[ Background Noise ]
>> Alright, let's get
started.
So let's continue on
with Uncle Tom's Cabin.
I wanted to just go over some
of the things I said
last time at the end.
Remember, just a
few things to bear
in mind structurally
about the novel.
The first is that it has
this kind of double plot,
so it's moves both
north and south
and again that's another
way of reiterating the fact
that slavery is a
national problem.
It's not simply something
that is a Southern problem
that they need to deal with in
a way Stow wants to indicate
that the entire country
as Emerson came to realize
after the passage of
the fugitive slave law,
is implicated in slavery.
And I think that's
one of the reasons
that not only she
creates the double plot
but has the worst villain
in the novel and argue,
the worst villain in nineteenth
century American literature,
Simon Lagree, hailed from the
north and to be the embodiment
of a certain kind of market
capitalism that just happens
to seize on trafficking human
bodies as it's, as it's object.
Another thing that I want you
to think about, structurally was
to think about the way in which
the idea of Uncle Tom's Cabin,
the title of the book, suggests
that there's something
important about,
you might say domestic
situations.
This is a domestic novel.
And it's a domestic
novel that falls
into the sentimental
tradition, which means is
that it's a novel
that's intended probable,
one way to think about
what sentimentality does is
that it is intended
primarily to appeal
to the reader's emotions rather
than the intellect first.
I'd say it's, you might say
it's a variation on the old,
the old idea that the
goal of poetry used
by [inaudible] Johnson or
Samuel Taylor Colege [assumed
spelling], well expressed.
The idea is to instruct
by pleasing, right,
that literature has, is taken
in the eighteenth century
to have adaptic function,
but what separates it
from other forms of writing is
that it pleases the
reader first.
You, you enjoy reading
it and then you realize
that you've had found, had some
kind of educative experience
at the, after you're done.
So this is a very [inaudible]
item, what Stow was going
to do is she has a kind of
analytical point to make,
she has an intellectual point to
make about the evils of slavery.
But the way that she's going
to make that point first is
by getting you in
the heart strings.
She's going to grab
onto those, pull those
and then finally make
her intellectual point.
See its sentimental fiction,
is a form that appeals first
and foremost to sentiment,
to feeling and secondarily,
but very importantly,
to intellect after that
and it's linked in
the nineteenth century
to the idea of domesticity.
So domestic life as this fear of
sentiment as opposed to the life
of the economy or of politics,
which are meant to be linked
to the life of an intellect or
of abstraction, you might say.
Remember she's interested
in emotions
and a kind of palpable feeling.
That's what she wants to do.
She wants to create for her
readers, something that is
like the experience that Senator
Byrd has when having thought
about fugitive slaves
in charactertures
or as abstractions
or as you know the,
the people you would read
about in court cases,
opens his back door and sees a
young woman with a young child.
And then sees that child dressed
in his dead son's clothes,
has a kind of visceral,
emotional experience,
that in the end trumps
his intellectual,
his intellectual experience.
And for Stow, you will remember,
that is a way, that is a,
a form of improvement.
It's a mirrortive
moment when he moves
from being simply a senator who
thinks in legal abstractions
in laws and about caricatures
from the press to someone who is
in some sense a man and
can feel more fully.
So that's one of the other
things that we want to say.
The house calls up the
domestic situation,
the domestic situation brings
in this whole discourse
of sentimentality, but also this
therefore the house becomes one
of the central ways in which
the nor, novel is organized.
So what we are really seeing
is and we'll go through this
in a little bit more detail
today is a kind of series
of domestic situations.
So we have a kind of
opening domestic situation
on the Shelby Plantation
and that presents us
with in some sense a kind
of preparation of spheres.
Mr. Shelby is the man
who runs the business,
apparently not very well
since it's not doing very well
and he's having to
sell his slaves.
His wife is a little bit cowed
by his, isn't able really
to intervene on behalf
of the slaves
that she's been trying to raise.
We see a variation on that
in the Byrd household later,
where Mrs. Byrd is
able to slowly
but surely what [inaudible]
calls influence on her husband.
And we talked last time about
the way in which the novel seems
to accept the separation of
spheres into a masculine sphere
of economy and business,
of politics and abstraction
and intellect on the
one hand and a domestic,
feminine sphere that's
about education and religion
and feeling and sentiment.
And one of the things
that she's proposing is
that in the right
state of affairs,
the domestic sphere should
promote a strong influence
on the masculine sphere, not
that it doesn't seem to propose
to us ever that women should
up and becoming politic,
politicians and actually,
literally intervene.
Instead, perhaps, that should
work as Mrs. Byrd does, right?
That is another variation
on the Shelby household
and we see a variety of
these different variations
as the, the novel progresses.
That's another structuring
thing I want you to think about.
When a novel does something like
this, you might say it works
in a kind of factorial way.
The sum total of a novel is,
is, is the product of a number
of factors which are
in sometimes variations
on a single idea.
This could be in terms of
character, could be in terms
of settings, scenes like this.
We, we, you want
to think closely
about how the novel has
created a system of value
and then explored this system of
value by setting up variations
on how these values
might be mixed together.
Right. So I said,
there's a masculine sphere
and a feminine sphere, the
novel clearly prefers many
of the aspects of
the feminine sphere.
Right. But not every woman
has the virtues of femininity.
It is not enough just to
be a woman, in other words
and there are many men in
this novel who do have some
of the virtues of femininity
and we see this very
clearly in Saint Claire.
Saint Claire household
where Augustine
and his wife really seemed
to almost switch places,
it's almost like she's the man
of the household who thinks
in these kinds of abstractions,
even though she constantly
appeals like oh,
oh if you were a mother you
would understand, you know.
We understand who
the real mother
in that household is
and it is not Marie.
It may be Augustine, probably
more likely it's Mammy, right,
so there's a, there are
interesting things going on in,
in these households in
which these, these elements
of masculine, feminine
are being reorganized
and tested as a result.
Right? One indication perhaps
that the feminine sphere
alone isn't sufficient is
that you might say that
part of, of what brings
down the Saint Claire
household is
that Augustine Saint Claire
lacks a little bit of a kind
of masculine, let's do it now.
He's kind of not enough of a
man of action and that proves
to have a kind of tragic result.
And so again Stow is
interested in the inter play
of these different values.
She believes in the separation
of spheres, but she believes
in a system in which both
spheres are necessary.
But there needs to be
the correct relationship
between them and at the
beginning of the novel
that relationship is a myth.
There's something
wrong with it, okay?
That's one of the things
that we want to say.
The third thing to say is that
there is a kind, there are sort
of three major parts and this
is kind of the opening part,
which focuses primarily I
suppose on the Harris' story.
Then that long second part which
is about the time in New Orleans
and the Saint Claire
household, which I suggested
to you last time is much
longer than it really should be
if we were going to have a well
proportioned narrative in terms
of what action takes place,
in terms of, we need to have
to tell a tight story, there
shouldn't be that many chapters.
But it becomes, you might say,
the time when the novel is,
seems to warm to her subject
in which she creates some
of these indelible characters
that people tend to remember
and when she allows
these characters to start
to in having, become
appealing to the reader
if everything is
working in your, your,
you're reading according
to her plan.
She's then able to bring in kind
of some intellectual discourse
that she wants to have.
But then there's this
third section that happens
after the death of Saint Claire,
the death of Eva and the death
of Saint Claire in which
we, we move into one
of the darkest phases
of slavery.
