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Uncle Tom's Cabin (Bantam Classics)
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Uncle Tom's Cabin (Bantam Classics) Customer Reviews
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♥♥♥♥♥
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A towering, very important American classic
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For whatever reasons, I'm one of those who, over the years, never gave "Uncle Tom's Cabin" much thought. I'm afraid I dismissed the book based on the derogatory cliche of describing a complacent black man as an Uncle Tom. What a pleasure to find how wrong I was.
Although the style of narration, the punctuation style of the day and the evolution of contractions, compound words and other bits of syntax show this book to be from the mid 1800s, "Uncle Tom's Cabin" is a modern novel. It is largely without the stifling level of detail offered in other books of the time, and it pushes the concept of omniscient narrator (perhaps along the lines of Vonnegut in "Breakfast of Champions") to a level that would likely be absurd in another story and purpose.
And Harriet Beecher Stowe did have a purpose - a daring, countervailing, completely forward-thinking challenge to the complacency of the day. The action of the story concludes in the second-to-last chapter. In the last chapter, called simply "Concluding Remarks," Stowe, referring to herself in third person, explains how she came to write the book, and in so doing pulls the reader beyond the realm of fiction in order to cap off her sermon. And a 500-page sermon is exactly what "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was and is.
To quote Stowe from the last chapter, "For many years of her life, the author avoided all reading upon or allusion to the subject of slavery, considering it as too painful to be inquired into, and one which advancing light and civilization would certainly live down. But, since the legislative act of 1850, when she heard, with perfect surprise and consternation, Christian and humane people actually recommending the remanding escaped fugitives into slavery, as a duty binding on good citizens,- when she heard, on all hands, from kind compassionate and estimable people, in the free states of the North, deliberation and discussions as to what Christian duty could be on his head,- she could only think, These men and Christians cannot know what slavery is; if they did, such a question could never be open for discussion. And from this arose a desire to exhibit it in a LIVING DRAMATIC REALITY [emphasis the author's]. She has endeavored to show it fairly, in the best and worst phases. In its BEST [emphasis the author's] aspect, she has, perhaps, been successful; but, oh! Who shall say what yet remains untold in that valley and shadow of death, that lies the other side?"
Within the narrative arts can be found a gray area between complete fiction and straightforwrad documenting. Within this area itself is a fine line of storytelling that sheds the fluff factor of fiction and the yawn factor of documentation. A story told along this line is not only compelling but offers to the receiver of the story a glimpse of what a life in the world depicted by the story must have been like. Or at the very least might have been like. This glimpse, whatever else it is, will be visceral, allowing the reader an actual emotional link. Finding this line is hard, staying on it harder and pulling off a finished work while remaining true to the line harder still. This is what Stowe did, a century before such a point of view emerged again in Americam media.
As such, Stowe explains that many of the characters are based on real people - yes, there really was a man as horrible as Simon Legree - and that most of the events in the book were based on true events known to her personally or through trusted reporting. This novelizing of reality was so compelling the book would be translated into twenty-two languages.
It would be relatively easy to take sentences and paragraphs out of context and reach the conclusion that Stowe decried slavery while holding the black race paternalistically. It's very possible to find any number of passages and label them as apologetic and paternalistic. There is, in fact, paternalism throughout the story, but this is a reflection of America ten years before the Civil War; and by the end of Stowe's "Concluding Remarks" this paternalism is gone.
I would describe the main apologist, St. Clare, who is keenly aware of the state of his own culture, as more of a rationalist. By making this character so, Stowe is able to open our eyes, as she opened many eyes of the day, to the subtler forms of defacto slavry - not at all to excuse slavery in general as some kind of natural order, but to bear witness to those toiling in other forms of captured work.
In 1851 the scullery maid of an English country home was not a slave, of course. Her employment was voluntary, after all, and at the end of a year she would have a few schillings to her name. But economically, perhaps even geographically, her freedom was largely unavailable to her, and so while not a slave under the law, the other side of her employment was the delivery of herself to twelve- or fifteen-hour days of scrubbing pots and pans. The delivery of herself to, at the end of any of those days, climbing three or four flights of a rear stairs to a garret; to a social life limited to the kitchen staff, which itself was a hierarchy that lorded over her; to little hope of marriage, if that's what she wanted, or to any sort of a life she might call her own. Why? To keep from starving to death.
And think about this today. Are you watching a 27" color TV with full remote that cost $199? Do you honestly think that set could have been made, boxed, shipped to a port in Asia, shipped by boat to the US, shipped by train and truck to your local StuffMart and sold to you profitably for one or two day's wages while every worker along the way was treated fairly? Do you care?
For the vast majority of those reading this review slavery is an abstracted and distant topic. It is a practice from a long ago past that might be given two meetings in a high school American History class, a cursory survey from which students might understand the concept of the economics of buying, selling and breeding human beings, from which they might be encouraged to imagine the suffering implicit to such practices.
Stowe's great achievment in writing "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was to belie the nuts and bolts, the mere logistics and schematics of slavery. She established for the reader the point of view of the slave, of a human life set against the legally sanctioned bureaucracy of slavery. She successfully depicted a person - an individual, a human being - sold as a product, warehoused as a product, transported as a product, and then set to use as an organic machine that was discarded and replaced when it broke. More to the point, she allows us glimpses into the inner lives, thoughts and prayers of those sold, warehoused, transported and used up while their ties to family and place, while their smallest hopes, are given credence only as an afterthought that may never coalesce. Only if, after having purchased a brother or a mother, there should be enough money remaining to buy the sister or the child. Only if it should be convenient and expedient for the planter to do so, only if it should strike that planter's fancy one particular afternoon but
not another.
This book is as meaningful today, in new ways, as it was in 1851, and that is wholly remarkable. |
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