Degree Year
1984
Document Type
Thesis - Open Access
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
English
Advisor(s)
Sandra Zagarell
Keywords
Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Anti-slavery
Abstract
Harriet Beecher Stowe has engendered a good deal of critical contradiction, both in her own time and since. Most of more extreme controversy centers on her popular and influential anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin. Although the New England novels are generally considered to have some merit as examples of "local color" fiction, Stowe earned her place in the canon of American literature primarily on the basis her authorship of UTC. But the place is an uneasy one. UTC's popularity and impact make it too big an event in American literary history for it, or its author, to be disregarded, but disputes about its intellectual, moral, and artistic legitimacy are rife. It has been variously described by critics as disastrous and miraculous, awkward and artful, dishonest and sincere, keenly intelligent and irrationally emotionalistic, racist and anti-racist, feminist and all-too-oppressively feminine.
But whatever else may be said about UTe, few would dispute that Stowe wrote it openly, self-consciously, and unapologetical in a woman's voice, which, for a novel addressing social and political issues of national importance, was at the time something unusual (and controversial) in itself. It is perhaps seems less unusual today, but I would suggest that in some respects the controvery has remained constistent, and that much of the critical argument about UTe may be attributed to the problems of interpreting a woman's voice fairly in a man's world.
Repository Citation
Case, Alison A., "Social Ethics in the Novels of Harriet Beecher Stowe" (1984). Honors Papers. 627.
https://digitalcommons.oberlin.edu/honors/627