And there's an interesting
thing,
just to give you an overview,
the interesting thing that seems
to happen at the end of the
novel in which the very premises
or sufficiency of sentimentality
itself are in question.
Maybe sentimental isn't enough,
maybe you need other
literary technologies
and in this case it
turns out to be gothic.
As the story starts to explore
about what the relations
between the sentimental
and the gothic might be
and then we'll see at the end
how you might say she resolves a
potential conflict
between these two things.
Alright. Just a couple, just
to get us back up to speed
so we remember where
we were last week,
remember that Stow thinks of
writing instrumentally, right.
She doesn't mean to be
thought of as an artist,
she doesn't have those kinds
of aspirations in the way
that somebody might, Hawthorne
or Melville might have
been said to have.
She thinks of writing
instrumentally at first
to earn money, right, she wins
fifty dollars in a prize wheel
and realizes that she can
supplement her family income
through writing.
That's one thing.
It's an extension of her
motherly duties there,
to help out in that
way and later
when she writes Uncle Tom's
Cabin, she concedes it
as a further extension of
her maternal duties, right.
She writes the editor of
The National Era in 1851,
up to this year I
have always felt
that I had no particular call
to meddle with this subject.
And I dreaded to expose even
my own mind to the full force
of its exciting power but I
feel now that the time has come
when even a woman or a child
who can speak a word for freedom
and humanity is bound to speak.
We can no longer sit on
the sidelines, right.
It's come time, the men,
the, the inference here
that we might have is that men
and ministers, you know all
of these things that are part
of the masculine sphere are
letting the country down.
Now it's come the
time that even women
and children have to speak.
Alright, so that's one thing.
Retrospectively she comes
back to think of this later
on when she writes a
preface to an 1879 edition.
I think I told you
later on in her career,
when she's very much the woman
of letters, she likes to write
about herself in the
third person, so she says,
she was convinced that the
presentation of slavery alone
in its most dreadful
forms would be a picture
of such unrelieved
horror and darkness
as nobody could be
induced to look at.
Of said purpose, she sought
to light up the darkness
by humorous and grotesque
episodes in the presentation
of the milder and more
amusing phases of slavery
for which her recollection
of the never failing wit,
that should be wit, and drollery
of her former colored friends
in Ohio, gave her
abundant material.
And this is exactly
the kind of statement
that people subsequently
find problematic, right?
I mean the idea that there could
be any milder or amusing phases
of slavery, something that
seems anathomous to us now.
But you can imagine it, that
one of the things she's do,
she does to both appeal to the
emotions, it's not only going
to be to the tragic emotions,
but she's going to try
to create things that you
can enjoy, is to appeal
to certain kinds of
essentialist stereotypes.
Which have to do with the way
in which African Americans sing
or dance or certain,
you know, certain kinds
of down home practicalities,
for example, in Mammy,
in Chloe's kitchen or
Mammy's kitchen are,
are things that Stow uses to
kind of leaven the story up
and make it seem a
little bit less oppressive
than it might be.
And that's one of the things
that we should remember
about the, the strategy of the
novel is that in some sense one
of the things she's doing is
suggesting that this is a time
when these three oppressed
groups, women, children
and slaves actually
can have a voice.
Needs intervene, but again the
style of the novel goes along
with this general idea about
influence, they're not going
to intervene directly,
bless you,
we're not going to
write a tract.
We're going to write a fiction
which can exert a certain kind
of influence and part of
the necessary trickery
of that fiction is that we're
going to have to present,
we're going to have to
have some comic relief.
For her, the ready to hand comic
relief comes really in the wit
that she finds in
African American culture.
Again, today that
wit puts us off
because it's been exaggerated
so much in the later part
of the nineteenth century
in things like Tom Shows
and other forms of, of minstrels
on stage that we find it kind
of off putting, right.
So I want you to again
think about the ways
in which Stow is
finding a set of,
you might even call them
kind of literary tactics
that she can deploy and
I would suggest to you
that she deploys them
rather consciously.
Again, I suggested last time
that she was deploying these
as part of emotive act of
sentimentality that she learns
from Stern and Dickens,
and very much Dickens.
Right, right, if any of
you have read Dickens,
either in high school or the
context of a Lit course here,
you'll remember that
you know, Dickens has,
is a social reformer
in many ways.
And there's some very
dark things in Dickens,
just you know, think about
child abuse in Hard Times
or in Oliver Twist and all
of these novels are lightened
by kind of moments of comic
relief and by comic characters.
There's a sense in
which Stow is trying
to translate the Dickensian
idiom into American letters
and that's part of
what her project is.
Alright, one of the
things to bear
in mind then is this
idea of the lowly.
And for her the lowly means not
only Africans who are enslaved
in the United States but also
other people who are set aside.
Women and children and so these
three groups are very much
linked together in the
novel's imagination.
And I want you to understand
that they are not incidentally
linked together, it's very much,
it seems to be by design.
The novel creates moments
of comparison among
these different groups.
And we might say it's,
it's a dangerous strategy,
not just for, for you know,
the picture of African American
culture, alright, I mean,
not just because in, we can
see in the subsequent career
of the novel for African
American intellectuals.
This novel became an [inaudible]
because it seemed to portray it
as a desirable cultural
affect, the subservience
of African American men and,
and women to some
other set of values.
But you can see how even in
terms of the novels secondary,
but still important,
feminist agenda,
this idea of submitting
forms possibly a new rational
for the submission
of women, right?
And we're writing in a time
when women still have not
achieved equal rights,
so you might say for awhile this
novel became not at all useful
for feminist thinkers or for
people who were interested
in promoting women's suffrage or
other kinds of feminist causes.
And again it's only later on in
the middle of the 1960's really
that it starts to be reclaimed
as part of a general reclamation
of thinking about kinds of
writing that don't fit a kind
of modernist prototype, right?
So these are all some of
the things that I want you
to be bearing in mind as we
think, as we look at a few
of the more details, right.
So one of the ways, to put this
in a nutshell, I will suggest
to you that this is a novel
that is deeply critically of
and even sets itself
against forms of racial
and patriarchal oppression,
okay.
I said, I'll say it again.
It sets itself deliberately
against forms of racial
and patriarchal oppression.
It does so by tactically making
use of a number of stereotypes
that we would think of
as racist and sexist.
Okay, it's using what
today we would call racist
and sexist stereotypes,
I would call them modes
of essentialist thinking.
But it's using the
essentialist modes,
which are typically thought of
as inclusion with patriarchal
and racial oppression
against patriarchal
and racial oppression.
So for example, let's take a
look at some examples of this
and you'll see what I mean,
I think, very vividly.
Take a look on page, oh
how about page forty four,
this is an early example
about this, of this.
The little boy walk, comes in,
Mr. Shelby says hello Jim Crow,
whistling and snapping a bunch
of raisin [inaudible]
and pick that up now.
The child scampered with
all his little strength
out for the prize while
his master laughed.
Come here Jim Crow, he said.
The child came up and the
master patted the curly head
and chucked him under the chin.
Now Jim, show this gentleman
how you can dance and sing.
Alright, so that is
the master's behavior.
This is the nararator.
The boy commenced
one of those wild,
grotesque songs common among the
Negroes in a rich clear voice,
accompanying his singing
with many comic evolutions
of a hands, feet and whole body,
all in perfect time
to the music.
