[ Silence ]
>> So if career goes
up, you know,
it becomes that real estate
that was underdeveloped.
Critics flock in there.
They start thinking
about Moby Dick.
It becomes very quickly like
kind of canonized center
of the American novel,
which means that nobody
reads it so much anymore.
Uncle Tom's Cabin had
a different career.
Many, many, many people read it.
It was the best selling
novel of the 19th century
and it was quickly
adopted for the stage.
Stowe wasn't so canny
as some other people
like Irving about her write.
So she didn't make any
money from the many,
many stage adaptations
that were made of this.
But Uncle Tom's Cabin was
quite literally a bona fide
cultural phenomenon.
And yet you might say because
of strategies that it pursues,
the novel pursues
that we'll talk about.
There was a sense in which it
kind of outlived its moment,
once slavery was abolished,
once African-American had
increasing rights although there
was clearly difficult in
the reconstruction era.
The idea of the African-American
protagonist being patterned
on someone like Tom started to
seem like not such a good idea
or at least not a useful idea.
Rather than being the
epitome of the good Christian
and therefore you might say that
the highest form of protagonist.
I mean what higher
protagonist is there
in wester civilization
other than Christ.
Tom was meant-- came to see sort
of the subservient and docile
and not exactly the template
for what a new African-American
person should be.
And in part that
has to do, I think,
with the way this
character became stereotyped
and the way the novels big
scenes became kind of set pieces
that were performed on stage.
The stage adaptations
made Uncle Tom's Cabin
into a much more
melodramatic story
than the novel actually is.
It highlighted those things and
some of the moral subtleties
of the novel were
lost in the process.
So the novel's career went
way down, and you wanna look
at the mid 20th century,
you'd say,
Moby Dick's stock was way up.
Uncle Tom's Cabin was probably
in an all time low and it took
in the aftermath of the '60s
and the rise of feminism
and you now, people who
took a look at the writing
that was actually written
in red in the middle
of the 19th century,
writing that was primarily
by women and for women.
And started to think that
maybe there were some kind
of masculine is bias in the way
the cannon have been construct.
I mean was it really
just accidental
or could it possibly be
that they were just better
that that cannon was basically
Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman,
Hawthorne, Melville, Poe
and sometimes Dickinson
or something else
going on there.
And I think one of
the arguments,
one of the powerful
arguments that critics made is
that Uncle Tom's Cabin is
not only antislavery novel
but it's also a kind of
feminist novel and that's part
of what motivates it, that
it really is making a kind
of analogy, a powerful
analogy between slavery,
the most pressing problems for
the United States in the middle
of the 19th century, and a
problem that continues on.
Again, a problem not solved in
the declaration of independence
on the constitution, the
problem of women's rights,
or what Stowe would come
to call domestic slavery.
And I think one of the things
that happens in the '70s
and onward is that critics--
feminist critics especially
but generally critics would
suggest that we forgotten how
to read novels like Uncle Tom's
Cabin in part because we become
so consumed as English majors
with text that are hard,
with text that are
light, you know,
they don't seem to
have a message.
And that there's a certain
way in which sentimentality
as a genre, has become
unavailable for us.
And the argument is in fact
we are poor readers for it.
So it seemed to me in the
interest of being, you know,
up to date in terms
of modern the very--
being the very model of modern
literary criticism back whenever
that was.
Now, if you're gonna
do Moby Dick you have
to do Uncle Tom's Cabin, too.
I chucked about but three weeks
or so out of the syllabus.
But I think one of the things
I want you to understand is
that Uncle Tom's Cabin and
Moby Dick represent two
contemporary novels.
They're basically the same
time, they are motivated
by the same cultural
context, they are marked by it
in slightly different ways but
there are two variant attempts
to write a modern major American
novel, a national level.
I suggest to you that The
Scarlet Letter is another way
of doing it as well, that it
has the same kinds of aims.
And we will talk about that
although I give it comparatively
short shrift in this
class because I think many
of you have, probably at least
been assigned The Scarlet Letter
in high school.
If that's true and
in high school
if you skip the Custom House
and you find yourself pressed
for time for some,
who knows what,
reason over the next two weeks.
I suggest you read the Custom
House, hey, this is rare tip.
Read the Custom House and
skim The Scarlet Letter
to re-familiarize yourself
of what goes on there.
I'll show you some of the major
portions of The Scarlet Letter.
But one of the things you
will understand if you realize
that the Custom House
is integral
to the novel The
Scarlet Letter in italics
on which The Scarlet Letter
that follows the Custom House,
Scarlet Letter in quotation
marks is simply a kind
of a long story.
You will understand
that one of the things
that Hawthorne is trying to do
is play off the 17th century
against the 19th century.
It isn't only a novel
about the 17th century.
And Hawthorne frames his
telling of Hester Prynne's story
with ideas that come from
the 19th century, alright.
So I want you to understand
that-- I mean, some--
with any luck, as I said, I
don't want you to remember dates
and things but by the end
of a course I do hope
you will realize,
it will be firmly
implanted in your head
that Hawthorne was
not a puritan writer.
Many students make that mistake.
Hawthorne was not.
It's one of the reasons
I've decided not
to ever start this course
with Young Goodman Brown
which I've thought of doing.
He's a 19th century writer.
He's writing a critic
of Puritanism, okay.
So we're gonna back.
But he's also writing a critic
of 19th century culture.
And there's a certain way
in which Hawthorne shares
that project with
Stowe and Melville.
They are all in some sense
evaluating the culture
that they find themselves
in from a variety
of different standpoints,
and in different ways
they find it wanting.
They have ideas about
how it might be improved.
And still is more overt
about it behind a kind
of prescriptive message about
how it might be improved.
So one of the other
things I want you to use is
that if Hawthorne is engaged in
a kind of critic of Puritanism
and is dramatizing some of the
shortcomings of typological,
allegorical modes of thinking,
some of the kinds of way
that Calvinism encouraged people
to think in the 17th century.
If Melville also in some
part is drawn to Hawthorne
because he is sympathetic
to that critic,
on the one hand we
might say that Stowe is
in some sense inheriting many
of the kind of impulsives
that come from Calvinism.
She belongs in some-- in--
you might say, in a kind of long
train of what we might think
of the sermonic literature that
would start for us with Thoreau.
So I want you to think about
this different trajectories
as we are talking about
these books, okay.
One of the things to say
is that and I'll bring back
to ask this question of
the horizon of expectations
that we started about with.
And I think I might
be even mentioned it
to you on the first day.
Melville sets himself at odds
with the prevailing horizon
of expectations in that
moment, right, in the 1850s.
He is writing a novel
that's gonna look weird even
to experienced novel readers.
