SOURCE: Gwin, Minrose C. “‘A Lie More Palatable Than the Truth’: Fictional Sisterhood in a Fictional South.” In Black and White Women of the Old South: The Peculiar Sisterhood in American Literature, pp. 19-43. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1985.

[In the following essay, Gwin suggests thematic affinities between Harriet Beecher Stowe's abolitionist novel Uncle Tom's Cabin and Mary H. Eastman's pro-slavery response Aunt Phillis's Cabin, especially in terms of the feminist subtext in both novels—Southern women as a whole standing against the dominant male power structure.]

… literature and sociology are not one and the same; it is impossible to discuss them as if they were.

James Baldwin, “Everybody's Protest Novel”

Because writers of fiction and poetry tend to grope for meanings rather than superimpose them—Yeats called this process the “public dream”—literary criticism can bring to the surface what otherwise might lie buried in the culture's subconscious.

Seymour L. Gross, Images of the Negro in American Literature

It is in the very fabric of the polemic novel to impose a rigid frame upon reality. In such fiction rarely is there obvious groping for new meanings and new ways of viewing the world. The method is deductive rather than inductive; the world and its problems are presented a priori. Such novels become primarily means to specific ends, not movements toward the unknown, the new, the unreckoned. No one can accuse America's nineteenth-century abolitionist and proslavery fiction of attempting many artistic or epistemological leaps into the void, certainly not the two novels most widely read on both sides of the slavery controversy. Moral outrage rather than artistic impulse set Harriet Beecher Stowe's pen in motion on Uncle Tom's Cabin, first published in the abolitionist National Era in 1851 and later selling millions of copies in dozens of countries after its publication in book form in 1852. In Aunt Phillis's Cabin, also published in 1852, Mary H. Eastman produced a proslavery response which—it is generally agreed—slightly outsold the flood of seventeen vituperative “feeble tractarian novels” attempting to prove Stowe wrong.¹ Both novels are guilty to a degree of James Baldwin's biting castigation of protest fiction in general and Stowe's book in particular—that such writing reduces the complexity of life to simplistic formulas and wrenches flesh-and-blood human beings into stereotypical straightjackets. Novels like these, writes Baldwin, become “mirrors of our own confusion”: by creating false worlds and implying false solutions, they do more harm than good. Their sole and dubious achievement is not the expression of a new cultural truth, Yeats's “public dream,” but simply the creation of what Baldwin calls “a lie more palatable than the truth.”²

These are harsh words which evoked passionate critical rebuttal,³ and yet they may serve as cautionary to this study. It would be foolhardy to seek in these two novels the historical reality of what white and black southern women meant to one another.⁴ Stowe and Eastman wrote with certain purposes in mind, and those purposes determined what kind of novels their books became and what kind of characters inhabited their pages. Their southern women characters, black and white, have meaning primarily as mouthpieces of the authors' political and moral views concerning what Stowe called “the truth” of chattel slavery in the antebellum South.⁵ The relationships among their southern women characters are often fictional constructs in which the characters may function most effectively in their roles as propagandists.

What is more significant, and deeply ironic, is that the women characters in these two novels, which purport to represent opposite sides of the slavery controversy, are actually cut from a common mold and imprinted with a common assumption of white superiority and black inferiority. Like the male characters in both novels, these women are recognizable as stock southern characters, types that were well ingrained by 1850 in an American cultural and literary consciousness already familiar with the plantation legend and the southern cult of chivalry and its patriarchal power structure.⁶ In their depictions of white women as well as black, Stowe and Eastman serve as prima facie evidence of David Levy's thesis that “those who attacked slavery in fiction portrayed the races in precisely the same terms as those who defended it.”⁷

Whether we look in the slave cabins or in the Big House of these two novels, we find the familiar silhouettes of the female stereotypes of southern plantation fiction: the mammy, the belle, the plantation mistress. Like many fictional slave women of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Mammy and Chloe of Uncle Tom's Cabin are Aunt Phillis's sisters in their maternal qualities of endurance, loyalty, and kindness. All three slave women embody the mother image of the black mammy, and their sisterhood as fictional mammies provides a striking illustration of how the referential weight of that image may be manipulated with ease in one propagandistic direction or the other.⁸ The lovely Alice Weston in Eastman's novel is an older version of little Eva, who, had she lived through her disease as Alice manages to do, would surely have grown up to become a chaste beautiful generous southern belle too. Mrs. Shelby of Uncle Tom's Cabin is the sister of Eastman's Mrs. Weston, the kindly plantation mistress who cares for the moral education and physical health of the servants (slaves are seldom called slaves in Aunt Phillis's Cabin). Both women conform to the ideal of the planter's wife, portrayed in novels of the 1820s and 1830s as what William Taylor calls “the heart and soul” of the plantation system, whose “benevolent rule extended over the whole household.”⁹ Likewise, many of the black female characters in both novels are delineated within the literary tradition described by Catherine Starke, in which contented slaves are “accommodative chattels” supported by “the myth of white superiority.”¹⁰ Even runaways like Stowe's Eliza and Eastman's Susan maintain fond relationships with their white mistresses.

White women of the two novels are depicted not only in the plantation ideal of benevolence and beauty (with the notable exception of Marie St. Clare); but are also pressed into the mold of the nineteenth-century Victorian cult of domesticity, “the cult of True Womanhood” which insisted upon the “four cardinal virtues—piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity.”¹¹ The southern white woman, in life and often in the literature of the period, was fully obligated to uphold moral virtue in the domestic sphere—a sphere enlarged in southern society to include the plantation. The female characters in both of these novels, as in other antebellum fiction about the South, reflect therefore a set of cultural assumptions not only of what slave women and their mistresses were, but also of what white women should be. Whether they are proslavery or abolitionist mouthpieces, these fictional women and their relationships to one another cannot avoid stereotypical delineations based upon identical assumptions about racial and sexual roles in the Old South.