The boy commenced
one of those wild,
grotesque songs common
among the Negroes.
So today we would say, hum,
that seems that like kind
of has a racist tinge to it.
Now, what I want
you to see is that,
I don't think this is racist
because it's not disapproving
of it, it's not meaning to
use this representation as a,
as a rationale for
the subjection.
Of anything, of, of
African Americans, anything,
it's quite approving of the fact
that there's something melodious
about their culture
that they have.
And again, you might
imagine it as being all part
of the domestic sphere over
against a masculine sphere
that doesn't have time
for things like this.
Alright, so again, this
is, this is again a moment
in which the novel is making use
of an essentialist stereotype
that African Americans are
have, have a naturally gift,
are naturally gifted as singers
or have a natural
affinity towards music.
Things like that.
Let's find another one.
How about page seventy seven.
This is singing also.
There getting together
to celebrate.
Middle paragraph, after
awhile the singing commenced
to the evident delight
of all present.
Not even all the disadvantage
of nasal intonation
could prevent the effect
of a naturally fine voices in
airs it once wild and spirited.
I take it that that means,
you know, they're not trained,
they still have nasal
intonations,
they're not tutored in singing.
Never the less they have the
kind of natural advantage,
naturally fine voices.
The words were sometimes the
well known and common hymns sung
in the churches about,
sometimes of a wilder,
more indefinite character
picked up at camp meetings.
The chorus of one of them,
which ran as follows was sung
with great energy and function.
Die on the field of
battle, die on the field
of battle glory of my soul.
That's such and such, so it
goes on in this kind of mode.
See if we go on, we could
even go on, there were others
which made incessant mention of
Jordan's banks, Canon's fields
and the New Jerusalem.
For the Negro mind, impassioned
and imaginative always attaches
itself to hymns and expressions
of a vivid and pictorial nature.
And as they sung, some
laughed and some cried
and some clapped hands or
shook hands rejoicingly
with each other as if they had
fairly gained the other side
of the river, right.
And we would say there's
something slightly patronizing
perhaps, about that description.
But one of the things to
say is, the novel in so far
as a novel is attributing
something childlike
to the African American
temperament,
to the African American
intellect,
it thinks that's a good thing.
The two most Christ like
characters in the novel Tom
and Eva, both have a kind
of childlike appreciation
for the world and for
other people, right?
So the novel is deliberately
making a link between Tom
and Eva and parted lays
the ground work for that
by creating the slightly
and tantalized idea
of what the Negro mind, as it
would put it, is all about.
Let's see, this becomes explicit
actually in the next example
that I've got for you, page 135.
This is in Eliza's,
this is Eliza's escape,
so it's about twelve chapters
into eight, twelve pages
into Chapter eight or so.
In this edition, it's
the middle of 135.
Now there's no more use in
making believe be angry,
in making believe be angry
with a Negro than with a child.
Both instinctively see the
true state of the case,
though all attempts to
affect the contrary.
And Sam was in no wise
disheartened by this rebuke,
though he assumed an air
of doful gravity and stood
with the corners of
his mouth lowered
in most penitential style.
Master quite right,
quite, it was ugly on me,
there's no disputing
that, [inaudible] master
and misses wouldn't
encourage no such works.
I'm sensible, that all
about a poor nigger like me,
[inaudible] attempted
to act ugly sometimes
when fellars will
cut up such shines
as that master [inaudible].
He ain't no gentleman no
way, any ways been raised
as I have been can't
help but seemed alright.
Right. So there's a
deliberate [inaudible],
deliberate bringing together
of these two forms
of representation.
And you can go on and on, right,
the page 253 in this, I'll,
I'll put some notes afterwards
that African Americans
are described as exotic.
A little bit later on,
cooking is described
as an indigenous talent of
the African race, right.
So I want you to see
is the kind of racist
and sexist stereotypes
are pretty much identical
in the novel.
They're clearly mapped
onto one another
and the masculine
characteristics
of white male characters
are often and, are often
and almost consistently
contrasted
with the feminine qualities,
not only of white women
but also of black men.
Let's take a look in chapter
ten, this is page 162.
I think it's probably the
third paragraph of chapter ten.
Let's start with the second.
Tom sat by with his
testament open on his knee
and his head leaning upon
his hand, but neither spoke.
It was yet early and the
children lay all asleep together
in their little rude
trundle bed.
Tom who had to the full,
the gentle domestic heart,
which wove for them, has been
a peculiar characteristic
of his unhappy race, got
up and walked silently
to look at his children.
It's the last time, he said.
Now again, this is a moment
when we see this kind of mixture
of things, so again,
you're going
to say there's something
patronizing about this.
The peculiar characteristic
of his unsym,
his unhappy race, right.
It's written from a
seeming vantage point
of white narrative superiority
and yet this is a moment
of deep path thoughts in which
the narrative has profound
sympathy for Tom and
the plight that he has.
Alright, again, I want you
to see how this is working.
These are passages
that are designed
to create sympathy for Tom.
And you might say in so
far as Eva and Tom are set
up to be kind of Christ
like figures, the function
that Eva plays in the novel,
is in fact not only Christ like
but in the certain sense,
she plays the role
of John the Baptist.
We affect really, onto her, we,
we, invest her, we have a lot
of our emotions as readers get.
They get focused on
her and when she dies,
they focus some place
else and it's almost
as if we've been taught
now to have a focus on Tom.
And there's a sense in which
his death replays her death.
Lives up even to the
promise of, of selflessness
that her death implies, and in
some sense, the novel helps us
to appreciate Tom by
first finding someone
with whom we more
readily appreciate,
a young innocent girl
who's all dressed in white.
Shouldn't have that much,
almost always dressed in white,
as opposed to Pearl who
you'll meet in like next week,
almost always dressed in red.
They make an interesting
contrast.
Please don't write a
paper about that, please.
But there's a sense in which
part of [inaudible] function is
to prepare us for Tom.
That she sucks us in by getting
us used to think about Ava
and then we transfer many of
those same emotions onto Tom.
There is a slave who
defies the stereotypes
that I've just been
talking about.
Anybody think of an example?
Yes?
>> [inaudible]
>> George Harris.
Right. So George
Harris would seem
to be an exception to this rule.
Except why is it that
George is different?
Remember anything about George
that makes him particularly
interesting
or different from Tom?
Yes.
>> [inaudible] OK.
>> [inaudible]
>> And?
>> [inaudible]
>> OK, he's and there's
something else about him too.
His genes.
>> [inaudible]
>> Right. He's Malato
[assumed spelling].
Take a look at page 182 in
the chapter that's called,
An Improper State of Mind.
It's about ten pages
into chapter 11.
So this is at the bottom of 182.
We were remarkable
pason [assumed spelling]
that George was, by his
father's side of white descent.
His mother was one of those
unfortunates of her race.
Marked out by personal beauty
to be the slave of the passions
of her possessor and
the mother of children
who may never know a father.
From one of the proudest
families in Kentucky,
he had inherited a fine, set
of fine European features
and a high, indomitable spirit.
From his mother he had received
only a slight Malato tinge,
amply compensated by it's
accompanying rich, dark eyes.
A slight change in the tint
of the skin and the color
of his hair, had
metamorphosed him
into the Spanish looking
fellow he had then appeared.
And as gracefulness of movement
and gentlemanly manners had
always been perfectly natural
to him, he found no difficulty
in playing the bold
part he had adopted.
