4 - Beyond Uncle Tom’s Cabin: The Reception of Stowe’s Later Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry

Summary

For most readers, Stowe is familiar only as the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and indeed the entire subgenre of antislavery fiction can be reduced for many people to this one highly visible work. There is more to Stowe than Uncle Tom’s Cabin, however, and much more to antislavery fiction than just Stowe. The critical response to Stowe has at times failed to acknowledge this fact, but at other times, Stowe’s later novels, works of nonfiction, and even poems have been analyzed with considerable insight, both for the light that they shed on Uncle Tom’s Cabin and for their own sake.

What was required for Uncle Tom’s Cabin again be read as a major work of fiction was the reestablishment of a framework in which explicitly political fiction could be valued, in which the boundary between literary art and propaganda could seem less absolute than it did for high modernist writers and critics, and in which women’s writing would not be dismissed on the basis of the gender of its author. All of this held true for Stowe’s later novels as well, but there were still further requirements for their widespread rediscovery. Most notably, none of the other novels were able to boast the same pedigree as major cultural events that Uncle Tom’s Cabin had, meaning that they required a stronger case to be made for their artistic value, and for a case to be made for their cultural value that did not rely on hyperbolic assertions that they had changed the nation, started a war, or ended chattel slavery in the United States. Thus, for a long time the attention that Stowe’s later novels garnered was rather modest, and largely served as a backdrop for conversations about the merits or demerits of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Over the past thirty years, however, and with some honorable precursors, critics have begun to discover considerable literary value in Stowe’s second antislavery novel, Dred, and her New England novels, The Minister’s Wooing (1859), Oldtown Folks (1869), The Pearl of Orr’s Island (1862), and Poganuc People (1878). Still more recently, Stowe’s New York society novels, My Wife and I (1869), Pink and White Tyranny (1871), and We and Our Neighbors (1873), have come to be seen as predecessors to the rich novels of urban society by figures like Edith Wharton and Henry James.