And yet both novels resonate deeply and peculiarly with the relationships between these white and black female characters, stereotypical though they may be. Critics of Uncle Tom's Cabin have long noticed both its distinctly female ambience and the odd way Stowe's characters have of making us feel their humanity.¹² It is perhaps in the relationships between black and white women that we can find a clue to the paradoxical power of Uncle Tom's Cabin. It is a novel which is in a very real sense the distortion of reality Baldwin says it is. But in another sense, it is much more, more even than Stowe may have consciously designed it to be or thought it was.

Generally, scholars have pointed to characterization as pivotal point of the emotional power of Uncle Tom's Cabin and have remarked at the paradox of “conventional literary characters and sociological stereotypes or roles express[ing] genuinely human qualities,”¹³ or put another way, of characters who “act partly as mouthpieces for their creator and at the same time are genuine individuals.”¹⁴ Certainly Stowe's characters are what we remember about her book. It is, as Charles Foster suggests, “the book's working at the deep places of the human personality that makes the reader feel that slavery is a personal tragedy.”¹⁵

Although Aunt Phillis's Cabin is by any standards a less effective work, it does emit, almost as if by accident, an undercurrent of something beyond its obvious proslavery argument. That something which hovers around the outer corners of the book's contrived plots and sentimental outpourings has, like Uncle Tom's Cabin, the strong flavor of a feminist subtext (perhaps in the case of Eastman surprisingly strong). Though both writers use their black and white southern women characters as mouthpieces of the proslavery or abolitionist factions, paradoxically those same women develop similarly strong interracial attachments. Significantly, these attachments often are developed in response to a male-initiated crisis. Often too these women gain strength from their cross-racial relationships and, more often than not, overcome or circumvent problems together. In these novels, pairs of white and black women also face another common enemy: death. They nurse each other, mother each other, and initiate each other into the mysteries of death. Their bond is their common womanhood. Their sphere is the family. Their enemy is anything that seeks to degrade or destroy either.

The implications of these fictional women's close cross-racial relationships and their bonding against common threats remain rather shapeless currents submerged under the smooth polemic surface of both novels, despite Stowe's clear opposition of the female spheres of maternity and domesticity to the male mercenary interests of slavery.¹⁶ Like much of the sentimental woman's fiction of the nineteenth century, Uncle Tom's Cabin, though it does not fall into that category, suggests that women's values are moral values and that the ideal nation should be “organized on the principle of familial love”: the woman's sphere is associated with basic human values; the mercenary male sphere barters in human lives and destroys familial ties.¹⁷

In Uncle Tom's Cabin, where slavery is linked to the male sphere, the bonds between white and black women not only provide succor but can generate enormous power against that sphere. The bonds between Mrs. Shelby and two of her female slaves, Eliza and Aunt Chloe, provide a literal and metaphorical frame for the novel. All three women characters are stereotypes. Stowe herself acknowledged Mrs. Shelby as “a fair type of the very best class of Southern women”—and the Shelbys' Kentucky farm as “the fairest side of slave-life, where easy indulgence and good-natured forbearance are tempered by just discipline and religious instruction, skilfully and judiciously imparted.”¹⁸ Eliza is, of course, the beleaguered mulatta; and Chloe, like Eastman's Phillis, the mammy with the strength to move mountains.

Yet again the real wonder of the novel is that Stowe can bring these women characters to life. Where they operate most dramatically and most believably is in their relationships with one another. This is true even in relationships between women of the same race; one of the most moving relationships in the book is between Cassy, who is looking for a child, and young Emmeline, who needs the protection of a mother. Although many of the interracial female relationships also are based on the maternal impulse, others are developed in an acknowledgment of common womanhood and common humanistic values. The importance of these female bonds cannot be overstated. More than anything else, they show the generative power of love and devastatingly delineate by contrast the rapacity of a system that tallies human life in profit and loss columns.

The opposition of female and male values becomes immediately apparent in the opening scene of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Mr. Shelby's willingness to sell Uncle Tom, his valued faithful slave, is contrasted with his acknowledgment to the trader of Mrs. Shelby's ties with Eliza. The fact that Mrs. Shelby cannot believe that her husband would ever agree to sell Eliza's child (“I would as soon have one of my own children sold,” she tells Eliza)¹⁹ reflects not only her attachment to the beautiful quadroon whom she has herself nurtured but the vast gulf between the female and male views of responsibility to valued chattels. Unlike her husband, Mrs. Shelby has committed herself to a parental role which she cannot dismiss merely because there are money troubles.

Even though such a role as conceived by Stowe is surely based on racist presumptions, the bond between the Kentucky mistress and Eliza is described in warm maternal terms. Mrs. Shelby has protected the young beautiful girl from sexual abuse, acted as matchmaker “to unite her handsome favorite with one of her own class who seemed in every way suited to her,” adorned Eliza's hair with flowers on her wedding day, and arranged to have her married in her own parlor (p. 17). In the past she tried to comfort Eliza upon the loss of two infants and “directed her naturally passionate feelings within the bounds of reason and religion” (p. 17). Obviously Stowe couches her description of the mistress-slave relationship in the premise of white superiority; still, there is stark and chilling contrast between Mrs. Shelby's loyalty to Eliza, reflected in her horror at having to sell little Harry—“If I could only at least save Eliza's child, I would sacrifice anything I have,” she mourns—and Mr. Shelby's matter-of-fact attitude about selling Tom and Harry: “… the price of these two was needed to make up the balance, and I had to give them up” (pp. 38-39).