That of a gentleman
traveling with his domestic.
So I want you to
see here how he's
in some sense the exception
who proves the rule.
He has inherited not
only European features
from his white father,
but that kind
of high, indomitable spirit.
OK? I want you to think
about that and think
about whether it is that the
Harris', that George Harris is
in some sense the hero of
the novel or whether in fact,
it is kind of a very
mixed blessing
to have inherited these things.
Right? Part of what we
realize in the novel is
that there isn't, the novel at
the end cannot imagine a place
for the Harris' in the
United States and they are
in some sense relegated
off to Liberia.
Part of it is this kind of
weird mixture of George.
One thing that George,
George is not the natural,
George isn't something that's
not the natural Christian
that Tom is and that
works against him
in the imagination of the novel.
Let's take a look at one
of these other households
that we haven't had much of
a chance to talk about yet.
This is the quaker
settlement and it's in chapter,
well it starts, it's chapter 13,
which is 214 in this edition.
Let me. This is an
illustration of characters
from the quaker settlements
and again,
that's Maliza [assumed
spelling] right.
So we're meant to understand
that Maliza also is very fair.
Now, let's take look
at page 222 here.
There's an interesting
passage here for us to look at.
Bottom of the page.
So this is about again, twelve
pages into the chapter maybe.
It comes after a break.
The chapter, the paragraph
begins the next morning was a
cheerful one at the
quaker house.
A little bit further on.
While therefore John ran to
the spring for fresh water
and Simeon the 2nd
sifted meal for corn cakes
and Mary ground coffee, Rachel,
Rachel Holiday, moved gently
and quietly about, making
biscuits, cutting up chicken
and diffusing a sort
of sunny radiance
over the whole proceeding
generally.
If there was any danger
of friction or collision
from the ill regulated zeal
of so many young operators,
her gentle come come
or I wouldn't now,
was quite sufficient to
allay the difficulty.
Bards have written of the sestus
of Venus, that turned the heads
of all the world in it's
successive generations,
we had rather, for our
part, have the sestus
of Rachel Holiday that kept
heads from being turned
and made everything
go on harmoniously.
We think it is more suited to
our modern days, decidedly.
Right? So she has a kind
of matriarchal authority.
It seems to work
effortlessly, but does it work
through direct punishment?
Not exactly.
It works with something that's
much more like influence.
Come come, she says
or I wouldn't now.
Right? Gently.
Just kind of, it's almost
like you have, she's just kind
of keeping order on a kind
of a system that's chaotic
or entropic of all
these particles.
She keeps them from colliding
from one another,
with one another.
Interestingly, her authority
never seems to be challenged
by the quaker men
in the settlement.
Next paragraph.
While all other preparations
were going on,
Simeon the elder stood
in his short sleeves before
a little looking glass
in the corner, engaged
in the anti patriarchal
operation of shaving.
The anti patriarchal Why
is that, anti patriarchal?
Another joke.
What? Yes?
>> [inaudible]
>> Yes, I'm just, think
about
old testament patriarchs too.
Long beard, right?
So if you shave, it's being
anti patriarchal That's kind
of a joke right, but it's one
of the things that signals
that the whole idea of what
constitutes a patriarch
and who usually runs
settlements like this,
is on the novels mind.
Just through that
little grace note.
If you will.
Everything went on socialably.
So quietly, so harmoniously
in the great kitchen.
It seemed so pleasant
to everyone
to do just what they were doing.
There was such an atmosphere
of mutual confidence
and good fellowship, everywhere.
Even the knives and forks had
a social clatter as they went
on to the table and the
chicken and ham had a cheerful
and joyous fizzle in the pan,
as if they rather enjoyed
being cooked than otherwise.
Seems like a little
one of those kind
of like Warner Brothers
cartoons.
Right? Something happy about it.
It's just about as
unrealistic as a cartoon as well
or you might say, for the novels
imagination, it understands it
as a kind of Utopian space.
It's not really, genuinely
possible and it is impossible
for the Harris' to stay
here for very long.
And when George and Eliza
and little Harry came out,
they met such a hardy
rejoicing welcome,
no wonder it seemed
to them like a dream.
And as far as they are
concerned, it is a dream.
Right? So one of
the things to say
within the topographical
imagination of the novel is
that to move, move north,
away from Ohio and Kentucky,
to move north towards Canada,
is to move towards freedom.
That's one thing that we
would say is going on.
There's also a hint that it's
also doing something else.
It's to move from the
public world of a plantation
or a senator's house, to
something more private.
A kind of settlement and
a matriarchal settlement.
So to move from a
world of power,
in the senator's household,
to a world where power is
exerted differently here,
through feminine influence.
And one of the things we might
say is that the ultimate result
for George Harris of
this move northward,
is the increasing influence of
this feminine influence on him.
So at the end, something about
that high, indomitable spirit
of his leads him to be
tempered a little bit.
And we'll take a
look at that again.
OK? Thus, the movement north.
The movement south is
a little bit different
and it's a little
bit strange as well.
New Orleans house of
Augustine and Marie St. Clair,
is as I suggested already,
a kind of strange variation
on the opening domestic
situation.
In fact, it's probably
the most unusual one
because the masculine,
feminine seems split
up in interesting
and different ways.
Let's see, I think I have,
now one of the things
to notice about this.
Is that it is a courtyard
in the Moorish style.
Right? So one of the things
that we would say is
it's kind of elaborate.
Its even baroque.
There's something
voluptuous about it.
These are words that Stowe uses
and one of the things to suggest
about that is that it is in
some sense a kind of reflection
of St. Clair's personality.
To have this kind of household.
Of house. All right?
I want you to remember
this though, this image.
We'll come back to it.
It's got the courtyard,
it's got fountains inside,
it's got this enclosed garden
space, got these arches here,
these kind of terraces
on the top.
OK, that's the way it looks.
We'll see another house a little
bit later on that's a variation
on that particular situation.
Now inside the house we
have Marie and Augustine
and as I suggested to you,
there's a funny way in which
when the values were
poured into each of them,
they didn't get poured in
exactly the way we'd expect.
Marie is kind of
selfish and masculine.
And Augustine has a lot, where
his greatest influence comes,
not from his father he says, but
from his mother, he tells us.
Let's take a look at the
chapter that's called,
Tom's Mistress and her Opinions.
This is well, let's take a look
on page 277 of this edition
and that is I don't
know, about seventeen
or eighteen pages
into chapter 16.
Right? Again think about how
I've mapped things out right.
Where does religion
belong in going to church,
which sphere does
those belong to.
Marie kind of knows
what the values
of the feminine sphere
is supposed to be.
She knows what she's
supposed to be,
she just in some sense
chooses not to do it
or rather she chooses to
manipulate those values
to generate sentiment
or sympathy for herself.
Right? As opposed to someone
earlier, even Emily Shelby
and certainly Misses
Bird, these are values
in which they seem sincerely to
live, Marie's seems to have kind
of a relationship to bad
faith to some of these values.
So, top of the page.
Ava looked down, cast an
aggrieve and turned slowly.
I say, Marie, let
the child alone.
She shall do as she
pleases, say St. Clair.
St. Clair, how will she ever get
along in the world, said Marie.
Well, Lord knows, said St.
Clair, but she'll get along
in heaven better than you or I.
Oh papa don't, said Ava,
softly touching his elbow.
