Uncle Tom's Cabin and Apocalyptic Sentimentalism

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size I would like to thank Elizabeth Outka and Monika Siebert for their helpful contributions to this essay. I am especially indebted to Arthur Riss, who generously read multiple drafts of this article and each time provided indispensible insight and guidance. Notes For analyses that consider nineteenth-century apocalyptic figurations, see Lewis; Tuveson; May; Ketterer; Robinson; and O'Leary. See Douglas; Tompkins; Samuels, Culture of Sentiment; Romero; Barnes; Stern; Merish; Hendler, Public Sentiments; and Berlant. The jeremiad and the apocalypse are not, of course, synonymous. For the Puritans (and for Stowe as well), the jeremiad was the primary mechanism through which the apocalypse was given public expression. See especially Douglas. Tompkins concludes that Stowe saw her book as “an instrument for bringing about the day when the world would be ruled not by force, but by Christian love” (141), a love that was specifically located within the purview of a matrifocal family unit. For other scholarly accounts that privilege motherly love over fear, see Joswick; Camfield; Whitney; Weinstein; and Berlant. For seminal analyses of Uncle Tom's Cabin and sentimentalism, see Baldwin; Douglas; Fisher; Romero; Noble; Sanchez-Eppler; and Merish. Coleman maintains the perennial opposition between love and fear that has characterized the novel's scholarship. She argues that, in the afterword of the novel's final installment in the National Era, Stowe disavows the “bold, decidedly masculine prophetic stance” of the concluding warning and instead re-emphasizes her role as a paragon of maternal affection, writing in recognizable fashion that “the dear little children who have followed her story have her warmest love” (278–9). These children, Stowe continues, should “[r]emember the sweet example of Little Eva, and try to feel the same regard for all that she did” (278). While it is true that Stowe's afterword recuperates the rhetoric of sympathetic love that has become synonymous with sentimental fiction, it is certainly not true that the “closing paragraphs [in the National Era]…subvert the jeremiad that precedes them by transforming it from direct address into a mimesis of direct address, a mere playing with the voice of prophecy” (278). Coleman's argument is an amplified version of Tompkins' original intervention. In order for her to continue to claim Stowe as the paradigmatic nineteenth-century literary matron, Coleman must first disavow the residual patriarchy that the jeremiad represents by turning Stowe's fire and brimstone language into mere mimicry of her Calvinist forebears. Rather than undermining the novel's concluding jeremiad, however, Stowe's return to the role of matronly womanhood in the afterword conforms to the pattern she already established in the narrative. Scholars who see the primary innovation of sentimentalism to be its ability to facilitate cross-racial identifications and who thus assume that Stowe sees such identification as inevitable for all readers do not recognize that in certain moments, Stowe appears less than sanguine about the willingness or likelihood of her readers to sympathize or identify with slaves. For a selection of these scholarly accounts, see Tompkins; Hendler, “Alcott”; and Fisher, chapter 2. Fisher argues that the “sentimental novel creates the extension of feeling on which the restitution of humanity is based by means of equations between deep common feelings of the reader and the exotic but analogous situations of the characters” (118). Hendler writes that “[s]ympathetic identification works through a logic of equivalence based on affect; any being capable of suffering, regardless of race, age, or any other personal characteristic, can evoke sympathy, especially from a female character (or reader) who has suffered herself” (688). Like Thoreau, who in 1854 would argue that with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law slavery became a national rather than merely regional sin, Stowe decried the North's decision to embrace this legislation. “So much for the course of a decided anti-slavery body in union with a few slave-holding churches,” Stowe wrote in response to the adoption of the Fugitive Slave Law. “So much for a most discreet, judicious, charitable, and brotherly attempt to test by experience the question, What communion hath light with darkness, and what concord hath Christ with Belial? The slave-system is darkness,—the slave-system is Belial!” (Key 216). I use the word “Negro” here, not only to faithfully represent how slaves and Africans were referred to during the antebellum period, but also to show how these identities ultimately collapse in the novel, a point that will become particularly important at the end of this article. That is, because Negro slaves and Africans are of the same order of being in Uncle Tom's Cabin, they will fulfill the same purpose within apocalyptic history. For more on the relationship between evangelical revivalism and abolition, see Abzug; McKivigan, War and Abolitionism (ed.); and Daly. Tompkins is the first to foreground in any significant way the salvific nature of Eva's passing. In contradistinction to Ann Douglas, who argues that Eva's death “is not particularly effective in any practical sense” (2), Tompkins maintains that “Little Eva's death enacts the drama of which all the major episodes of the novel are transformations, the idea, central to Christian soteriology, that the highest human calling is to give one's life for another” (128). See also Fisher and Hochman for discussions of the significance of Eva's death. Topsy's conversion also figures prominently within the novel's colonizationist argument. However, because scholars have discussed Topsy in greater detail, I will forego any discussion of her here. The frustration with Stowe's colonizationist solution in many ways begins with Martin Delany, who expressed his outrage soon after the novel's publication. For other important contemporary analyses of Stowe's ending in Uncle Tom's Cabin, see Spillers; Gillian Brown; Riss, chapter 2; Samuels, “Miscegenated America”; Levine, chapter 2; and Ryan. According to George Fredrickson, Stowe's views on Africa's privileged place within apocalyptic history were probably first influenced by Alexander Kinmont's lectures on race, in which he describes a millennialist future for Africa in ways that closely resemble Stowe's vision in Uncle Tom's Cabin (110–16). Timothy Powell suggests that Stowe was also influenced by the rhetoric of the American Colonization Society, which “elegantly adorned” its colonizationist aspirations “in the language of divine providence and sentimental benevolence” (111). Stowe's father, Lyman Beecher, himself a supporter of colonization, was, according to Joan Hedrick, also directly responsible for shaping Stowe's initial defense of colonizing missions in Africa (235). While Stowe does not say much elsewhere in her writing about colonization and in fact begins to revise her opinions once she is attacked by critics for the way she concludes the novel, her statement in Uncle Tom's Cabin concerning colonization should be seen as part of a more expansive cultural milieu in which colonization was said to have a providential design. For an excellent critique of contemporary liberal readings of nineteenth-century literature, see Riss. For examples of scholars who, like Baldwin, deride sentimentalism for its ostensibly insincere melodrama and for fundamentally misrepresenting reality, see Herbert Ross Brown; Douglas; Midgley; Jefferson; and Berlant. The jeremiad, says Bercovitch, “made anxiety its end as well as its means. Crisis was the social norm it sought to inculcate…. The future, though divinely assured, was never quite there, and New England's Jeremiahs set out to provide the sense of insecurity that would ensure the outcome.” By creating an atmosphere of crisis and alarm, the Puritan minister attempts to make certain that his Bible commonwealth will fulfill its religious duties. God's displeasure with his chosen community and his subsequent retribution—two very common themes of the jeremiad—produce the requisite fear and anxiety to bind the Puritan society to its theological obligations and to compel its communicants to act with Christian virtue. Crisis, alarm, and fear—together with Christian love—were, for the Puritans, as they were for Stowe, essential components of a communal-building economy. Additional informationNotes on contributorsKevin PelletierKevin Pelletier is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Richmond where he teaches courses in early-American literature. He is currently working on a book manuscript that investigates the relationship between evangelical Christianity, sentimentalism, and slavery during the US antebellum period.