Mrs. Shelby's loyalty to Eliza actually supersedes her loyalty to her own husband. She is glad when Eliza runs away. To prevent the slave woman's capture, Mrs. Shelby joins the slaves in league against her husband and Haley the trader. She directs Sam and Andy to “lose” the horses; she and Chloe conspire to make dinner late. Once the meal is on the table, she detains the trader “by every female artifice” (p. 61). Her bond with Eliza makes her “feel too much,” as her husband says—“an awful feeling of guilt” for having pushed the desperate slave woman to the extreme of risking her life and that of her child on the treacherous ice floes of the frigid Ohio River. Her reaction to the news that Eliza made it to the other side of the river is in ironic contrast to her husband's response. “Are we not both responsible to God for this poor girl? My God! lay not this sin to our charge,” she says, to which Mr. Shelby responds, “What sin, Emily? You see yourself that we have only done what we were obliged to” (p. 76). Likewise, her outraged response to the sale of Eliza's Harry and her willingness to take responsibility for what she considers to be an immoral act against the slave woman contrast sharply with Shelby's lack of emotion and his refusal to take moral responsibility for the selling of Tom. Shelby, never one to accept guilt, absents himself from the farm on the day his loyal slave is to be taken so “that he might not witness the unpleasant scenes of the consummation” of his own act of separating Tom from his family.

Stowe herself maintained that “the worst abuse” of slavery was “its outrage on the family”;²⁰ and generally she saw women, white and black, as the keepers of moral virtues and domestic values. It is because of this ideal of woman as upholder of right action that Marie St. Clare becomes, by contrast, such a despicable character and that Ophelia's racism is so shocking. It is also this maternal, familial ideal that makes Cassy's protectiveness of Emmeline believable and moving. Similarly Chloe's passionate refusal to forgive Mr. Shelby and her wish to send all slave-traders to hell is not so much a black rejection of Christian principles, as David Levin has suggested,²¹ as a female rejection of the male sphere, which buys and sells human beings for profit and callously disregards familial ties. In Uncle Tom's Cabin, then, the bonding of white and black women against the dehumanizing greed of a male marketplace has enormous thematic force.

The plot reverberates with that force. Mr. Shelby's decision to sell Tom and little Harry breaks up two families. Stowe's purpose was, of course, to muster sympathy for black families who lived under the specter of slavery; and her story shows women, black and white, reacting in dismay and rage at the destruction of these families. Eliza, with Aunt Chloe's and Mrs. Shelby's help, flees to safety after her treacherous journey across the ice. The slave woman, who responds with active rebellion to her son's imminent sale, is happily reunited with her husband George in Canada. Meanwhile, Tom's misfortune increases after being separated from his family, going from the relatively easy existence he finds on the Louisiana plantation of the humane Augustine St. Clare to actual torment at the hands of Simon Legree. Although Stowe seems to praise Tom's long-suffering Christianity, his downward plunge in fortune to eventual death shows, interestingly, that his passivity gets him nowhere. He dies, the victim of his own goodness. His relationships with little angelic Eva St. Clare and Legree's mistress Cassy are full of love and tenderness; yet in the end he is, in many ways, beaten by the institution of slavery and the cruelty and inhumanity of its perpetrators Marie St. Clare and Simon Legree. His willingness to suffer and to die contrasts sharply to the active efforts of his wife Chloe to save him by earning money to buy him back. In their denial of passivity, the cross-racial female relationships in the book reflect the implication of plot in Uncle Tom's Cabin—that those who do not fight a rapacious system ultimately lose themselves to it.

Stowe's development of women's cross-racial bonds here (and later in Dred) has obvious implications for the abolitionist cause: if mistresses and their female slaves can be friends and work toward the same goals, then they may be seen to share a common humanity and a common morality. This relationship also implies a connection in Stowe's mind between feminism and abolitionism. Certainly in the popular mind of the period there resided a strong connection between such “similar repressions” and the submissive virtues of women and blacks.²² John R. Adams and others have suggested that Stowe's sympathy with slaves might be traced to her own experiences with the servitude of domesticity.²³ She was the mother of seven children, one of whom died in infancy. Her professor husband, Calvin, was absent for long periods, and the family often was pinched for money.²⁴

As to her feminist views, or lack of them, Stowe has most recently been placed somewhere between what feminist critics and historians call the “domestic feminism” of her older sister Catharine Beecher, who wrote books and articles on the stabilizing influence of women upon society, and the radical feminism of her youngest sister, Isabella Beecher Hooker, who became an avid follower of Victoria Woodhull and who was convinced that the world was soon to become a matriarchy and that she, Isabella, would rule as Christ's vice-regent.²⁵ Perhaps the single most visceral connection in Stowe's mind between feminism and abolitionism was her intense admiration for Sojourner Truth, the powerful black spokeswoman for human rights during the fifties. Truth, a freed slave who traveled through America in behalf of women's rights and abolition, visited the Stowes in 1853 and won whole-hearted admiration from the whole family. “There was both power and sweetness in that great warm soul and that vigorous frame,” Stowe later wrote of “The Libyan Sibyl.”²⁶

Stowe's moderation in such issues as women's suffrage—she supported but did not actively campaign for the vote—may be due partly to the fact that she was perhaps more concerned about extending the realm of the domestic sphere with its humanistic values into the world around it than moving women out of that sphere into the world of male materialism. Yet, Severn Duvall points to the immense threat that Uncle Tom's Cabin and Stowe posed to the southern patriarchy. Like the slave, the white woman had her proper place “on the scale of Nature” and thus in the antebellum familial hierarchy. White southerners were horrified at a woman “unsexing herself” enough to write a novel on slavery, perhaps because for the first time masculine dominance of the southern social order was being challenged publicly.²⁷

The antislavery movement, like moral reform and temperance, was at its core in a very deep sense a woman's issue.²⁸ Northern women were urged to “rise up in the moral power of womanhood; and give utterance to the voice of outraged mercy” and to hear “the sighs, the groans, the death-like struggles of scourged sisters at the South.”²⁹ Theodore Weld's American Slavery As It Is, which Stowe claimed to have kept under her pillow during the writing of Uncle Tom's Cabin, listed incident after incident of the sexual degradation and physical abuse of slave women. During the 1830s and 1840s thousands of northern and western women formed antislavery societies, and their activism carried them into state and national politics, making them “subjects of intense controversy.”³⁰ The bonding of white and black women in an abolitionist novel and the feminist implications of these fictional cross-racial relationships should not be suprising, then.