It troubles mother.
Well cousin, are you ready
to go to the meeting?,
said Miss Ophelia
[assumed spelling],
turning square about
on St. Clair.
I'm not going, thank you.
Ah, I do wish St. Clair ever
would go to church, said Marie,
but he hasn't a particle
of religion about him.
It really isn't respectable
I know it, said St. Clair.
You ladies go to church
to learn how to get along
in the world I suppose and
your piety sheds respectability
on us.
If I did go at all, I
would go where Mamie goes.
There's something to keep a
fellow awake there at least.
What? Those shouting methodists.
Horrible, said Marie.
Anything but the dead sea of
your respectable churches Marie.
Positively, it's too
much to ask of a man.
Ava, do you like to go?
Come stay at home
and play with me.
Thank you papa, but I'd
rather go to church.
Isn't it dreadful
tiresome, said St. Clair?
Well I think it is
tiresome some,
said Ava, and I'm sleepy, too.
But I try to keep awake.
Right out of the
mouths of babes.
What do you go for then?
Why you know papa,
she said in a whisper.
Cousin told me that
God wants to have us
and he gives us everything
you know.
And it isn't much to do
it if he wants us to.
It isn't so very
tiresome at all.
You sweet, little obliging soul,
said St. Clair kissing her.
Go along, that's a good girl.
And pray for me.
Certainly, I always do,
said the child as she sprang
after her mother
into the carriage.
Right? So there's a
whole set of things
that are being laid out here.
A whole discourse of
respectability and that's part
of the discourse that
Stowe is taking aim at.
She hates this idea of
Christian respectability.
All these women like Marie
who go to church and listen
to ministers and do nothing,
at best, about slavery
and at worst, are actually
promulgator of slavery
in the way that Marie
turns out to be.
Right? So there's one thing.
There's the idea that
there's a more authentic form
of Christianity that
is available here.
It isn't the church
that Marie goes to,
it's the one that Mamie goes to.
And immediately you see here,
as in elsewhere in this section,
a kind of comparison and
contrast set up between Marie
and Mamie Who's the
real mothering figure
in this household?
Well there's actually
several and they learn
from Mamie Mamie
will be one of them.
St. Clair might be another and
Ava herself might be a kind
of mothering figure by
the time we're done.
Let's take a look a little bit
earlier on to get a contrast
between Marie and St. Clair.
Let's see.
Or actually no, just let's
press a little bit further
on this idea of Christian
respectability.
This is page 208 in
Incident of Lawful Trade.
And it's a moment that should
remind us of the way in which,
this should remind
us in the way that,
that Stowe abraids the
south for their attitudes
and the moment then she
props up senator Bird.
This is 208 in the
chapter called,
Incidents of Lawful Trade,
about sixteen pages in or so.
The traitor had arrived
at that stage of Christian
and political perfection,
which has been recommended
by some preachers and
politicians of the north lately,
in which he had completely
overcome every humane weakness
and prejudice.
His heart was exactly where your
sir and mine, could be brought
with proper effort
and cultivation.
Right? So this is the
effect of respectability.
This is the effect
of civilization.
We have the kind of Christian
that this traitor
concedes himself to be.
The wild look of
anguish and utter despair
that the woman cast on him,
might disturb one
less practiced,
but he was used to it.
He had seen that same
look hundreds of times.
And then she addresses
the reader.
You can get used to such
things too, my friend.
And it is a great object
of our recent efforts
to make our whole northern
community use to them,
for the glory of the union.
Right? So she takes a dig again
at the fugitive slave law.
And this is an example
then again
about what the purpose
of the novel is.
People like Marie,
people like this traitor,
have become the dominant
representatives
of respectable Christianity
We need something else other
than that.
OK, so that's one
thing to bear in mind.
Let's go back now to just,
let's go back to take a look
at Marie one more time.
This is on page 268.
OK and I want to you
know, to set a contrast
of the novel as taking off.
Right? So that's a form of
respectable Christianity
And there's different
forms of motherhood.
There's kind of respectable
motherhood, I suppose in the way
that Marie practices it and
there's real motherhood.
On 268, this is in the chapter
that's called, Tom's Mistress,
about eight pages into it.
Don't you believe that the lord
made them of one blood with us,
said Miss Ophelia shortly.
No indeed, not I.
Pretty story, truly.
They are a degraded race.
Don't you think they've got
immortal souls said Miss Ophelia
with increasing indignation.
Oh well, said Marie
yawning, that of course.
Nobody doubts that.
But just putting
them on any sort
of equality with us you know.
As if we really could
be compared.
Why it's impossible.
Now St. Clair really has talked
to me as if keeping Mamie
from her husband was like
keeping me from mine.
There's no comparing
in this way.
Mamie couldn't have the
feelings that I should.
It's a different
thing altogether.
Of course it is and yet St.
Clair pretends not to see it.
Right? So that's
one of the things.
Again that's a moment
of a little irony,
in which we the reader,
clearly see it
and St. Clair is not only,
is not exactly pretending not
to see it, but there's a
sense in which you might say
that what St. Clair is
attempting to do is operate
in the way that somebody in
the feminine sphere might do.
Through influence.
And we might say that
that perhaps isn't' quite
good enough.
All right, let's talk about one
of the more disturbing
representations of childhood
and femininity and that's Topsy
Topsy of all the characters
in the novel, is most likely
to offend people as a kind
of racist representation.
Right? And there's
clearly I mean,
is as far as the novel is all
about setting up contrasts,
there's clearly a
contrast that's set
up between Topsy and little Ava.
I mean Topsy is really dark
and little Ava is really white.
And Topsy and little Ava
is really well behaved
and Topsy is really not.
OK. Let's take a look in chapter
20, this is page 364 in the OK
and we'll see how Miss Ophelia,
who takes up the care
of Topsy, decides.
Now Miss Ophelia is a woman
from the north right,
she's a reformer.
She comes in with systems right.
There's not that funny
moment when she tries
to make Dinah's kitchen,
systematic and of course,
it's disastrous Top of 364.
It's your system
makes such children,
said Miss Ophelia I know
it, but they are made.
They exist.
What is to be done with them?
Well I can't say I thank
you for the experiment,
but then as it appears to be a
duty, I shall persevere and try
and do the best I can, said
Miss Ophelia And Miss Ophelia,
after this hour, did labor with
a commendable degree of zeal
and energy on her new subject.
She instituted regular hours
and employments for her
and undertook to teach
her to read and sew.
Now, Topsy has her preferences.
She's not just some wild child
and these are the preferences.
In the former art, reading,
the child was quick enough.
She learned her letters as if
by magic and was very soon able
to read plain reading.
She's a little natural
Frederick Douglas, right.
But the sewing was a
more difficult matter.
The creature was as live as a
cat and as active as a monkey
and the confinement of
sewing was her abomination
So she broke her needles,
threw them slyly at the window,
down in chinks of the walls.
She tangled, broke,
dirtied the thread
or with a sly movement would
throw away a spool altogether.
Her emotions were
almost as quick as that
of a practiced conjurer
and her command
of her face quite as great.
And though Miss Ophelia
could not help feeling
that so many accidents could not
possibly happen in succession,
yet she could not
without a watchfulness
which would have
leave her no time
for anything else, detect her.
What's going on there?
In that passage.
I mean, what are Topsy's
preferences all about?
What does she like?
Reading. With what
is that associated?
