2 - Family values and racial essentialism in Uncle Tom's Cabin

Summary

When Harriet Beecher Stowe introduces her readers to Uncle Tom's cabin, she remarks that the “wall over the fireplace was adorned with some very brilliant Scriptural prints and a portrait of General Washington.” In their privileged position over the hearth, these domestic adornments, one sacred, and the other secular, prefigure the Christian virtue and the desire for personal liberty that Tom's life, and by extension his home, will come to embody. As George Shelby tells the slaves he manumits at the novel's conclusion, “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 as honest and faithful and Christian as he was” (437). Of course, it was not unusual to find either Scriptural prints or a portrait of Washington in a typical nineteenth-century American home. One might assume, therefore, that Stowe places these generic household icons in the cabin of a slave in order to demonstrate that the American slave and the American citizen are essentially similar. However, readers learn that there is a striking difference between the slave and the citizen. Tom's portrait of Washington is “drawn and colored in a manner which would certainly have astonished that hero” (20). Tom's Washington is Black.

The strange form of this presidential portrait is of more than passing significance. It suggests more than the fact that Tom yearns for, yet is denied the personal liberty that the figure of Washington represents.