It is the relationship between Mrs. Shelby and Chloe which provides the most insight into Stowe's emphasis on the strength of female values and female bonds. Uncle Tom is the submissive Christian; his wife is the Christian warrior. He accepts inhumanity; she rejects it. Together Chloe and Mrs. Shelby become a Christian chorus of remonstration and reproof. The beginning of the book shows them brilliantly playing the womanly roles expected of them in order to save Eliza: Mrs. Shelby is the gracious southern lady making witty conversation at the dinner table to detain the slave trader Haley from taking up the chase; Chloe is the energetic mammy laboring to prepare what must be the quintessence of dinners for the white gentleman at that table. Theirs is a concerted effort to save another woman and her child—an effort which probably would have failed had it not been concerted. This is perhaps one of the few places in the novel where race becomes unimportant. An invisible, powerful, yet unspoken thread runs from kitchen to table and back; both women work desperately within their own spheres to buy Eliza time, yet their efforts blend and merge into a wonderful, peculiarly female mire of food and talk which engulfs Haley's efforts to take up the chase.

Behind this humorous account of Chloe's bad gravy and Mrs. Shelby's chatter are an intense urgency and an electrifying three-way connection between the two black women and their mistress. There are two integral dramas played out in Eliza's behalf as she frantically races against the clock in her movements across the countryside: Chloe slows time, dragging it out with methodical preparations of “watching and stirring with dogged precision”; and Mrs. Shelby's pleasant cultured voice chats and drones, compartmentalizing the moments, making them fly lightly, imperceptibly. Linked by their manipulations of the same unit of time, the three women challenge male attitudes and actions: Mrs. Shelby circumvents her husband's decision to sell Harry; Chloe rejects Tom's passivity; Eliza rebels against a white, male-controlled system that counts slave children as so many cattle. Stowe shows the strength of this three-way female bond and its humanistic challenge to a dehumanizing system as the epitome of courageous, active love, a balance for Tom's passive Christian response to Legree's evil.

These active women in Uncle Tom's Cabin may in fact provide a strong counterargument to the moral and critical dissatisfaction which has given the term Uncle Tom its pejorative sense. In depicting Eliza's escape, Stowe has pitted three women, two of them black, against the white male world—and she has allowed them to win. Nor is it any accident that it is often women—the hostess of the public house, the Quakers, Mrs. Bird—who respond to Eliza's desperation and who actively assist her. While Tom's willingness to endure cruelty and tragedy is in some sense a grand defiance, these women respond against slavery practically and actively. Like Chloe, they decry the system and they cripple it by helping others escape its clutches. It is interesting generally that Stowe chose to make so many of her female characters so active, perhaps with the exceptions of Eva and Marie St. Clare, and so many of her white and black males—Mr. Shelby, Tom, St. Clare—so passive. Only the young men, George Shelby and George Harris, seem to have much force to their personalities.

Throughout the novel, Chloe and Mrs. Shelby continue to cooperate in an actively ongoing effort to return Tom to his home. Mrs. Shelby, who has sworn to repurchase Tom, soon finds that she cannot count on her husband to make any effort to save money toward that end. Possessor of “a clear, energetic, practical mind, and a force of character every way superior to that of her husband” (p. 259), she rejoices in Chloe's proposition that the black cook hire herself out. Together they figure how long Chloe will have to work at the bakery for four dollars a week to save enough to buy Tom back and Mrs. Shelby promises to save what she can to add to Chloe's earnings. Significantly, the scene in which Chloe and her mistress make these arrangements is preceded by one in which Mrs. Shelby begs her husband to straighten out his financial matters by selling some of his horses or farms. When he refuses (we are given the distinct feeling that Mr. Shelby could have sold something besides Uncle Tom to even up his debts) and she suggests that she herself earn money by giving music lessons, he reacts with indignation: “You wouldn't degrade yourself that way, Emily? I never could consent to it” (p. 260). We are reminded of his horrified response to Eliza's escape after he has promised Harry to the slave trader: “It touches my honor!” (p. 45). Mr. Shelby's concern with his “honor” seems to supersede all moral obligations. His negative response to his wife's pleadings is thus a strong contrast to her own affirmative response to Chloe's request, which will leave the Shelby household without a cook.

Actually Mrs. Shelby and Chloe seem closer emotionally and ideologically than either woman does to her own husband. Though both are fond of their husbands—Chloe is certainly heartbroken over the sale of Tom—they refuse to share their husbands' attitudes toward slavery. Just as Mrs. Shelby cannot accept her husband's idea of slaves as convenient means of settling debts, so Chloe rejects Tom's Christian acceptance of his fate. “… de Lord lets drefful things happen, sometimes,” she says. “I don't seem to get no comfort dat way” (p. 98). Despite Tom's protests, she places blame where it is due—directly upon Mr. Shelby. “Mas'r never ought ter left it so that ye could be took for his debts. … Them as sells heart's love and heart's blood, to get out thar scrapes, de Lord'll be up to 'em!” (p. 99). Unlike their husbands, both women hold individuals morally accountable for their actions.

The tie that binds Chloe and Mrs. Shelby is further strengthened by their joint role as a chorus of lamentation at what Stowe felt to be the central evil of slavery—the disruption of family ties. Twice Mrs. Shelby shares Chloe's grief, first when Tom is sold away and finally at the end of the book, when George comes home without Tom. Unrealistic as these scenes are, there is a sense in both of shared female outrage. Interestingly, in each scene Chloe is presented as first rejecting Mrs. Shelby's displays of mutual sorrow, and then accepting the white woman as fellow mourner. Stowe was aware, seemingly, that the black woman may resent a white woman's intrusion into her own peculiar realm of despair. When, as she is preparing Tom's belongings for his journey, Chloe receives word that “Missis” is coming, she immediately retorts, “She can't do no good; what's she coming for?” (p. 101). When Mrs. Shelby enters her cabin, Chloe sets a chair for her “in a manner decidedly gruff and crusty” (p. 101). It is only when Mrs. Shelby sits down and begins to sob that Chloe ceases to associate her mistress with Mr. Shelby's devastating decision to sell Tom, accepts her common grief, and finally weeps with her.