Man the masculine sphere.
About getting out of slavery
from Frederick Douglas.
What doesn't she like?
Sewing. Right?
What is sewing associated with?
Women's work.
Right? Topsy is a little
rebel and there's a funny way
in which she's behaving
according
to a set of principles.
So I want to suggest
to you that even here,
Stowe is reinforcing her method.
Right? Topsy and Topsy becomes
a prime example of the way
which some of these values
of masculine feminine can
be interestingly blended
and there are certain kinds
of relegation of women
to certain kinds of work,
such as sewing, that make,
it's another way of saying
that there's a tie here
between slavery and what Stowe
refers to as domestic slavery.
Right? Now a very interesting
thing happens with Topsy
and Miss Ophelia I asked
you to think about this.
So the irony of course
about Miss Ophelia is
a couple of things.
She walks into the
St. Clair household
and immediately she
sees Ava kissing Mamie
and she's like, ugh.
You know, well your young
southern girls do something I
couldn't possibly do.
Right? So clearly Miss
Ophelia is a racist.
She's a northern, anti slavery,
abolishist, but former racist.
OK. So what does Miss
Ophelia need to learn to do?
She needs to get beyond
that category of race
or that thing that puts her off.
She needs to be able
to touch and embrace.
She needs the magic of the
real presence of distress.
Right? And she is transformed
by the death of little Ava.
She actually, it becomes
a transformative thing.
She manages to embrace Topsy.
And to be a real
mother to Topsy.
Right? That's the story.
Except it's not quite
that simple.
There's one step that needs
to be taken between having,
you know, doing that you know,
being able to be Miss
Ophelia being of a kind
of a real mothering figure for
Topsy and where she was before
and it's a legal step.
So what is it?
What does she have to do?
What did she have to do?
Yes.
>> [inaudible]
>> Very good.
She has to own Topsy.
Right? So the white,
northern, abolishonist lady,
who reads all the good things,
pilgrims progress and you know,
[inaudible] and all this kind
of stuff is on her bookshelf.
She has to gain possession.
She tells St. Clair, I want
to do it, we need to do it.
He's like all right,
we'll do it.
No, do it now.
Right? She has a little, enough
of that kind of masculinity
in her, she says,
well do it now.
Would that he have done it
now for all of his slaves?
But Topsy is saved
from the dissolution
of the south household,
because Miss Ophelia has
to become the thing
that's an aphama to her.
She becomes a slave owner, in
order she can gain possession
of Topsy and free Topsy.
So she works within the system,
but that becomes the irony.
Again, northerners, if they want
to make a change, have to admit
that they are implicated
in slavery.
They have to own up to it.
Literally.
And then they can
actually do some good.
Right? So that's not
accidental again.
It's part of a very
complicated way
in which the narrative
has set up,
to implicate both
southerners and northerners.
And again, the most famous
northern implication is Simon
Legree [assumed spelling].
A northerner and ardent
capitalist who cares more
than anything else,
about making money.
There's a way in which the greed
hasn't quite eternalized the
anti black racism that seems to
motivate many of the characters,
but he's happy to use
it as a kind of tool.
Let's turn to chapter
31 now, the second,
this is the last
part of the novel.
It's page 480 in the Penguin.
This is a part of the
novel that portrays slavery
at it's most corrosive.
It's called, the middle
passage, and it's designed
to in some sense, suggest
that Tom's final passage
to Legree's plantation
is a recapitulation
of the horrible middle passage
from Africa to the new world
that captured Africans
were forced to endure.
Many of them dying on the way.
I mean, packed like
sardines into these ships.
Influence may not be enough
in this section of the novel.
Right? Read the first three
paragraphs of chapter 31.
On the lower part of a small,
mean boat on the
Red River, Tom sat.
Chains on this wrists, chains
on his feet and a weight heavier
than chains lay on his heart.
All that faded from his sky,
moon and star, all had passed
by him as the trees and
banks were now passing
to return no more.
Kentucky home with wife and
children and indulgent owners,
St. Clair home of Ava
with saint like eyes.
The proud, gay, handsome,
seemingly careless
yet ever kind St. Clair.
Hours of ease and
indulgent leisure.
Novel has been recapitulated
for us.
All gone. And in place
there of what remains?
Another novel, narrator
steps back.
In personal construction.
It is one of these bitterest
apportionments of lot of slavery
and again, we're
going to have one
of these essentialist summing
up moments, that the Negro,
sympathetic and assimilative
after acquiring [inaudible] fine
family, the taste and feelings
which formed the
atmosphere of such a place.
Is not the less liable
to become the bond slave
of a coarsest and most brutal.
Just as a chair or table
which once decorated the superb
saloon, comes at last, battered
and defaced, to the bar
room of some fility tavern
or some low haunt of
vulgar debauchery.
And again, I want you
to see how this works.
Right? It seems to
be patronizing,
but it's making the same
point you might say,
that Phyllis Wheatley [assumed
spelling] makes in that poem
on being brought from
Africa to America.
She even uses the
same word, refined.
The African American is
sympathetic and assimilative.
These are good things.
All right?
They are clearly educable.
A naturally take to these
kinds of refinements.
But the logical possessive
individualism is such that
if you aren't free, you're no
better than a chair or a table
and subject to all of the kind
of vicissitude the
property is subject to.
The great difference
is that the chair
and table cannot
feel and the man can.
Right? So what do you see
out of that category now?
Established earlier on in the
chapter with senator Bird,
is being redeployed here.
A man can feel.
For even a legal enactment
that he shall be taken reputed
and judge in law to
be a chattel personal,
cannot blot out his soul with
it's own private little world
of memories, hopes,
fears, loves and desires.
Right? So clearly there's a
kind of natural law that's being
in some sense contradicted
by the laws of the land.
Mister Simon Legree, Tom's
master, had purchased slaves
at place and another in New
Orleans, to the number of eight
and driven them handcuffed,
in couples of two and two,
down to the good steamer
pirate, which lay at the levee,
ready for a trip
up the Red River.
OK, no accident that it's
called the Red River.
No accident that the ship
is called the pirate,
the steamer is called
the pirate.
Right?
Probably it's an actual
reference to the moment
in Douglas' narrative where
he thinks about the right
or his owner to own him
and take any of his wages
as simply the right
of the pirate
on the high seas
to take by force.
Right? Let's go about seven
pages on to a description
of the landscape in the,
actually it's the beginning
of the next chapter
called, Dark Places.
They're now off the river
and onto the landscape.
It was a wild forsaken road,
now winding through
dreary pine barons,
where the wind whispered
warnfully.
Now over long causeways
through song cypress swamp,
the doleful trees rising out
of the slimy, spongy ground,
hung with long wreath
of funeral brack moss.
Whatever [inaudible]
loathsome form
of the moccasin snake might be
seen sliding among broken stumps
and shattered branches
that lay here
and there, rotting to the water.
The approach to Legree's
plantation in other words,
which is very deep in these
kind of eerie, Louisiana,
swampy wilderness, draws
on Gothic conventions.
I mean, this is kind
of a mild version
of that disgusting passage that
I read you from Monk Lewis.
Right? Think about it.
It's a kind of dream landscape,
a closed world that's separate
from the world of the
everyday, somehow cut off.
Repeated images of
darkness and death, decay.
Kind of sense of evil
portrays this whole thing.
And then we get to the, let's
see, that's Dark Passages.