And if you'll remember
he starts with as--
with etymology section with
extracts isn't really get
to this personal narrative
until many pages in.
And even in-- even
then it's a kind
of dodgy personal narrative.
It's one where we should
immediately be suspicious
of the very chatty narrator
that he's presenting to us.
It looks weird as a novel.
Stowe has a different
attitude as I hope you'll see
over next couple of days towards
the horizons of expectations.
She wants to use it.
She wants to mobilize it.
She knows that one of a
things she's trying to get
across is something that is
deeply controversial at best,
perhaps deeply unpopular
at worst.
So, she wants in some
sense to sugar coat
that indigestible nugget
at the heart of her project
with something that will
prove to be more digestible
that will even make
you want to ingest it.
And those things are what
we called sentimentality,
and with them a healthy dollop
of Christian doctrine,
some melodrama.
And you might say, a general
idea that what she is trying
to do would fall into a
category that if it exists
at the time we would
call realism.
Now you'd say that's ridiculous.
It's a novel.
When you get to the end you'll
say, "Wow, that was really
so full of coincidence and it's
just completely unbelievable
story," right.
People wouldn't behave
that way or, you know,
these kinds of things really
wouldn't happen except
in novels.
But what I wanna
suggest to you is
that Stowe is actually
pitching the novel
to her readers as realism.
And if they read it in that way
and that she dramatized
the scenes in the novel
that are precisely
about those kinds
of problems of representation.
So that's part of
where we're going.
And again, that would
be another thing
that separates Stowe's practice
from Hawthorne's and Melville's.
Today in the 21st century,
we would say, "Oh, yeah,
Stowe is a sentimental
novelist."
>> Those guys are doing
something more complicated.
They're modernist or romantic
writers but I would think
that a way of capturing
the dynamic
in the 19th century might
be more accurate to say
that she is something that
is more like realism and less
like romantic writing, the
kind of romantic writing
that they are pioneering.
And in the end, you might
say of the 19 century
when there's a kind of backlash
against romantic writing.
And genres that we've cope--
when we think of more properly
if you take American literature,
too, you would start off
with the age of what's
known as realism
and then leading to naturalism.
Well, part of realism is
an intention to region
and regionalist writing
as it worked.
And one of the major
regionalists
of the late 19th century--
of the later part of
19th century is Stowe.
So you might say
that Stowe has--
if you look at her
career there's a sense
in which she kind of
surrounds the romantic writers
that are epitomized by
Hawthorne and Melville.
So I want you to think
about that as well.
What would it mean
to be a reader
for whom sentimentality is
in fact a form of realism?
Okay, now, like Emerson's
antislavery lectures,
Stowe's novel was
motivated by the passage
of the Fugitive Slave Law.
And in 1851, she
wrote to the editor
of an antislavery newspaper
called the "National Era"
that she wanted to
write a sketch
and this sketch was gonna be
called "Uncle Tom's Cabin."
And this sketch would run for
three or four installments.
Maybe some of you are wishing
that in fact she'd stuck
to her original plan.
But once she began her
writing, the project took off.
It grew to 40 installments.
It was later reorganized
into 45 chapters
for publication as
a book in 1852.
Alright, so you might
see there's a project--
the project gets a way with--
or from her and at the same time
which she is not
interested in literary form
in the way that Melville is.
She's interested in literally
form, I would suggest to you
in the context of course
in the way that someone
like Phillis Wheatley is.
She doesn't want
form to be a problem.
She wants form that draws you in
but she's got something other--
something that's
different around.
And like Wheatley, one of
the things that's thought her
in mind is you might say,
the faith of Christianity
in the new world.
Wheatley thinks that
Christianity is something
that is, you know,
eventually going
to provide a certain
kind of salvation.
It's good for Africans to
come to the United States
if it mean-- even the slaves,
if it means that
eventually are Christianized.
We need to perfect Christianity
so the white people will realize
that Africans who may be
dark has came nevertheless
like came can be refined.
Stowe also thinks,
believes in, you might say,
the salvation of-- the idea
of Christian salvation,
what's gone wrong as far
as Stowe is concerned is the
institution that supposed
to provide-- to help
provide that, the church.
The church, you might say,
has fallen down on the job
not only does the church--
not [inaudible]-- the Christian
church not necessarily be
counted on to oppose slavery.
There are many instances and not
only in the south of churches
and ministers who
openly support slavery
who find biblical president for.
So I think that's a problem.
So for her, form is not
going to be an issue,
and you might say
therefore if we were looking
to judge the novel in
contemporary terms,
you might say that actually
it's kind of deformed.
It probably could
have use an editor,
although I think that's
probably true of most 20th--
21st century, no, it was not.
Everybody here read Steven King,
don't you wish Steven King
were just a little bit
shorter sometimes.
I mean, come on, you
really need all those words.
Probably better when
it was shorter.
In any case, Stowe's middle
section gets away form her you
might say.
And so, I think you'll notice
that as you read
over the weekend.
There's a sense in which
in terms of the story,
the narrative, that
middle section that sets
in New Orleans is too long.
And yet there's something
about what it is
that Stowe is interested in
thinking about it that makes how
that kind of-- that makes her
take all that kind of space.
So we'll talk about
that, I think,
a little bit more next time.
One of the things to start
by thinking about is couple
of things to help you read this.
What is that the book
has a double plot?
It moves geographically
north from Kentucky
and south from Kentucky.
So the northern plot
has a certain logic,
it's north towards
Canada and to freedom.
That's the Harris' who
escaped from the beginning
and moved their way
up to Canada.
And the logic of south, just
as I suggested to you earlier
about Huckleberry Finn, the
logic of south is the logic
of deeper into slavery,
down towards Louisiana
and the deepest, darkest,
most dismal faces of slavery.
The early sections of the book
are the most tightly plotted.
They are the most motivated by
the needs to dramatize a critic
of Fugitive Slave Law.
But as she gets more and more
taken with this kind of logic
of moving south, you might
say it's the southern movement
that ends up dominating
the book.
The northern plot
has a kind of climax
or they had a central middle
climax that was a frequent--
it was frequently the set piece
that would close the first act
of stage adaptations
of Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Her people used to go to see how
this was going to be performed,
Eliza on the ice floes.
This is from a French
edition of a play.
This is an illustration
from the 1880's.
And again, they do get across
that Eliza doesn't look exactly,
not necessary look
African-American.
And this is from an
advertisement for production
of Uncle Tom's Cabin
in the 1880's.
How were they gonna do this?
How were they gonna
dramatize that was typically
as these things went on
you would have, you know,
actual dogs come on the
stage and, you know,
somebody wonders what
they did when the dogs
like poop on the stage.