Likewise, when Chloe is told of her husband's death, she deals Mrs. Shelby a gesture of rejection by giving her the money she had earned for Tom's freedom: “‘Thar,’ said she, gathering it up, and holding it, with a trembling hand, to her mistress, ‘don't never want to see nor hear on 't again. Jist as I knew 't would be,—sold, and murdered on dem ar' old plantations!’” (p. 450). But when Mrs. Shelby responds only with sympathy and grief—“My poor, good Chloe!”—the black woman accepts her as a fellow mourner and again all weep together and lament Tom's death and the system that caused it. This mutuality of grief, though limited always by the fact that Mrs. Shelby and Chloe are stereotypes based on racial myth, is nonetheless moving. We are reminded of archetypal scenes of women throughout history weeping for their lost men and lamenting the loss of peace and harmony among men. To have black and white women join in this timeless chorus of grief extends the dimensions of the novel from the polemic to the mythic.

These dynamic female bonds also define the concept of motherhood in Uncle Tom's Cabin. Since what it means to be a mother is so closely tied in the novel to what it means to be a true Christian and a caring human being, the process of defining a good mother becomes a basic pattern that knits the novel together. Weaving in and out of the relationships between black and white women, the maternal impulse, or lack of it, becomes a criterion upon which to judge their humanity. Mrs. Shelby teaches Eliza how to be a good mother. Mammy mothers Eva when the child's own mother, Marie St. Clare, shows no maternal interest in her daughter. Eva mothers Topsy when Ophelia's racism precludes such nurture. The depravity of Prue's mistress is felt so intensely because she interferes with Prue's maternal impulses; she refuses to give the black woman milk to feed her starving infant. As Elizabeth Ammons points out, the cruel separations between mothers and children in Uncle Tom's Cabin dramatize “the root evil of slavery: the displacement of life-giving maternal values by a profit-hungry masculine ethic; … mothers and motherless children show the human cost of the system.”³¹ Stowe herself says that she wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin because of her own empathy with slave mothers. After the death of her infant son, she writes, “at his grave … I learned what a poor slave mother may feel when her child is torn away from her.”³²

The discrepancy between Marie's selfishness and indifference to maternal obligation and Mammy's loving maternal nurture is meant to be particularly acute. Marie's relationships both to her own daughter and to her black servant illuminate the white mother's egocentric corruption and illustrate Stowe's thesis that total power breeds evil. Unlike Mrs. Shelby, who is described by the author as “a fair type of the very best class of Southern women,”³³ Marie St. Clare is “the type of a class of women not peculiar to any latitude, nor any condition of society.” In the North, Stowe writes, such a woman has “no end to her troubles” in retaining servants, whom she invariably overworks and underpays. But with the absolute control which slavery permits her, the southern Marie becomes an unleashed fury who can do as she wills to whom she likes and inflict “the most disgraceful and violent punishments.”³⁴ More subtle torture she measures out upon Mammy, keeping the black woman at her beck and call every night and then complaining at Mammy's “selfishness” in sleeping so soundly. Like Prue's mistress, Marie shows her inhumanity by denying Mammy her own children. Marie is characterized as less than a whole woman, having “no heart,” thoroughly selfish (p. 160). Her relationship with black women—her inhumane treatment of Mammy and later sending Rosa to be whipped—serves as an index of her total corruption, as does her marked lack of interest in her own daughter.

In contrast, Mammy's love for Eva and her nurture of the white child show the black woman's humanity and unselfishness. The scene in which Eva returns home with her father and Ophelia reveals the vast difference between Marie's and Mammy's responses to the child. Stowe draws the distinction heavy-handedly. When Eva kisses her mother, Marie's response is half-hearted: “‘That'll do,—take care, child,—don't you make my head ache,’ said the mother, after she had languidly kissed her” (p. 170). But as Eva kisses Mammy, Stowe writes, “this woman did not tell her that she made her head ache, but on the contrary, she hugged her, and laughed, and cried, till her sanity was a thing to be doubted of …” (p. 170). While Marie takes no notice of the child's declining health and strength, Mammy is acutely aware of Eva's oncoming death. More than that, Mammy, like Tom, intuitively knows Eva for who she is—a rare and mysterious good spirit whose time on earth is limited. Like Tom, who sees “the Lord's mark in her forehead,” Mammy knows Eva “wasn't never like a child that's to live—there was allers something deep in her eyes” (p. 281).

Marie is obviously jealous of Mammy and Eva's closeness. One of her most despicable acts is to keep the black woman away from Eva's deathbed with her own incessant demands, “so that stolen interviews and momentary glimpses” of Eva are all Mammy can obtain (pp. 298-99). The relationship between Marie and Mammy is characterized by the white woman's constraints upon the black woman's maternal feelings. Marie denies Mammy her own children and later her surrogate child. Though these denials are only one facet of Marie's egocentricity, they are telling ones. Marie is not only a bad mother herself; she forces Mammy to be one as well. Stowe shows in this relationship the institution of slavery at its worst. It is the system which permits Marie to control Mammy's maternal impulses—surely a power no woman should have over another.

Just as Marie will not fulfill her maternal obligations, Ophelia's antipathy for blacks makes her unwilling to provide much-needed nurture for Topsy. Interestingly, Eva, who is denied the same nurturance by her own mother but given it freely by Mammy, steps into that role with Topsy, who has internalized much of the racial hatred directed toward her during her short life. In a most significant way, Eva becomes the force which moves Topsy from self-hate and forces Ophelia to see the psychological destructiveness of her own racism. While Mammy provides the positive maternal force in the Marie-Mammy-Eva relationship, Eva is the sustainer of true motherhood in the Ophelia-Eva-Topsy triangle. With a childish mother herself, Eva takes on the cloak of motherhood that saves Topsy. Although the scene is overdone, Eva's “burst of feeling” and her pronouncement of love are moving in that they seem to engender in Topsy, for the first time in her life, a sense of self-worth and a realization that she was wrong in thinking “there can't nobody love niggers, and niggers can't do nothin'!” (p. 288). Though as children they are mirror images, Eva saves Topsy by mothering her. The vitality and all-encompassing nature of this motherlove give the black girl peace and wholeness. It also shows Ophelia the psychological destruction caused by racism and helps her overcome her aversion to Topsy so that she can learn to be a true mother to the child.