Let's take a look at
Legree's plantation.
OK. Legree's plantation
is an interesting thing.
It seems to embody decay itself.
Take a look on page 491.
Actually bottom of 490.
There's about three, three and
some pages into this chapter.
Legree had been drinking to that
degree that he was inclining
to be very gracious and
it was about this time
that the enclosures of the
plantation rose to view.
The estate had formally
belonged to a gentleman
of opulence and taste.
We've seen a gentleman of
opulence and taste, right?
Augustine St. Clair.
The estate had formerly belonged
to a gentleman of opulence
and taste, who had bestowed
some considerable attention
to the adornment of his grounds.
Having died insolvent, it had
been purchased at a bargain
by Legree, who used it,
as he did everything else,
merely as an implement
for money making.
The place had that
ragged, forlorn appearance,
which is always produced by
the evidence that the care
of a former owner has been
left to go to utter decay.
Right? It's decay embodied.
What was once a smooth
shaven lawn before the house,
dotted here and there
with ornamental shrubs,
was now covered with
frousy tangled grass,
with horse post set up
here and there in it.
Where the turf was stamped
away and the ground littered
with broken pails, cobs of corn
and other slovenly remains.
Here and there a
mildew Jessamine
or honeysuckle hung raggedly
from some ornamental support,
which had been pushed
to one side
by being used as a horse post.
What once was a large garden was
now all grown over with weeds,
though which here and there
some, through which here
and there, some solitary, exotic
reared it's forsaken head.
What had been a conservatory now
stood, had now no window shades
and though the moldering,
moldering shelves stood some dry
forsaken flower pots with sticks
in them, who's dried
leaves showed
that they had once been plants.
Now Stowe was drawing here
again, on the whithered garden.
Right? It goes back all
the way to puritan record.
The idea that the new world
had been a wilderness.
It had then become a garden.
But then through
spiritual neglect and decay,
it's become this
horrible wilderness again.
Right? That whole
period of the Jeremiah,
is in fact being evoked by this.
And the topographical
imagination
of the novel continues
to think about the ways
in which houses might be
expressive of some kinds
of larger spiritual states.
In that sense, you might say,
this is a Gothic landscape.
It seems to express the interior
decay of Legree himself.
Skip a paragraph.
The house had been
large and handsome.
It was built in a manner
common at the south.
A wide veranda of two stories
running around every part
of the house in to which
each outer door opened.
The lower tiers supported
by brick pillars.
But the place looked
desolate and uncomfortable.
Some windows stopped
up with boards,
some with shattered panes
and shutters hanging
by a single hinge.
All telling of coarse
neglect and discomfort.
Now I want you to
think about this.
It's built in a manner
common in the south.
It's a wide veranda
of two stories,
running around every
part of the house
into which the outer
door opened.
Right? So you can see
the veranda out there.
Does that remind you
of anything else?
I should have put the slides
right next to one another.
But to me it seems
like a deliberate
inversion of this house.
Which is also two stories.
Owned by a person who has
a kind of rich sensibility.
Has a broke, well cared
for garden on the inside.
Legree's house has the
veranda on the second floor,
going around on the outside.
And I don't think that little
detail is in fact incidental.
I think what these
two houses compare
to one another are meant, it's
meant to suggest, what happens
to something like the St. Clair
mansion, when it's not run
by somebody like St. Clair.
It too easily forms
the kind of decay.
It becomes something that is an
embodiment of the worst places
of slavery, like that.
So you could see in them
a kind of progression.
We move from one place
that seems pretty good,
to another place that's awful.
And yet, I think the novel is
suggesting even more than that,
by having this kind of
inversion you might say.
It's as if this is the St. Clair
household turned inside out.
And when you turn the St.
Clair household inside out,
you not only get the verandas
and garden on the outside,
but what you get is what
was at the dark heart
of the St. Clair
household all along.
Right? You turn it out and
it's a slave holders house.
All right, one of the things
you might say is that Legree,
this you know, it's almost in
a sense then that St. Clair
and Legree's plantations,
function as almost
like type and anti type.
St. Clair's is the type,
the fulfillment of it,
the true meaning of it is
not understood until we get
to Legree's plantation
and we realize these
are both slave holding,
slave holding plantations,
households.
And it looked kind of nice,
because St. Clair seemed
like a kind of good guy.
But he was irresponsible in
a certain way and his actions
or lack of actions have led,
have led to Tom's
being relocated
from the one to the other.
But I want to think the novel
is creating a certain kind
of equivalent.
It's only a hop, skip and a jump
and an accidental stabbing
perhaps, to go from one phase
of slavery to another.
And the over arching point is
that they are both
phases of slavery.
All right, so I think that Stowe
was very careful in the way
that she describes
this house and the way
in which she puts
these things together.
Let's take a look on page
512, a little bit further on.
Cassie tells Tom about
precisely how isolated he is.
This is in the quadroon story.
Right? And Cassie and
Tom were having this kind
of interaction together
and she tells him
about how bad things really are.
You see, said the woman.
You don't know anything.
Let's see, here's
Cassie talking to Tom.
I do. I've been on this place
five years, body and soul,
under this man's foot and I
hate him as I do the devil.
Here you are on a
lone plantation,
ten miles from any other.
In the swamps.
Not a white person
here, who could testify.
Again invoking the
conditions of future slave law.
If you were burned alive, if you
were scalded, cut into pieces,
set up for the dogs to tear or
hung up and whipped to death.
There's no law here of god or
man, that can do you or any one
of us the least good
of this man.
There's no earthly thing
that he's too good to do.
I could make anyone's hair
rise and their teeth chatter,
if I could only tell what I have
been seeing and knowing to hear.
And so she resolves
to kill Legree
and Tom talks her out of it.
Right? There's a part of what
he's learned from little Ava.
So she does something else.
What does she do?
She mobilizes one phase
of the Gothic Right?
She mobilizes that kind
of hoax Gothic that we saw
and we've talked about it
in terms of Ann [inaudible],
we saw in Washington Irving's,
Legend of Sleepy Hollow.
Right? So just as Brawn Bones
impersonates Ichabod Crane,
the headless,
I mean impersonates the
headless horseman in order
to drive Ichabod Crane off,
Cassie impersonates
a ghost as well.
Somebody out of this term.
Legree's past, in order
to frighten Legree
and enable her own escape.
And one of the things I
want to suggest to you is
that Stowe is making use,
deliberately making use
of that tradition
of Gothic fiction.
She's not interested in the,
she's not interested in the kind
of charnal house,
disgusting Gothic of Lewis
and Walpo [assumed spelling]
and all these other writers.
Rather she sees that that's
what slavery is about.
So again, you might say Stowe
is manipulating literary forms.
She's suggesting that
slavery is embodied
by that kind of Gothic fiction.
She takes another kind of
Gothic fiction, the hoax kind
of Gothic fiction and turns
it against that other kind.
Right? And enables,
therefore you might say,
to have Gothic fiction become
compatible with sentimentality.
Finally, towards the, so
that we get that, right.
Cassie haunting Legree.
And one of the things to
notice about this, this the way
in which this works, is that
it isn't quite so clear right.
I mean, think about how
it works psychologically.
Tom is carrying around a
relic, a kind of talisman.
Right? You people, do
you remember what it is
that he's carrying around?
Something that he received.
What's that?
>> [inaudible]
>> And what else?