Don't ask me that question.
I have no idea.
[Laughter] But it
became spectacle, right.
So one of the things
you might say
about the novel immediately
is it it's open itself
up to spectacle like that.
It contains certain kinds
of steps that pieces
that draw attention
to themselves,
that's part of its technique.
There is, you might
say, an undercurrent
of melodrama in this novel.
And it's not only in its
narrative but even in the voice
of the narrator, right.
There is a narrative voice
her e. It will address you
periodically as dear reader.
It would comment on what
the narrative is doing.
And that in some sense
also heightens the kind
of melodramatic for us, alright.
Now, you remember that Eliza
after receiving assistance
from Senator Bird is reunited
with her husband, George.
They find a temporary haven
in chapter 13 of the novel,
in the Quaker Settlement
which is run
as if it's a kind of
matriarchy, right.
And you might say that's a kind
of Utopian space for Stowe.
She's-- It's almost like vision.
It's almost like her little
furrow thought experiments.
What would it look
like of women ran stuff
and the man didn't mind, if
the men were cooperative.
What would a matriarchal
society look like?
It might look like
this Quaker Settlement.
Interestingly though
you can't stay there.
It doesn't really for everybody.
The Harris's can't stay there.
They have to move on.
And so that might be
one way of thinking
about the novels acknowledgment
of what is possible especially
for people like to Harris's in
the middle of the 19th century.
Now in the first part of
the novel, that novel,
that plot of escape alternates
with Tom's-- the Tom plot.
Tom sailed to a slave
owner down South.
And it's at the end
of chapter 17.
So I ask you to cutoff
basically where book 1
of the published book,
first publication ended off.
But that's just the beginning
of this New Orleans section
at the end of chapter 18.
That's where we get
more and more of a focus
on to the real kind of
horrors, both literal
and you might say even
intellectual horrors of slavery
and that part of the novel
is less tightly plotted,
there's more conversation,
there's more thinking especially
between Augustine St. Clare
and his cousin Miss Ophelia
about the kinds of a, you
know, problems of slavery,
the possible remedies
for a slavery.
One of the things I want
you to immediately see is
that it's important that
Miss Ophelia is a northerner
and it's important that
Miss Ophelia is a deeply
flawed character.
She needs to learn something
from the people in
the household.
And part of that is, you
know, there's an insight
that Stowe has which is the same
insight that motivated Emerson
which is that's slavery
is a national institution.
It isn't that southern
problem that the South is part
of a union and that's this
union is part of a large--
is a larger economy
that's built on slavery.
You can't have slavery in
one part of it and saying
that the whole country is
into slave holding society.
So there's a way in which one
of things she's dramatized is
northern implication in slavery.
The implication of would be do
good or is like Miss Ophelia.
Notice what happens to
her when you found--
when the novel progresses.
There's a deep irony
about what happens
to Miss Ophelia in
the course of it.
It's subtle but just
think about ways
in which you would
categorize her in relation
to slavery as the novel unfolds.
That's one thing.
The other is that the most--
one of the most vicious villains
in all of the American
literature is the villain
of the last half of this novel,
Simon Legree, is a northerner
and a capitalist, right.
So one of the things we would
say is that the worst character
in this entire novel
is a northerner.
Stowe is suggesting that it's a
national problem that the south
and north are both
implicated in this.
And there are ways in which she
will, you know, almost try--
she would try to address herself
to us a sympathetic southern
reader at the moment.
She doesn't wanna demonize the
south that's just too easy an
excuse for northern readers.
>> Okay, so that's one
thing to bear in mind.
One of the things we might think
about with Uncle Tom's Cabin
of course is that it belongs
to a model in which of reading
and writing and thinking, in
which literature was thought
to actually have
social consequences,
to actually have some
kind of efficacy.
I don't think-- we don't
believe that so much
in the United States anymore.
Do anyone believe that a
book can change the world?
May even sounds right
when you say, "Oh,
books will change my life."
But there are cultures
out there.
[Inaudible] with that, there
are Americans out there
that believed that books can
do things, have social effects.
Mostly they focus on
negative social effects.
They think that certain writers
are be banned or have death--
you know, death sentences
passed on them for certain kinds
of sect, religious things
that they've written
or that certain very, very, very
popular books should be burnt
because they promote
witchcraft and wizardry.
[Laughter] Or that no one
should read Huckleberry Finn
because it contains the word
nigger, even though it's one
of the most deeply, antiracist
books that's ever been written
and people would get funny
ideas about [inaudible].
Nevertheless, there's
one good thing
about all those prospectors
which is that they seemed
to think that literature
matters or as you know many--
I don't know well healed
liberals are kinda of too bossy
about the possibilities
for literature.
When Stowe went to the White
House in 1862 and met Lincoln,
finally, he looked at her
and you can imagine
Abe Lincoln talking.
Lincoln at her and probably
only half joking said," So,
this is the little lady who
made this great big war."
And one thing again, he's
only half joking about that.
There was the belief
that somehow Uncle Tom's Cabin
was related to the civil war.
Some would say, he brought
it-- it brought it about.
Certainly, one of the things
we would say is that it kind
of galvanized discourse
about slavery.
To a certain extent, once Uncle
Tom's Cabin was published,
it was so powerful as a form
and so many people read it,
that in some sense the slave--
the debate over slavery got
turned into literary debates.
Was the novel true or not?
Was it a true dramatization
of slavery?
Some people say that's
exactly the slavery.
See, it's evil.
You read the novel.
Some people say didn't
go far enough.
It doesn't show you enough
about how horrible slavery
is, has pull its punches.
Southern writer would
appall and say, "No, no,
it's completely unfair."
That the slavery is actually
much better that the kind
of wave slavery that
you have in the north
where people are kinda left
with their own devices.
The plantation system
is like a family.
And in a family, there needs
to be punishment every
now and then, right?
Spare the rod, spoil the child.
But it's a system
in which we care
about everybody that's
in a family.
These were more debates
that were mobilized.
And so people would
say, you know,
Uncle Tom's Cabin was true,
wasn't true, wasn't true enough.
So much so that pass--
Stowe, the year afterwards,
publishes a volume
what's you called The Key
to Uncle Tom's Cabin in
which she reveals some
of her contemporary sources.
And one of the people
that's the influence
in the story Frederick
Douglas, right.
So Stowe, herself buys
in into this debate
over whether the novel
is actually true.
So then that's the kind
of leave the imagination
that we have to make.
We have to think of a situation
we could actually think
that a novel could cause a war.
Here's an example from
later on in the century,
this is a Brigadier General
who was a confederate general
who wrote this in
Sewanee Review in 1893.