True motherhood is often denied the slave women of the novel. Nowhere is this denial felt more deeply than in Prue's story. Simon Legree's cruelty seems mild compared to that of Prue's mistress, who refuses to buy milk for the slave mother to feed her starving infant. When the child “cried, and cried, and cried, day and night,” the white woman forces Prue to put the infant away in a garret where it starves to death, wailing continuously (p. 223). Prue's misery at the child's murder makes her wish for her own death, which—grotesque though it is—puts her at last out of imaginary earshot of her dying infant's crying. The white woman's denial of food for the child is worsened by the fact that Prue's own milk dried up as the result of a fever contracted by nursing her mistress.

In the shadowy character of this villainous mistress surely Stowe, whose own children were so important to her, was sketching the worst that could be said of slavery. When white women embrace the materialistic dehumanization of slavery, depicted as a male attitude in this novel, they seem to become so warped and twisted by absolute power that they deny the maternal bonds that link them to all women (those that Mrs. Shelby, Eliza, and Chloe feel so deeply), and become asexual monsters who destroy human lives and psyches more out of pique and carelessness than conscious cruelty. In this fiction, slavery generates such female monsters, and they are best shown through their relationships with those over whom they exert the most power, yet with whom they should feel the most common bond—black women.

Yet these relationships in Uncle Tom's Cabin most often show white and black women in a peculiarly female and often powerful opposition to the materialism of slavery; as such, these bonds reveal the vast gulf between humanistic values and materialistic assessments of human life. What it means to be human in the profoundest sense is often connected to what it means to be truly maternal—to nurture others, as Eva does Topsy, and so to encourage generative growth in lives other than one's own. Motherhood and Christian nurture are closely associated. In a sense, then, Marie St. Clare and Prue's mistress become in their relationships with their black women slaves more evil than Legree himself. They deny their own maternal impulses as well as those of their slaves; they are thus doubly evil. Yet they demand maternal nurture for themselves from those same women. In their relationships with black women, they become children and evil ones at that, whose behavior shows above all the sinful nature of all human beings, and the horrifying consequences of allowing that sinful nature full rein.

As is to be expected, Mary H. Eastman paints a rosier picture of human nature in general and woman's nature in particular in Aunt Phillis's Cabin; or, Southern Life As It Is. As a southern white woman, Eastman was the most likely respondent to put the heretical Yankee Stowe in her place. In the popular mind the southern lady was keeper of the hearth, human link between master and slave, and moral voice of the slave South. As Duvall points out, many southern white women, Chesnut among them, opposed slavery because of the opportunities it provided for miscegenation.³⁵ Of the seventeen novels which sought to refute the assertions of Uncle Tom's Cabin in the years 1852-1854, five were written by women who were born in the South. I have selected Aunt Phillis's Cabin from the seventeen fictional replies to Stowe for the following reasons: It is one of those written by a southern white woman and thus is interesting to compare to the work of the northern white woman, particularly since the focus of my study is upon relationships between women, fictional or real. Eastman's novel is generally agreed to have outsold all other proslavery novels of the period (about 18,000 copies in a few weeks) and thus may be assumed to have been at least among the most influential. Unlike several books of this type, the novel has most of its action on the plantation, therefore providing a fictional backdrop for cross-racial relationships between southern women. Its focus, as Jeannette Tandy points out, is unusual in that it gives particular attention to the attitude of a slave woman toward slavery, and therefore toward masters and mistresses. And finally, Aunt Phillis's Cabin, written in 1852, was the only immediate fictional response to Uncle Tom's Cabin by a southern woman.³⁶

Southern white women would be expected to defend not only the South's “peculiar institution” but the place of white and black women in the social and familial order. Yet, in this best seller of all the proslavery novels, Eastman, a Virginian by birth, who traveled extensively in the West with her Army officer husband, also questions the place of woman in the family hierarchy. Her diatribe about the relationship of slavery and matrimony follows obvious approval of Phillis's ability to get the best of Bacchus, her childlike husband. Beginning with Stowe's own words, Eastman moves almost imperceptibly in this passage from a sarcastic, antiabolitionist tone to a scorching analysis of husband-wife relationships, and finally to a reevaluation of Phillis's actions in asserting her will upon Bacchus by cutting the ruffles off his shirt. In this passage Eastman thus turns Stowe's abolitionist statements about generic man into feminist diatribe about real men:

“To you, generous and noble-minded men and women of the South, I appeal, (I quote the words of a late writer on Abolitionism, when I say,) Is man ever a creature to be trusted with wholly irresponsible power? Can anybody fail to make the inference, what the practical result will be?”* Although she is here speaking of slavery politically, can you not apply it to matrimony in this miserable country of ours? Can we not remodel our husbands, place them under our thumbs, and shut up the escape valves of their grumbling forever? To be sure, St. Paul exhorts “wives to be obedient to their own husbands” and “servants to be obedient to their own masters,” but St. Paul was not an Abolitionist. He did not take into consideration the necessities of the free-soil party, and woman's rights. This is the era of mental and bodily emancipation. Take advantage of it, wives and negroes! But, alas for the former! there is no society formed for their benefit; their day of deliverance has not yet dawned, and until its first gleamings arise in the east, they must wear their chains. Except when some strong-minded female steps forth from the degraded ranks, and asserts her position, whether by giving loose to that unruly member the tongue, or by a piece of management which will give “an old fool a lesson that will last him all the days of his life.”