>> [inaudible]
>> A lock of Ava's hair.
Right? This beautiful,
gold hair.
And when he sees it,
Legree has this kind
of freak out moment right.
For one thing it
reminds him of the moment
when he received a lock of hair
from his mother whom
he clearly you know,
was a Christian woman whom he
clearly didn't treat very well
and whom he deeply disappointed.
And he's racked by a
certain kind of guilt.
So that in this context,
you might say
in the very deepest form of
context, something weird happens
to the idea of influence.
It isn't so much that the
outward force has changed,
but it's the way in which they
are able to perceive changes.
So that even saintly
little Ava's lock of hair,
becomes this kind of
weird, sinister thing
in Legree's imagination.
He imagines it just
kind of curling
around his fingers
if it's alive.
You might say that is a sign,
that he is beyond redemption.
He can't actually be saved.
Right? And so that's
one of the things that,
I think one of that things
that, one of the reasons
that Stowe brings the Gothic
into this sentimental fiction
at all is to suggest the
limit of sentimentality
and also the limits perhaps
even of Christian sensibility.
There are some people who
are going to go to hell.
There are some people
who cannot be saved.
And perhaps what the novel
suggests is that we need
to concentrate on saving those
who can be saved and not worry
about those like Legree.
We get to the final
moment of the novel,
the one that you might say
is the final building block
that Stowe needs
before writing on.
Right? Remember I told
you she has this vision
that the communion table,
after her son has died of her,
of a slave being whipped
to death by his master
and forgiving that slave, that
master with his dying breath.
And that's what we see.
Although again, mostly
the very worst part
of it occurs off stage.
Again, Stowe is not
really interested
in dramatizing that for us.
We only see sometimes
the aftermath
of Tom's fatal, final beating.
But here's a funny, OK, so we
don't need to belabor that.
And I take it all of
you are too hard boiled.
Nobody shed a tear
when they look at that.
Sad. But think about this from
a narrative point of view.
That should be the
climax of the novel right.
But it isn't the
climax of the novel.
Why is that?
Possibly it's to suggest that if
Tom is a kind of Christ figure,
we don't, we can't
culminate in his death.
We need to see what he might
say is the most important thing
about the life of Christ
and the life of Tom,
the after effects that it has.
And what are the after
effects that we have here?
Cassie is saved.
Cassie does not become a
murderous, Cassie is saved.
Right? Tom presumably goes
to heaven and or is you know,
within the imagination of the
novel, he also acts as a kind
of force for redemption,
even the other slaves
who are complicit in his death,
are kind of awed
by his behavior.
But the final thing that we see
is that at the end of the novel,
he emerges almost
as a kind of symbol.
I mean, there's a kind of weird
resurrection of Tom at the end,
when young George Shelby
manages to return and we find
out that all this stuff has
been going on in the back story.
We kind of come around
full circle.
We come around back to uncle
Tom's cabin, once again.
And we see that the cabin is in
some sense set up as the final,
it's almost like the first
domestic situation we want
to think about but
from the beginning
of the novel is Uncle
Tom's Cabin,
it becomes a kind of
symbol at the end.
And there's a kind
of [inaudible]
that takes places here.
Right? So this is
where we would say,
oh like sentimental fiction, all
of this is truly unbelievable.
How could all of these
people have been related?
That's part of the
sentimentality,
that's part of what puts
audiences today off I suppose,
is that it all gets
tied up neatly.
But one of the things
that Stowe would answer
if she was a novelist behind
this, is she would say,
there's a reason that all these
extensible coincidences come
to pass at the end.
There's a reason that there's
been a kind of controlling,
there seems to be a kind
of controlling force
in the background
waiting, you know,
happening with the Shelby's,
even though we don't
know about it.
What's the name that
we would give to this?
The name that we might
give to this is providence.
Right? I mean ultimately I want
you to see that Stowe would say
that there isn't a such
thing as coincidence
within sentimental fiction.
There's a sense in which all
of this is part of a kind
of larger Christian plan.
And so finally where
Stowe ends up here,
in her concluding remarks
section, is in some sense
to break the fiction entirely.
The last image that we have
in the chapter that's
called, The Liberators.
That's the second to last
chapter, is this image of,
let me see if I have it for you.
Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Right? George is able
to reinvoked uncle Tom,
now just kind of a
ghostly spiritual presence.
It was on his grave my friends,
that I resolve before God,
that I would never own another
slave while it was possible
to free him.
And nobody, through me,
should ever run the risk
of the being parted from
home and friends and dying
on a lonely plantation
as he died.
So when you rejoice in your
freedom, think that you owe it
to that good old soul and
pay it back in kindness
to his wife and children.
Think of your freedom every
time you see Uncle Tom's Cabin
and let it be a memorial to
put you all in mind to follow
in his steps and be
honest and faithful
and Christian as he was.
Right? And that is the form
that Tom resurrection you
might say, takes place in that.
One of the things that
we realize at the end is
that we've been reading
this very long novel,
that we thought was a kind
of fiction and in the end,
it may be a fiction but
it also takes the form
of something else.
A sermon. And so Stowe in
some sense, breaks the,
she breaks the frame of the
fiction at the very end and goes
and it's like all those
little bits and pieces
of direct address to the reader
come front and center at the end
and we find out who the
audience for this really is.
Right? So page 621.
It's about five pages
into the conclusion.
She writes about herself
in the third person.
No longer as the kind of,
now the narrative voice takes
on the voice of the author.
The author hopes she has done
justice to that nobility,
generosity, humanity, which
in many cases characterize
individuals at the south.
Such instances save us from
utter despair of our kind,
but she asks any person
who knows the world,
are such characters
common anywhere.
For many years of her life,
the author avoided reading
or put illusion to the subject
of slavery considering too
painful to be inquired to.
Right? It's like that
think I showed you
from the 1879 preface.
And she goes on, as the
concluding remarks continue,
to basically offer up
her final suggestion
of what people can do.
And as I told you last time,
if you're expecting some kind
of legislative programs,
some alternative
to the future slave law, you're
going to be disappointed.
The bottom of 624.
She has addressed
herself now to the mothers
and daughters of
the free states.
But she asks at the bottom of
624, what can any individual do,
of that every individual can
judge, there is one thing
that every individual
can do, they can see
to it that they feel right.
And I want you to
think about a pun
that might be implicit
in those worlds.
It isn't quite grammatical, but
I think it's a pun nevertheless.
An atmosphere of sympathetic
influence encircles every human
being and a man or woman
who feels strongly, healthy,
healthfully and justly on the
great interest of humanity,
is a constant benefactor
to the human race.
At the end, what this
novel is promoting,
is a kind of grass
roots movement,
linked to Christianity,
linked to the idea of feeling
and then feeling correctly and
then feeling that you are right.
And it has tried to teach
you how to feel properly,
to create that sense of
understanding things,
not in terms of abstractions,
but in palpable realities.
It's taught you how to
respond to narrative,
not primarily first through the
head, but through the emotions
and in the end the novel is
suggesting that if you take
that approach to reading
and to life as a whole,
you will in the end find
that you feel right.
That you are in the right
and if everyone did this,
it would be a radically
different country.
OK, we'll leave it there.
As you go on to Hawthorn,
I want you to think
about the differences
between Hawthorn's technique
and Stowe's.
How does Hawthorn
seem to make use
of allegory while
demonstrating it's limitations?
