5 - A Sentimental Journey: Escape from Bondage in Uncle Tom's Cabin

Summary

In representing Babo but not presenting his point of view, Melville's text reinforces Babo's existence as “other”, denying Melville's contemporary white audience direct sympathy with him. In this respect “Benito Cereno” is in direct contrast to the period's most influential work of fiction dealing with slavery – Uncle Tom's Cabin. Harriet Beecher Stowe's work is designed to conflate the interests of white readers and black slaves. In her preface she writes, “The object of these sketches is to awaken sympathy and feeling for the African race, as they exist among us; to show their wrongs and sorrows, under a system so necessarily cruel and unjust as to defeat and do away the good effects of all that can be attempted for them, by their friends, under it”.

To awaken that sympathy, Stowe imagined a black character not as other, but self-consciously created in the image of the white man's spiritual leader and most celebrated victim – Christ. Because Uncle Tom's nobility lies in his strength as a victim, he has been subject to criticism from some twentieth-century blacks, who identify his passivity as too close to a white wish-fulfillment of how blacks should respond to their subservient position. Unlike Babo, Tom seems to pose no threat to the order that exploits him.