*Uncle Tom's Cabin³⁷

This passage is odd in that Eastman seems to begin with the intention of criticizing feminists and then ends up, in spite of herself, admiring Phillis's mastery over her husband. Although again, the interracial relationships among women in Aunt Phillis's Cabin are designed to show first of all how happy and contented slaves are in the South, the bonding between these women has much more in common with the feminist suggestions of Uncle Tom's Cabin than we might expect. In Aunt Phillis's Cabin the ties between slave women and their mistresses are powerful and often are formed, as in Stowe's novel, in response to some external threat. The strength of these female ties, and the humanistic values they imply, are what we remember about both books.

Eastman's narrative, polemical as it is, opens predictably with a biblical justification for slavery as a necessary evil “authorized by God, permitted by Jesus Christ” (p. 24). The story revolves around the Weston family members who live on Exeter plantation in Virginia. Mr. Weston is a “true Southern gentleman” who lives with a household of women: Mrs. Weston, his dead brother's wife; Alice, her daughter; and Cousin Janet, “a dependant [sic] and distant relation; a friend faithful and unfailing; a bright example of all that is holy and good in the Christian character” (p. 28). Cousin Janet assists Mrs. Weston in “the many cares that devolved on the mistress of a plantation, especially in instructing the young female servants in knitting and sewing, and in such household duties as would make them useful in that state of life in which it had pleased God to place them” (p. 28).

Such as it is, the plot is episodic. Eastman presents a series of exempla to show just how carefree slave life is for “the servants,” and how devoted they are to their white folks. Much of the action comes second-hand from tales told on the front porch of the Exeter Big House. The action, real and related, skips erratically from Big House to slave quarters and even includes incidents that happen up North. The love interest in the novel involves a triangle of Alice, the Byronic Walter, who is not suitable marriage material, and the plodding Arthur, who is. Though Alice loves Walter, she comes to her senses and marries the rather stuffy Arthur. Her mother instructs her on the responsibilities of the plantation mistress, the role she will assume as Arthur's wife, and she declares herself ready to take up the twin mantles of responsibility and hard work to fulfill her destiny in that role. Phillis has a short life. She does not appear until the midpoint of the book, and she dies before the end—but not before she asks Mr. Weston's forgiveness for sometimes wishing she weren't a slave (he does forgive her) and rejects his half-hearted offer to free her children (they both agree that the children are better off as they are).

In such a context it is surprising to find anything remotely resembling a feminist subtext. And surely much of what is there would surprise Eastman as much as it does us. Still, the author does not appear to have been a typical nineteenth-century woman or to have had a typical nineteenth-century marriage. Though a native Virginian, Eastman had traveled widely with her husband Seth, an artist as well as an Army officer. The two apparently worked closely together, she writing books—some about Indian tribes and their customs—and he illustrating them. Together they produced several successful works and apparently had a close professional relationship. The streak of feminism that threads its way through the undersurface of the novel may not be completely anomalous to Eastman's experiences.

Loving bonds formed between white and black women in Aunt Phillis's Cabin create female community and female power. In much proslavery fiction, the mistress becomes “elevated and spiritualized.”³⁸ What is surprising in this novel is that the black woman is elevated as well, and that cross-racial female bonding often develops in response to male evil or male silliness. Bacchus is stereotypically a rather stupid, silly, and weak-willed black—in contrast to his wife, who is intelligent and imposing, “a tall, dignified, bright mulatto woman” (p. 102). Phillis's mental stature is also stereotypical; Eastman makes it clear that Bacchus's wife is smarter than Bacchus because the “blood of freeman and slave” mix in her veins but not in his, yet this distinction between her character and his comes after at least three other men, all white, are shown to be either silly or evil creatures in their dealings with the women—white and black—associated with them. In these incidents, which appear early in the novel, white women and their female slaves develop close personal relationships that exclude men or react against them.

The story of Ellen Haywood and her faithful slave Lucy, related by Cousin Janet, involves such a triangle. Ellen's Mr. Lee, divorced from his first wife and therefore unmarriageable in polite society, secretly marries, impregnates, and deserts the eighteen-year-old Ellen. With only Lucy and Janet to assist her, Ellen dies in childbirth, a fallen woman. It is Lucy, not the phantomlike Mr. Lee, who begs the dying woman to live; and it is Lucy, recalls Janet, who “wept unceasingly by Ellen's side, and it was impossible to arouse her to a care for her own health, or to an interest in what was passing around” (p. 40). It is also Lucy to whom Ellen entrusts the task of placing her hidden wedding band upon her finger after her death. The closeness and trust between the older black slave and the young white woman become a reproach to the illusive Mr. Lee.

Likewise, as Lucy's miserable history unfolds in Cousin Janet's account, Ellen's father, Mr. Haywood, is seen as an even worse villain—also against a backdrop of a close interracial women's relationship. It is interesting too that Lucy's story about Haywood's cruelty is first related to Cousin Janet, who in turn is telling it to other white women. The result is a layering of points of view from black woman to white woman, a kind of artistic integration of two racial consciousnesses into one female perception of the evil perpetrated by a white southern male upon a black woman slave and her children (one of whom was probably his). As Janet relates it, Lucy's story is that Mr. Haywood, a drunkard and poor money manager, sells her seven children after sending her to accompany her mistress, Ellen's mother, to the country. The white woman's reaction is a sharp reproach to her husband's actions. Mrs. Haywood, Lucy recalls, “cried day and night, and called him cruel, and she would say, ‘Lucy, I'd have died before I would have done it.’ I couldn't murder him … 'twas my mistress held me back” (p. 43). Although this incident is obviously related so that the Westons can click their tongues at Mr. Haywood's action and explain to the reader that such things seldom occur in the South, it is nonetheless interesting that, like the Mrs. Shelby-Chloe relationship in Uncle Tom's Cabin, these incidents set the humanistic combination of white and black women against the callousness of white men.

Even in the far-fetched exemplum in which the unfaithful slave Susan deserts her mistress, indirectly causing the death of the white woman's baby, and becoming the mistreated victim of avaricious abolitionists, it is the mistress, Mrs. Casey, who is willing to take the slave woman back. Mr. Casey refuses to forgive Susan and will not allow her to return from her unhappy state as a free woman in the North to the joys of slavery in the South. Yet Mrs. Casey, in her compassion, sends Susan ten dollars to help her along in her new and frightening life. The slave woman, who abused her maternal role by abandoning her charge, is thus forgiven and nurtured by the mother of the child she deserted.

