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The Explicator
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Stowe's UNCLE TOM'S CABIN

a
Ed Piacentino
a
High Point University
Published online: 30 Mar 2010.

To cite this article: Ed Piacentino (2000) Stowe's UNCLE TOM'S CABIN, The Explicator,
58:3, 135-138, DOI: 10.1080/00144940009595962

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 WORKS CITED
Biedermann, Hans. Dictionury of Symbolism: Cultural Icons und the Meunings Behind Them.
Trans. James Hulbert. New York: Facts on File, 1992.
Coleridge. Samuel Taylor. Christubel. Suniuel Tuylor Coleridge: Selected Poetry and Prose. New
York: Penguin, 1957.
Cooper, J. C. An lllusrruted Encyclopuediu of Truditionul Synibvls. London: Thames, 1995.
Hendrickson, Robert. ladybugs, 7iger Lilies and Wallflowers. New York: Simon, 1993.
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Stowe’s UNCLE TOM’S CABIN

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s best seller Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) has been
heralded as the most controversial and most influential antislavery novel writ-
ten in antebellum America. According to Josephine Donovan, Stowe’s princi-
pal intent in the book “was to persuade her audience that slavery was intoler-
able” (30). And the critical consensus generally supports this contention.
In a recent reassessment of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Richard Yarborough has
noted that “although Stowe unquestionably sympathized with the slaves, her
commitment to challenging the claim of black inferiority was frequently
undermined by her own endorsement of racial stereotypes” (47). Because
these stereotyped notions not only appear in Uncle Tom’s Cabin but show up
more frequently than perhaps Stowe had intended, it would seem that Stowe’s
attitude toward chattel slavery, or rather how she pandered to her readers’ con-
flicting attitudes toward slavery, was ambivalent.
The use of racial stereotypes adds credibility to the long-standing notion
that Stowe consciously made concessions to the South in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
As Forrest Wilson has pointed out, “the kindest, most philanthropic, and most
upright characters were, with some minor exceptions, all Southerners and
slave-holders’’(276).’ Among white Southerners and slave owners featured in
the novel, Mrs. Shelby and Augustine St. Clare-the former the wife of Tom’s
first owner, and the latter Tom’s second master-are for the most part
admirable characters. And the novel’s most despicable character, Simon
Legree, is a New Englander from Vermont. Stowe herself had always thought
that her novel depicted the favorable side of slavery, and the fact that she did
so should have appeased the South. The typical Southern reaction, however,
did not reflect such an awareness.2 Indeed, in the eyes of most contemporary
Southerners (even those who had never read Uncle Tom’s Cabin) Stowe’s
novel was an abomination, utterly false and therefore a full-fledged misrepre-
sentation of the institution of slavery (Johnston 263).
Whereas, in one respect, Southern criticism regarding the veracity of Uncle
Tom’s Cabin was justified, most contemporary Southern readers of the novel

135
 failed to give Stowe the credit she obviously sought. Still, in both overt and
subtle ways, Stowe had consciously attempted to appease the South. One such
concession in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which has been overlooked by previous
critics, is found in chapter 19 when Augustine St. Clare recounts to his wife
Mane an incident in the past when he conquered an unsubmissive slave with
kindness. He does this in response to Marie’s complaint about a lazy slave her
father had once owned who did not want to work.
A sensitive, kind, and effeminate man, St. Clare purchases from his broth-
er Alfred an unruly slave named Scipio. The slave had tried to run away into
the swamp because he had been struck by one of Alfred’s cruel overseers, then
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was hunted like an animal, and shot by his pursuers. Proving to be basically
intractable, Scipio is a slave who, in St. Clare’s words, “‘all the overseers and
masters had tried their hands in vain”’ (253). Scipio had run away, St. Clare
reports, because he “‘appeared to have the rude instinct of freedom in him”’
(254). Yet under the compassionate attention and care of St. Clare, his new
master, Scipio becomes ‘“tamed as submissive and tractable as heart could
desire”’ (254). Once St. Clare has nursed the wounded Scipio back to health,
he draws up manumission papers and offers the slave his freedom, which Sci-
pi0 in turn rejects. Apparently self-conscious about Scipio’s rejection of free-
dom, St. Clare reports: The “‘foolish fellow tore the paper in two, and
absolutely refused to leave me. I never had a braver, better fellow, trusty and
true as steel”’ (254-55). In rejecting St. Clare’s offer, Scipio seems to have
come to regard slavery as benevolent and being a slave under a caring and
paternalistic master preferable to the uncertainties connected with freedom.
Subsequently, Scipio, whom St. Clare has treated humanely and compassion-
ately, becomes a Christian who is “‘as gentle as a child”’ (255). Moreover, St.
Clare recognizes Scipio’s competence, assigning to him the responsibility of
overseeing St. Clare’s lake property, and Scipio “‘did it capitally”’ (255). In
Stowe’s character portrayal of Augustine St. Clare as a caring and compas-
sionate master and of Scipio as a devoted and contented slave, her portraiture
actually conforms closely to the familiar stereotype. used to portray other
African American slaves and their relationships with their masters that had
previously been featured in the antebellum Southern novels such as John
Pendleton Kennedy’s Swallow Burn ( 1832) and William Gilmore Simms’s
The Yemassee ( 1835).
Yet in making this concession to her Southern readers, Stowe created a
predicament for herself. Even though she presents Scipio’s character indirect-
ly (St. Clare’s fond memories of him), Stowe seems to allow the considera-
tions of her audience and the matter of political and social expediency to take
precedence over honest and consistent portrayal of Scipio’s humanity. Even
so, Stowe surely must have realized that in acknowledging Scipio’s trustwor-
thiness and his capability in managing St. Clare’s property responsibly, she