Has Mrs. Stowe ever try to think
what her book has been a chief
factor of bringing upon the
world, have she ever try
to weigh those occasional
and rare horrors.
I'll say that again,
the occasional
and rare horrors of
the old slave day.
Hard as they were against
the agonies of the million
of brave men mutilated
and done to death
in the ranks of the
blue and gray.
Has she ever reflected upon the
10, the 20 millions of lives
and mothers, sweethearts
and daughters who slaughter,
whose hearts has been
torn up by the roots
of the wild slaughter
between brothers.
Truly the indulgence
of sentiment is costly.
Again, you can see some
things going on here.
Right, I mean, there's the
apology, the occasional
and rare horrors of
the old slave days.
The family metaphor,
the country as a family,
brother against brother,
with the civil war.
He's taking those and
he's not actually stupid.
He's taking aim at
precisely the audience
that Stowe's novel was
aimed at, you know, women.
Here he calls the mothers,
sweethearts, and daughter.
That's exactly that Stowe's
gonna address her book
to in end, you'll see.
It's like, you know,
the men they suck.
Women of the America, it's time
for you to do something, right?
And-- But the idea that
truly the indulgence
of sentiment is costly
is misguided.
It wasn't simply
indulging sentiments.
There wasn't like, "Oh, women,
they write sentimental stuff
and look what happens."
Write about slavery
and see what you-- no.
Stowe knew exactly what
she was doing, right.
So that Stowe I would say--
Stowe truly did mean to do harm.
I think that was-- but she meant
to do harm to this institution
that she found to be, you
know, a complete disgrace.
And you might say a kind of
cultural contradiction that was
in some sense a sort of
very present evil, okay.
So that's one of the things
I want us to understand
that we understand in the 19th
century that it was Stowe,
that literature can have
a certain kind of efficacy
and she means it to have a
certain kind of efficacy, right?
So, here's a-- here's
an advertising
for the novel, blew
that later on.
And you can see that it was the
greatest hail at this point,
it's the greatest
book of the age.
In addition for the million
complete in one volume,
people would say, "Oh, you
know, she was really successful
as a novelist because
she had a powerful theme,
antislavery," right.
She was just the best of
the antislavery novels,
everybody bought it, right?
Wrong. In fact, antislavery
was dead at the box office.
Everyone knew, including Stowe,
that antislavery was a genre
that nobody wanted to read.
It did not sell well.
In effect, Stowe was forced
to sell the publication rights
to the novel for just
a 10 percent royalty
and her husband had told her--
he was quoted later on in
saying, "I tell my wife
that if she can get a good
black silk dress or 50 dollars
and money for the story,
she should take it"
which of course was not
exactly the right thing to do.
And she missed out on a lot
of money although I think--
I don't think it really mater.
But the success of Uncle Tom's
Cabin surprised everybody.
Surprised her, her
husband, her publishers.
You might say therefore
more accurately
that the novel gained a large
audience in spite of rather
than because of its
antislavery stance.
One Stowe scholar
put it this way,
sometimes critics have
assumed that it was the subject
of antislavery which made Uncle
Tom's Cabin a powerful novel.
It is perhaps more exactly
through to say the opposite
that because Uncle Tom's
Cabin was a powerful novel,
antislavery became a
powerful cause, okay.
So that again, as one say
you seemed that they--
you could demonstrate
and liberate history
that this is a novel,
a piece of literature
that has a certain kind
of social efficacy.
Stowe knows that she can't just
write an antislavery critique
that it becomes a
[inaudible] or something
and nobody wants to read it.
How doe she hoodwink the reader?
How does she draw the reader in
so that finally the reader has
to accept this antislavery
novel?
She does it-- I'd
suggest you very candidly
by using literary techniques
that allow her to appeal
to her readers' emotions first
and their intellect second.
Once she's got the emotional
pull then she starts to--
she can bring out the--
try to seek a kind of
intellectual change, right?
So it is an antislavery polemic.
I think that's true.
It is also a kind of feminist
appeal and you might say
that she compelled-- she brings
those two things together.
It's not incidental by the way.
Part of the reason Stowe
as a writer is able
to imagine what it's
like to be a slave is
that she feels herself to be
what's called a domestic slave.
And in some sense, it's not
her husband was a bad guy
or a thing.
It's just that simply the
situation of women was
such in the 19th century that
even if you're relatively well
to do you are nevertheless
kind of in a situation
which your options are limited.
You don't live for yourself.
You're constantly doing things.
Rather, she has large family.
And so she has this
experience that she's able
through what [inaudible] might
have called negative capability
to generalize out and think
about what it might
mean to be a slave.
So she takes these two things
and in priority order, right?
Slavery first, domestic
labor is second,
as the topics of a novel.
She wraps them in a technique
of sentimental fiction.
And what for her is inseparable
from the idea of sentimentality.
She wraps them in the garb
of Christian doctrine, okay.
So, I want you to
be clear about this.
Above all, this is
a Christian novel.
It is a Christian
abolition novel.
And it is a Christian abolition
novel that takes the opportunity
to also offer a kind of
feminist dramatization
or feminist critique and
that's activated by the idea
that what Stowe-- you know,
that what Stowe experienced
herself personally.
It's something that
she would refer
to as domestic slavery, right?
And her biography makes
this clear that she knows
about domestic slavery.
She's born in the beginning
of the century, 1811,
to a very prominent family.
Her father, Lyman, is
a Presbyterian Minister
and he was one of the
most famous preachers
in the northeast and even
in America in that day.
>> He was a very strong
influence on his children.
He had seven children
who followed him,
some of them into the ministry.
One of them, Harriet's
younger brother, Henry,
became perhaps even
more well-known
as a preacher than his father.
Her older sister in
fact, I think the oldest
of the children, Catherine,
became an influential proponent
of education for women and
wrote treatises about that.
One scholar writing about
Uncle Tom's Cabin in a kind
of disparaging way in the
middle of the 20th century said,
that any of the beaches
that sat alone
on a deserted island
would have a church
and a missionary
society up and running
within a couple of days, right.
That's kind of activist family.
Stowe launches her literary
career when she's about 23.
1834, she began publishing
a set of stories
in a western monthly magazine.
On of the stories wins a price
of 5 dollars which is more
than it is-- oh, excuse me,
50 dollars which is, you know,
more than 50 dollars
today by quite a bit,
but still not a ton of money.
But it teaches her this lesson,
that you can make
money from writing.
It can be a form of supplemental
income for her family.
So she [inaudible] it.
I would suggest to you-- one
of the least I mentioned is
that there's a kind
of instrumental idea.
Literature is not just there
for aesthetic appreciation.
It's to achieve things.
It's to get things.
