11 - Stowe and the literature of social change

Summary

No other American author has ever attained the international celebrity status to which the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin catapulted Harriet Beecher Stowe. A leading German literary journal of the day ranked the novel above “the whole modern romance literature of Germany, England, and France,” asserting that Stowe eclipsed such luminaries as George Sand, Charles Dickens, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton in “eloquence,” “truth to nature, ” intellectual scope, and “artistic faultlessness.” “[O]ur English fiction writers had better shut up altogether and have done with it,” agreed the prominent British reformer Harriet Martineau, who claimed Stowe had whetted a public taste for “didactic” novels that no one else could satisfy. Sales of Uncle Tom's Cabin abroad the first year - a million and a half copies in England alone - dwarfed the already astounding record of 300,000 set in the United States. Translations in twenty European languages - among them not only French, German, Spanish, and Russian, but Armenian, Finnish, Hungarian, Illyrian, and Serbian - appeared almost overnight, and more proliferated across the globe as far away as China and Japan. Stowe's international audiences also “translated” her message, reapplying her indictment of American slavery to the wrongs their own peoples endured. For example, Chinese theater-goers in 1917, seething with resentment against discrimination in the United States and imperialist domination at home, wildly applauded the play version of Uncle Tom's Cabin “because they 'knew by bitter experiences the sufferings and humiliations of an oppressed race.'” Similarly capitalizing on the versatility of Stowe's masterpiece, a Soviet stage adaptation of the 1930s eliminated the Christian preaching and recast little Eva as “something of an American forerunner to a vigorous present-day Komsomol (Young Communist) championing the cause of the downtrodden proletarian Negro.”