. This study seeks to engage this section of Uncle Tom’s Cabin within the context of the Gothic genre, and, in so doing, reveal Stowe’s Gothic turn to be not, as some scholars have suggested, merely superficial appropriation, but rather a sophisticated manipulation of genre that culminates in a Christianization of the Gothic. By exploring Stowe’s use of Gothic figures and devices—the setting of the crumbling Louisiana plantation, the threefold Gothic female represented by Cassy, and the “haunting” of Legree—in the light of both European and American Gothic fiction, this study demonstrates how the trappings of the Gothic genre can be used to refresh and further Stowe’s progressive Christian narrative, one which ultimately refutes the Gothic by seeding it in a universe where peace, freedom, and Christian redemption are possible. This article is published as part of a collection on Gothic and horror.

Highlights

It comes as no surprise that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s great sentimental novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, originally published as a forty-week serial in The National Era, should at times exhibit tonal or stylistic shifts between instalments, temporarily departing from the established narrative and voice to engage another character or even another genre. The longest of these departures—the nine instalments from Chapters 32 to 41 encompassing Tom’s time at the Legree plantation—plunges into a seemingly incongruous collection of inflated Gothic tropes and vocabulary: “ghostly” garrets (Stowe, 1994: 346), a demoniacal madwoman, and even sheeted apparitions that go bump in the night
Using the contexts provided by Gothic works during and before Stowe’s time, with special attention paid to its American variants, this study examines three distinct Gothic figures or devices within Stowe’s work: the Gothic setting of the Louisiana plantation, the threefold Gothic female as represented by Cassy, and the “haunting” of Legree
Cassy’s escape may have made her appear, as Gilbert and Gubar assert, an ironic example of a Gothic archetype; not all of the Gothic elements within Uncle Tom’s Cabin can be taken ironically—Stowe’s depiction of the Gothicism of the African–American slave narrative, and her expansion upon the Gothic setting to encompass the whole of American society, cannot be resolved in as simple a manner as Cassy’s parody of the Gothic ghost tale

Summary

Introduction

It comes as no surprise that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s great sentimental novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, originally published as a forty-week serial in The National Era, should at times exhibit tonal or stylistic shifts between instalments, temporarily departing from the established narrative and voice to engage another character or even another genre. This is a hell from which there is no escape, and to that end, where many Gothic novels create a grand resolution via destruction or conversion of their haunted space, Stowe refuses her readers this catharsis, providing only a single paragraph regarding the demise of Legree, with barely half a sentence devoted to his death.

Results

Conclusion