One of those things you might
wanna get at least at the outset
of your career is money.
In fact, she needed
money because in 1836,
she married a man who
didn't have a lot of money,
Calvin Stowe, who was a widower
and a professor whose
circumstances were not
exactly prosperous.
He was a classics
professor and she said later
on after the novel was a
success, "I was married
when I was 25 years old to a man
who is rich in Greek and Hebrew,
Latin and Arabic, and alas
rich in nothing else."
I sympathize.
In any case, it becomes
impossible
to support their growing family
on just a professor's salary.
So she looks to writing to try
to provide some extra money.
And in 1842, she was--
she collected enough stuff to
actually put a volume together
and she was canny about
her professional life
and a certainly way.
She knew where to go.
She went to New York to
negotiate with the House
of Harper which is one of the
most prominent publishers.
And she-- there's a letter
in which she writes back
to her husband this,
"On the home, my dear,
if I choose to be a
literary lady, I have I think
as good a chance of
making profit by,
it is anyone I know of."
And again this should
remind as an earning, right.
She's not in this for
the love of literature.
She's in this to make money.
And her husband apparently
writes back and says, "My dear,
you must be a literary woman."
And she writes back to him
and says, "If I am to write,
I must have a room to myself
which shall be my room."
[Inaudible] Actually, I don't
know if he got that room.
I mean this anticipates Virginia
Wall, right, a room on its own.
But you can kind of
see that the situation
in which she is writing.
Anyway, the result of all
these was a volume called the
Mayflower that was
published by Harper in 1843
to not a lot of notice.
And after that, her life was
really dominated by trials
where in between 1836 and
1850s, so this volume goes
about the middle of that.
She has birthed to seven
children, count them up,
the years, 1836 to
1850, about 14 years.
Seven children and she suffers
at least two miscarriages,
that's 9 years [inaudible] so
we don't know exactly, right.
And she was one of these--
she was not one of these women
who could just kinda like have
a pregnancy and be up and,
you know, jogging the next day.
She was frequently
frustrated by her pregnancy.
So she spent a lot of time in
bed and when she was well enough
to write, she had to
worry about the family.
I want you to understand
she's not--
we talked about Anne
Bradstreet before.
It doesn't went with Anne
Bradstreet was well to do
and had helped and Stowe
doesn't have that kind of help.
In fact later on, she said
this to a friend even--
It's not even that later.
It's 1838 before she has
a lot of her children.
She said, "I am but
a mere drudge
with few ideas besides
babies and housekeeping."
And that was before, you know,
the drudgery had
hardly reached its peak.
The following year, she writes
this, "I am determined not
to be a mere domestic slave
without even the leisure
to excel in my duties."
Alright, so there, early on,
you see this connection
that's being made in her mind
between slavery and a lot of
women in the 19th Century.
She finally had a
nervous breakdown.
And in 1846, she had to go
for hydrotherapy in Vermont
and almost a year of
isolation from her family.
So that's one of the
things to understand
about where this
novel comes from.
In other way, it places
novel comes from 1849.
There was a cholera epidemic and
it killed one of her children,
her 1-year-old son, Samuel.
And she said this, "It
was at his dying bed
that I learned what a
poor slave mother may feel
when her child is
torn away from her."
She's thinking back about where
the genesis of this novel was.
"In those depths of sorrow
which seemed to be immeasurable,
it was my only prayer to God
that such anguish might
not be suffered in vain.
I felt that I could
never be consoled
for it unless this crushing of
my own heart might enable me
to work out some
great good to others."
So, there's a kind
of double sense here.
Domesticity as a kind
of duty on the one hand,
domesticity as a
kind of slavery.
She likes the duty part.
She doesn't like
the slavery part.
She doesn't like the
fact that in so far
as this drudgery is keeping her
from doing the duty
particularly.
But you can kinda see how
this is becoming a kind
of complex metaphor for Stowe.
It's evolving even
in this moment.
Finally, the thing
that prompts Stowe
to write Uncle Tom's Cabin
is the passage next year
of the compromising 1850
and the Fugitive Slave Law.
Let's take a look
in the novel now.
We've delayed long enough, to
page 142 in the Penguin edition,
chapter 9, or anybody who's
using something separate.
Here we find a direct
reference to the passage
of the Fugitive Slave Law
although one of the things
to bear in mind is that
the law they're talking
about is not the national
Fugitive Slave Law but a kind
of similar law that's
being passed
at the state level in Ohio.
It's about-- So it's
about states politics.
But this is what-- We have
the Senator Bird here talking
to his wife.
Alright, and he's
the man of business
and politics, public affairs.
She is the little lady
who stays at home.
Well, said his wife,
after the business
of the tea table is
getting rather slack
and what have they been
doing in the senate?
Now, it was a very unusual thing
for gentle little Mrs. Bird ever
to trouble her head
with what was going
on in the house of the state.
Very wisely considering
that she had enough
to do to mind her own.
Now I wanted you to see again
even in the little thing
like that, that's just not
a neutral narrative voice.
There's a lot of
stuff that's going on.
In this narrative voice drips
with irony much of the time
and you should be attuned to it.
Mr. Bird therefore opened his
eyes in surprise and said,
not very much of importance.
Well, but is it true that
they have been passing a law
forbidding people to
give meat and drink
to those poor colored
folks that come along?
I heard they were
talking of some such law
but I don't think any Christian
legislature would pass it.
Why Mary, you're getting to
be a politician all at once.
No nonsense.
I wouldn't give a fip for
all your politics generally.
But I think this is something
downright cruel and unchristian.
I hope my dear no such
law has been passed.
Alright, so one of the things
we're starting to see here
as a kind of separation.
This is what scholars would
later call the separation
of steer.
There's a male realm of
politics and a female realm
which is not supposed
to be about politics.
It's about the home.
It's about religions,
about education,
but not about politics.
And there's a certain way
in which you should say--
you should see that there's
kind of something dismissive
about her attitude
towards politics.
I wouldn't give fip
for all your politics.
Generally, as if it's all
just stuff that men do.
But wait a minute, once the
men start doing stuff that's
unchristian then the
women had to take notice.
It's all men-- already we see
there are two different ways
of framing what's going on.
The male way is the
legalistic way.
There has been a
law forbidding--
passed forbidding people to
help off the slaves that come
over from Kentucky my dear so
much of that thing has been done
by these reckless
abolitionist that are brethren
in Kentucky are very
strongly excited
and that seems necessary.
And actually she's gonna
use the Christian thing back
at her, right?
And no more than Christian and
kind of something should be done
by our state to quiet
the excitement.
And what is that law?
It don't forbid us to
shelter those poor creatures
at night, does it?