136
 was undermining the racial stereotype. Nor does it seem that Stowe’s con-
temporary readers likely perceived St. Clare’s ineffectuality to accomplish
what he sets out to d o - t o free his slave-as a reflection of his own moral
paralysis, a deliberate counterpoint that serves to enhance Scipio’s personal
effectiveness. And not many of her readers, especially her Southern readers,
perceived that Stowe may have created in St. Clare’s account about Scipio the
disturbing reality that even under the most benevolent of circumstances, slav-
ery is debilitating to the slave as well as to the master. The propaganda leveled
against slavery in the Scipio segment is at best subtle, if it exsits at all. Rather,
in focusing on the slave’s individualized human traits, Stowe seems to have
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placed a higher premium on Scipio’s character portraiture, giving greater

emphasis to her integrity as a literary artist than to the narrowly dogmatic
sociopolitical agenda expected of a novelist with an indisputable abolitionist
bias. In having St. Clare accentuate Scipio’s loyalty and selfless devotion, a
dedication that the slave carries out to the fullest extent during a cholera epi-
demic by endangering his own health and consequently losing his life by car-
ing for the ailing master, Stowe raises in the reader’s mind (and perhaps her
own as well) the question of why a man of Scipio’s capability should have to
remain a slave. No doubt, had Scipio lived, St. Clare would have felt obligat-
ed to insist that the slave to whom he had offered liberty once before, only to
have it rejected, accept his deserved freedom this time.
In retrospect, it seems clear that Stowe had written herself into a quandary,
one she had to find a way to resolve, especially if she intended to pacify her
Southern readers. In continuing to use St. Clare as a mouthpiece, Stowe pre-
vents the inevitable from occurring: She writes Scipio out of the plot, provid-
ing an outlet so that St. Clare does not have to extend freedom to his slave for
a second time. It appears that Stowe had found yet another way to make peace
with her proslavery readers, many of whom were Southerners, by awkwardly
alleviating what now seems a bothersome contradiction and dilemma. But as
a consequence Stowe, probably quite unintentionally, creates an ambivalent
perspective about slavery. Stowe has St. Clare conclude his story about Scipio
by declaring that “‘I never felt anybody’s loss more’” ( 2 5 3 , a sentiment that
enabled Stowe to wrench Scipio back to stereotypical status, thereby capitu-
lating to Southern expectations regarding race. She anticipated her contempo-
rary Southern reader’s reaction that Scipio should not be regarded as a human
being and transformed him into an object of sentimental pathos. And in con-
verting Scipio from a character of viable human potential into what amounts
to one who is pathetic and inconsequential, Stowe confirms what seems to
have been her intention all along-to proffer yet another conciliatory gesture
to the Southern readers of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

-ED PIACENTINO, High Poinr University

137
 NOTES
I.A similar viewpoint was expressed by Edmund Wilson, who observed that Stowe, “if any-
thing leans over backwards in hying to make it plain that the New Englanders are as much to
blame as the South and to exhibit Southerners in a favorable light” (6-7).
2. For instance, Louis S. McCord, who reviewed Uncle Torn’s Cabin in the Southern Quarter-
ly Review, voiced the familiar Southern reaction, designating the novel “‘the loathsome rakings
of a foul fancy”’ (qtd. in Hedrick 232).

WORKS CITED
Donovan, Josephine. Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Evil, Afliction. and Redemptive Love. Boston: ’lbayne,
1991.
Hedrick. Joan D. Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life. New York: Oxford UP, 1994.
Downloaded by [University of Birmingham] at 07:52 12 November 2014

Johnston, Johanna. Runaway to Heaven: The Story of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Garden City: Dou-
bleday, 1%3.
Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. 1852. New York: New American Library, 1966.
Wilson, Edmund. Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War. New York:
Oxford UP, 1%2.
Wilson, Forrest. Crusader in Crinoline: The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Philadelphia: Lip-
pincott, 1941.
Yarborough. Richard. “Strategies of Black Characterization in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Early
Afro-American Novel:’ New Essays on Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Ed. Eric J. Sundquist. New York:
Cambridge UP, 1986.45-84.

Thoreau’s WALDEN
Biblical allusion in Walden (1854) has generated considerable critical notice
over the past three decades, encompassing examination of numerous individ-
ual passages along with general analysis of Thoreau’s rhetorical strategies (see,
for instance, Ensor, Lang, Cook, and Jacobs). Thoreau’s borrowings from a text
regarded by his audience as a repository of spiritual truth enable him to launch
ironic attacks on his neighbors’ “mistake[s]” in living, as well as to invoke indi-
rect authority for his own, far from conventional, revelations (5). Notwith-
standing the existing body of critical comment, one of the most prominent bib-
lical allusions-what readers have consistently identified as a key moment in
the book-has received less critical attention than its centrality warrants.
The famous line describing the spring thawing of Walden Pond, “Walden
was dead and is alive again” (31 1 l), derives almost word for word from the
story of the prodigal son in Luke 15.1 1-32. The phrase suits Thoreau’s imme-
diate purposes ideally, capturing the mixture of ecstasy, reverence, wonder,
and triumph with which he greets the rebirth of nature. Despite the obvious
rightness of tone and sentiment in the appropriated language, however, the
scriptural context evokes associations that might seem irrelevant, even anti-
thetical, to Thoreau’s purposes. He is echoing a father’s celebration of his

138