And to give them
something comfortable to eat
and a few old clothes and
then send them quietly
about their business.
Well, why yes my dear
that would be aiding
and abetting, you know.
Mrs. Bird was a timid, blushing
little woman, of about of 4 feet
in height with mild blue eyes
and a peach-blow complexion,
and the gentlest, sweetest
voice in the world.
As for courage, a moderate-sized
cock-turkey had been known
to put her to rout at
the very first gobble,
and a stout house-dog
of moderate capacity
would bring her
into subjection merely
by a show of teeth.
And this must be funny guys.
Her husband and children
were her entire world,
and in this she ruled more
by entreaty and persuasion
than by command or arguments.
There was only one thing that
was capable of arousing her,
and that provocation came in on
her side of her unusually gentle
and sympathetic nature.
Anything in the shape of cruelty
would throw her into a passion,
which was the more alarming
and inexplicable in proportion
to the general softness
of her nature, right.
I want you to see that in
this passage, there's a way
that we should understand
Mrs. Bird as something
like a Stowe figure, right.
>> Normally she thinks of
herself as a wife and mother.
Normally she wouldn't
interfere in these things.
But all of a sudden something
is going on in that male realm
of politics that
forces her to intervene
and that is the passage
of the Fugitive Slave Law.
Her sister in law wrote to her
after the fugitive slave law
and said, "How do you
feel if you use the pen
like you can I would
actually write something
that will make this
whole nation feel what
in the curse thing slavery is."
And still reads that letter
aloud to her children apparently
and says, "This I
will write something.
I will if I live."
Okay, we're getting closer to
passage of Fugitive Slave Law.
Finally, this is the story,
in February of the following
year she's taking communion.
She has a vision.
This is what she said later
on of a slave being flogged
to death from the
orders of his master
and with his very
last dying breaths,
forgiving his prosecutors
for what they have done.
And that vision is a thing and
supposedly that kicks it all
into gear, that brings
it all together,
and that crystallizes
ultimately in Uncle Tom's Cabin.
So that later on Stowe says and
I think, you know, there's a way
which we wouldn't
take this ironically.
I mean she's tried to
mean it ironically.
She says that she-- not she
but the Lord wrote
Uncle Tom's Cabin.
I think she is thinking
back to that--
the genesis of the
novel and that vision.
She calls this, she says-- and
at this point, she's gotten
to be kind of an
institution so she started--
she used to write herself
in the third person.
She says, the Lord himself
wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin
and she still was but an
instrument in his hand.
And I wanna understand
that we should take that--
to think that that's
kind of sincerity, right,
that she really means that.
So this is God's purpose
that she is about.
Okay, so that's one
of the things
that I want us to
bear in mind here.
There is a way in which one
of the things the novel is
dramatizing for us is a kind
of cultural believe that men
and women have different
roles to play in society.
That's one thing.
They have different roles.
It's called constructive, caught
the separation of spheres.
On the other hand-- and
therefore you get quotes
from Stowe like this, right?
Women if they're a
writer not suppose
to be doing what the men--
think back to Bradstreet.
They're not supposed to
be doing what the men do.
They do it in the different way.
She says I had no more thought
of style or literary excellence
than the mother who rushes into
the street and cries for help
to save her children
from a burning house,
thinks of the teachings
of the rhetorician
or the elocutionist, right.
So one of things I
want you to see here is
that what she's conceiving
is writing the novel
as an extension of
her domestic duties,
of her duties as a mother.
And again the logic is she's
actually always thought
about writing this way, right.
She wrote for fun at first
but then she earned money
and then she tried to write
to earn money for her family.
Again, an extension of
her domestic duties.
Here, is on a larger stage.
The nation if it's a
family is really suffering
and mothers finally need
to, you know, get out there
in the street and do something.
And in this idea of the
teachings of the rhetorician
or the elocutionist, you've
got to see something like a dig
at people, the literati
like Ralph Waldo Emerson
who are standing at the
sidelines and not doing anything
and talking about,
you know, rhetoric
and literature and
speech, you know.
There's think-- a desire
here to say that, you know,
the men of the country
whether they're be ministers
or intellectuals or whatever
are falling down on the job.
So much so that women have to
finally do something about that.
Now, again I wanna
to suggest to you--
you can't really
see it very well.
But there's a way in which women
are seen as writers, right.
But when Stowe says
that she hadn't thought
about literary style or
excellent is because women
like Susan Warner or
others or Maria Cummins
and Fanny Fern although she's
a slightly different case,
typically these-- this is the
best selling novel, the wide,
wide world before Uncle
Tom's Cabin, right.
So people thought
of women as writers
but they didn't think
of them as literary.
They were writing
the kinds of novels
that Charles Brockden Brown
in some sense was
trying to write again.
So it's a continuation
about sentimental tradition.
They were melodramatic.
They were about the family life.
They were about-- They
have a lot of kind
of Christian educative
impulses behind them
and they were sentimental
in this way.
They were about, you know,
good people dying young
or having adversity.
So much so that between
Warner and Stowe and others,
scholars used to refer
to this the decade
in which this novel
was published
as the feminine '50s I told you
at the beginning of the course
about a book that help
to set the kinda called
American renaissance.
You could see the
feminine '50s as kind
of the counterpart for that.
But the feminine '50s is only
meant to acknowledge, you know,
that's a purely literally
historical interest.
These women you should
know if you wanna know
about the literary culture
that produce the great writing
of Hawthorne and Melville
and everybody else.
There was this other writing.
It was done by women.
They were outselling everybody
else and in some sense
that was another thing
that the men have
to fight up again, right.
So one of the things we
would say about all this is
that even Stowe accepts that
there is this kind of division.
Even Stowe would suggest,
yes, what people like Susan
and Warner and I are doing
is not literary per se.
It isn't about style
or excellence.
We leave that to the men.
We're doing something else.
And therefore this is again
the reason to think of this
as the feminine '50s 'cause
historians later on have talked
about writers like Stowe
and Warner basically buying
into something that was--
that became known as the cult
of domesticity, right
or sometimes the cult
of true womanhood.
That women were supposed to do
was take care of domestic life
that there wasn't kind
of separation of spheres
and that meant for women
what they were suppose
to do was write sentimental
fiction.
That was their genre.
And I wanna suggest to you
that Stowe buys in to this.
Now, that sounds bad.
But I want you to understand
things from Stowe's perspective.
The female sphere is actually
an extremely important
cultural sphere.
It is, you might say, the
sphere were Christian values get
inculcated and propagated.
It's this sphere of the home,
of the raising of children,
of education, a real religion.
This sphere you might say that
it's most naturally Christian.
And there's one thing
that you would say
about that I wanna make clear is
that Stowe understands the
ideal Christian to be the kind
of Christian who is willing to
turn the other cheek, right?
The ideal Christian is someone
who is meek and submissive
and docile and willing
to be educated,
who will resist violence,
the poor, the outcast, right?
Women are naturally
like this, right?
We all know that.
Yeah? Well, it's probably not
true but they believed it.
I mean, she probably
believed it, too.
Women are naturally good
Christians because they have--
she-- okay, so just
to say, the separation
of spheres maybe
culturally constructive
but Stowe's novel seems
to believe in certain kind
of essential characteristics.
Women are naturally this way.
They are naturally less
aggressive than men.
So it's good that men are in
politics and women are not,
except when the men
get too carried away.
There's another group
or two other groups even
that have this qualities that
are submissive, and meek,
and educable, naturally
good Christians.
They are Blacks and children.
And one of the things that
the novel does, you might say,
is to make this connection.
In fact to have the novel in
some sense crucially revolved
around this connection.
Well, why won't you
get that across?
So this is an important
point that I want to make
and I will start again next
time by stressing it is
that the novel buys into what we
would call today essentialism.
So some people that don't like
it say, it's a racist novel.
Because you will find
descriptions of it
in which African-Americans
are characterized
as if they have certain
natural qualities
like good singing voices
or a meekness that leads
to natural Christianity, right.
I would suggest that it is not
racist but it is essentialist.
It does believe that
certain kinds
of people have certain
kinds of characteristics
or at least a tendency
towards them
because of factors
like gender and race.
Now, as you go through--
so, okay, that's one
thing to bear in mind.
It buys into that.
And I will say it's
not racist simply
because it doesn't
mean therefore.
It doesn't believe
that African-American
should be enslaved or kept
out on the basis of the cause.
No! In fact, for a certain--
in a certainly you would say
African-Americans become the
paragons in the novel.
They become the best
Christians in the novel.
White men like Senator
Bird should learn
from African-Americans and
from women and children
to be better Christians because
if everybody were a better
Christian, we wouldn't
have slavery
and we wouldn't have most
of the problems that we face
in the United States in the
middle of the 19th century.
So there's a certain way
in which I would say to you
that essentialism is not
incidental to this novel.
We shouldn't try to
apologize for it.
It's essential to what
the novel is doing it.
I suggest next time that
comes with certain cause.
I've already suggested
it to you.
I mean, a certain point
to say that, you know,
African-Americans are
natural Christian, yey!
Because they're docile
and meek, boo!
I mean it becomes not
useful in the letter part
of the 19th century as you try
to reconstructed viable
African-American culture, right?
>> So there cost
to this strategy.
We'll talk a little bit
more about them next time.
But I want you to see that
they are absolutely central
to the meaning of what
it is that she's doing.
Let's go back to chapter 9.
This is page-- Let's go back
to chapter-- to 141, right?
And look at the title here.
In Which It Appears That a
Senator Is But a Man, right.
This is the kind of
title you would see
in the novel by Dickinson.
Dickinson is one of
her inspirations.
But what does that title
mean when you it got you.
What did you think?
In Which It Appears That
a Senator Is But a Man.
I mean, you're gonna you put
that in newspaper today I
know what we think of that.
We think about sexual
harassment, right?
Men, huh. But look at the
category that it sets up.
There are two categories
of identity here.
One of them is senator
and one of them is men.
And you could say,
well, alright one
of the things you would say
is that the high category
of a senator, you
know, somehow demeans
by the idea of becoming a man.
Oh, Senator X proved
himself to be just a man.
He has do weaknesses.
He abused that page, you know.
She shouldn't have
save that dress all
that kind of stuff, right?
But in fact, it doesn't
work that way.
What we expect in other words
to be the higher category turns
out to be in some sense
the lower category.
It is better for the
senator to be a man.
In other words, to
be a human being,
to not be a senator
who's bound by kind
of legalistic distinctions
but somebody who is a person,
a man, someone who feels.
And that's the point
of this chapter.
This is a crucial
chapter in the novel
to understand what he's doing.
Because not only to dramatize
what I show you this situation
of the separation of spheres
and the role that women
and mothers can play
in, you know,
making sure that the country
doesn't go radically off course.
It is also in some sense
about the literally problem
that Stowe faces
in creating this.
Take a look in some of the ways
in which she understands herself
to have a kind of
complicated audience.
Take a look at page 155 here.
If you're using a different
edition, I don't know it's
about 12 pages in probably.
I'm gonna look at the paragraph
that begins what
a situation now.
Okay, so senator Bird, right,
has thought about the Fugitive
Slave Law that's been passed
by Ohio to help Kentucky
out in legalistic terms.
And if you thought about what
a fugitive slave would look
like he thought about it
as a caricature perhaps
from the newspapers.
You know, somebody already
went to that kind of stake
in this act, been running
away and little afford of luck
and looking low down and
dangerous, never thought
that it was gonna be
someone like Eliza
and her child at the back door.
Add that to the fact
that this family
and again remember
the story I told you
about Stowe has recently
lost a young child.
So, middle of 155.
What a situation, now,
for a patriotic senator,
that had been all the
week before spurring
up the legislature
of his native state
to pass more stringent
resolutions
against escaping fugitives,
their harborers and abettors.
Our good senator in his native
state had not been exceeded
by any of his brethren
at Washington,
in the sort of eloquence
for which has known
for them immortal renown, right.
So he's talking about-- remember
I told you that the debates
over Fugitive Slave Law and
the [inaudible] produced a lot
of speeches that became very
well known, [inaudible].
She refrained to that
debate, those senate debates.
How sublimely he had sat with
his hands in his pockets,
and scouted all sentimental
weakness of those
who would put the welfare
of a few miserable fugitives
before great state interests,
right.
So you can see that this course
of sentimentality is exactly
the same as General Shoup,
sentimentally it's
beneath noticed.
How dare you indulge
in sentiment
when there are great
state interests at stake?
He was as bold as
a lion about it,
and "mightily convinced"
not only himself,
but everybody that heard him.
But then his idea of a fugitive
was only an idea of the letters
that spell the word,
or at the most,
the image of a little newspaper
picture of a man with a stick
and bundle with "Ran away from
the subscriber" under it, right.
So I want you to
understand this.
He's a legalistic understanding.
He has an abstract understanding
of the fugitive slave.
A fugitive slave is not part
of his own personal experience.
And you know what?
Stowe understands that
for most of her readers,
a fugitive slave is not part
of their actual experience.
They've never met one.
They probably won't
meet one, right,
if they are northern readers.
And here is the kicker.
The magic of the real
presence of distress,
the imploring human eye, the
frail, trembling human hand,
the despairing appeal
of helpless agony,
these he had never tried.
He had never thought
that a fugitive might
be a hapless mother,
a defenseless child,
like that one
which was now wearing his lost
boy's little well-known cap.
And I want you to
see that the magic
of the real presence
of distress.
When it's there in front
of you, when it's real,
when it's palpable and you
can touch them and hold them,
all these abstractions, great
state interests must give way.
And that is what Stow is
trying to do in this novel.
She is trying to recreate
that situation in words
that the senator
experiences there when he sees
that little boy dresses
of his dead son's clothes.
The magic of the real
present of distress.
That's what I mean for you to
understand it as realism, right.
So it's full of sentimentality.
It's full of melodrama
but it's meant to provoke
that real response
of real distress.
So it usually palpably
feel distress
when you read about this.
That's what she is trying--
That's what she could
see of realism, right.
So it's an activist
form of sentimentality.
It's meant to provoke or I mean
activism mainly is politically
activist but it's meant
to provoke a response
from the reader, a gut reaction.
And then we'll get to that,
the head stuff later on.
And you might say that even in
that paragraph you see that.
This is like referring
to a gut reaction
and now we're gonna think a
little bit more abstractly.
And again, you can see here
the establishment of men
as the higher category
than senator.
To say a senator is but
a man is not destructive
but ameliorative you might say.
And so, as our poor senator
was not stone or steel,
as he was a man, and a downright
noble-hearted one, too, he was,
as everybody must see, in a
sad case for his patriotism.
And now she's gonna address
herself even more widely.
And you need not exult
over him, good brother
of the Southern States; for we
have some inklings that many
of you, under similar
circumstances would not do
much better.
Now I'm not gonna
delay with this.
But I want you to think
about the kind of inversions
that are in placed here.
'Cause remember I told
you about the famous one,
Huckleberry Finn, does
the right thing, gets--
tries to save his slave
friend and considers
that he's gonna be
damned for it.
We know him to be assuring his
place in heaven by doing that.
But the slave system has
created this kind of inversion.
So look at the inversion
here now.
She's feeling sorry for the
senator, for the southern states
because she knows that if they
were in Senator Bird's position,
they would betray
their principles
and they do no better than he.
They'd save this person, right?
So I want you to understand
how she's kinda of using--
how she's trying to use this
language and this imagery
and this situation that comes
out of the feminine
domestic Christian sphere
over against the
male political sphere
with its legalism
and its abstraction.
And she is trying to suggest
that the South has typically
allied itself to that sphere.
But it wouldn't do any
better in the presence
of the real magic of distress.
We have reason to know, in
Kentucky, as in Mississippi,
are noble and generous
hearts, to whom never was tale
of suffering told in vain.
Ah, good brother is it fair for
you to expect of us services
which your own brave, honorable
heart would not allow you
to render, were you
in our place?
What she's talking about?
[ Inaudible Remark ]
>> Yeah, exactly.
Thank you.
She's talking about
the Fugitive Slave Law,
now the National
Fugitive Slave Law.
You're expecting
us to return slaves
when we know you wouldn't
be able to do it either?
So that's-- I mean, to me that
is very complicated writing.
And I think there's a
lot of stuff going on.
There's the irony of a
narrative voice, the deployment
of these different
forms, the allusion
to the cultural situation.
I think anybody that
think that Stowe is kind
of simplistic writing is missing
a lot of what's going on here.
But it's not the same kind of
complicated, you might say,
as it is in Hawthorne
or Melville's.
It's a part of what
we are trying
to do is learn how to read it.
Stowe sentimentality comes from
a couple of her inspirations.
[Inaudible] sentimental journey,
above all Charles Dickens
who gave her a conception
of the lowly
and that's what its
called, life--
the subtitle, life
among the lowly, right.
And again it's among the lowly
that you would find the
expression of Christian values.
There's a sense in
which what she wants
to do is return Christianity
to its roots among the
disenfranchised, the cast out.
And so I think-- what I wanna
leave you with for today is
to understand what
Stowe is trying to do.
>> What she thinks
sentimentality is all about.
It's something that becomes
an [inaudible] important word
in this novel and one that
you should bear in mind
when you're thinking about it.
That word is influence.
Women shouldn't be part of the
male domestic sphere of politics
but they should influence it.
The male sphere would
probably be better off
if it has certain kinds of--
if it were tempered by certain
of the aspects of the feminist,
particularly Christianity.
Women, she doesn't proposing
that women should get up there
and actually run for senate.
She proposes that every woman
has a duty like Mrs. Bird
to make sure the Senator
Bird is a man rather
than simply a senator.
So women are gonna
work through influence.
Sentimentality is gonna
work through influence, too.
It's gonna influence
it's readers in this way.
So that if what you're
looking for by the end
of the novel is some
kind of program.
You could already
see at the beginning,
you're going to be disappointed.
This is a novel that is
promoting a model of influence.
Now, when you get to the last
section of the book which draws
on a genre that we've
seen before, right,
so something happens
to sentimentality.
It's almost like, this novel
is smart enough to know
that there are reasons,
there are situations
in which sentimentality
and influence alone
will not do the job.
There may be people who are
so far gone into the logic
of slavery and the evil
that slavery produces
that they can't be saved.
So I want you in
the last section
of the novel withdraw
on gothic fiction.
Decide for yourself whether
you think its hoax gothic
or real gothic.
Look at what happens to
influence in that section.
Look for the word.
Okay, one last thing.
This novel for today, this novel
is called Uncle Tom's Cabin.
So again, it's a
fiction that belongs
on a tradition of
domestic fiction.
So you ought to take
all of the houses
and domestic situations
seriously
as alternatives of one another.
We start in a household.
We go to another
household, the Bird's.
We find another household,
the Quaker Settlement.
We find another household,
the St. Clare's.
And there are a couple
of others beyond that.
What I want you to understand
is that a way to think
of the structure of this
household as a series
of variations on that initial
household, right, from which Tom
and Eliza-- from which Tom is
sold and from which Eliza runs.
And it by the way it
comes back in at the end.
So Uncle Tom's Cabin is
at the very beginning.
There's a way in which
it serves as a kind
of alternative right there to
the main house and I want you
to think of all of these
domestic situations.
There are variations.
So you will see that if the
feminine sphere has a set
of values associated with it and
the masculine sphere has a set
of values associated with,
in the St. Clare household
especially they will become
confused in interesting ways.
In other words, just
being a woman,
just having those double X
chromosomes is not enough
to be an exemplar of
the feminine sphere.
Alright, we'll leave it there.
Enjoy the rest of the novel.
Try to open yourself
to the experience
of maybe shedding a tear or two.