More realistic is the bond between Mrs. Moore, a transplanted southerner (probably an autobiographical figure), and her servant Polly, a freed slave who has stayed with her mistress out of loyalty. They have pitted themselves in a humorous household battle with Mrs. Moore's teetotaling husband, an Army captain, who has demanded that she keep spirits out of the house and consequently out of the cooking. Polly solves the problem by taking charge of the liquor and placing the bottles in her “old chist” on the practical assumption that out of sight is out of mind. Even though the relationship of Mrs. Moore and Polly is not set up in moral opposition to Captain Moore, they do outsmart him. The message behind the story is that men are silly, unreasonable creatures who must be fooled every now and then. As Polly puts it, “men's mighty onreasonable, the best of 'em, but when a woman is married she ought to do all she can for the sake of peace” (p. 55). Furthermore, women have their own spheres of influence which should not be invaded by men: “I dont see what a man has got to do interferin with the cookin, no how; a woman oughter 'tend to these matters” (pp. 55-56). In this case the combination of white and black women repels the captain's intrusion into that one sphere where the nineteenth-century woman reigned—the kitchen.

As a black woman, Phillis herself is Eastman's lofty example of all the good that comes of slavery. Physiologically Phillis is more white than black (she is even described as flushing), and she identifies more with whites than she does with blacks. She is the mother of twelve children, all but one of whom (his father's namesake) have inherited her energy and liking for white company and instruction. Phillis doesn't like “ordinary servants.” She has a lovely house with a parlor superior to her owners' drawing room. She wet-nurses white children. She forgets her own children when Alice Weston falls ill. She is what Langston Hughes would call a “white folks' nigger.”

Yet, stereotypical and one-sided though Phillis is, the bonds of mutual nurture that she forms with the white women characters suggest Eastman's belief in a common ground between women of both races and a peculiarly female strength to be generated from such bonds. This novel is full of death; and the bonds between Phillis and her mistresses Alice, Cousin Janet, and Mrs. Weston are strengthened in the face of death. During Alice's serious illness, the sheer force of Phillis's will linked to that of Cousin Janet and Mrs. Weston seems to snatch the young woman from the brink of the grave. Keeping their watch around Alice's sickbed, the three women nurse her untiringly through the crisis of her illness. This is perhaps the most memorable scene in the book. All through the night the three women kindle and rekindle the dying spark. Together they defeat death, and in so doing become archetypal maternal figures whose common nurture sustains Alice and returns her to life.

Other black women in the novel initiate white girls into the knowledge of death or comfort young white women in their grief. The narrator of the story recalls an incident in her girlhood in which two children of her acquaintance died and an old slave woman showed her their graves, “two little mounds, covered over with the dark-green myrtle and its purple flowers” (p. 100). She recalls this incident in connection with the death of her own child, and the realization that those little mounds hide “silence and pallor, desolation and destruction” (p. 101). After the drowning death of her brother William, Ellen Graham has no one to turn to but the black woman who reared brother and sister: “Ah! Ellen was an orphan now—father, mother, and friend had he been to her, the lost one. Often did she lay her head on the kind breast of their nurse, and pray for death” (p. 185).

Despite the obvious artificiality and sentimentality of scenes like this one, the oppositions in Aunt Phillis's Cabin pit black women and their white mistresses against men and against death. In the sexual battle, women are the voices of morality and practicality that make white men such as Mr. Lee, Mr. Haywood, and Mr. Casey appear callous or, in the case of Captain Moore, downright silly. Although white southern men are upholders of “the peculiar institution” which Eastman is supposed to be defending, her creation of these sexual oppositions is not counterproductive to her proslavery argument. In these female bonds she shows simply the closeness of slave woman to mistress and the mutuality of regard in that relationship. Yet, though the antiabolitionist message of the book is everywhere apparent, Eastman may have been more like Stowe than she consciously knew.

Though the novels are polemic opposites, ironically they contain an almost identical subtext: the power of cross-racial female bonds in opposition to the male sphere. Whether black and white women are hiding liquor from men or making the slave hunter wait for his dinner, they challenge the patriarchy and suggest an active, energetic contrast to black male acceptance of it. It is an even greater irony that these fictional women and their relationships can be put to such diverse polemic purposes. These female bonds reflect, either directly or by implication, the institution of slavery as familial and antifamilial, kind and cruel, moral and immoral. Yet this second irony is a comment also upon the nature of these two novels. Both sentimentalize and simplify the real world of human bondage and its snares of sexual jealousy, fury, and distrust that engulfed and entrapped southern women black and white. “The swirl of this stream—history, nightmare, accountability” was surely a “current angrier and more multiform than the surface shows,”³⁹ or than Stowe or Eastman would have us see.

Notes

1. Richard Beale Davis, “Mrs. Stowe's Characters-In-Situations and a Southern Literary Tradition,” in Essays on American Literature in Honor of Jay B. Hubbell, ed. Clarence Gohdes (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1967), p. 109. Like Eastman, the writers of many of these novels apparently read Uncle Tom's Cabin in serial form and wrote and published their fictional responses within one year.

2. Baldwin, “Everybody's Protest Novel” [Partisan Review 16 (June 1949)], pp. 578-85.

3. See Charles Foster, The Rungless Ladder: Harriet Beecher Stowe and New England Puritanism (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1954); Helen Papashivly, All the Happy Endings: A Study of the Domestic Novel in America, the Women Who Wrote It, the Women Who Read It, in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Harper, 1956); Ernest Cassara, “The Rehabilitation of Uncle Tom: Significant Themes in Mrs. Stowe's Antislavery Novel,” CLA Journal [College Language Association Journal] 57 (Dec. 1973): 230-40; Thomas Graham, “Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Question of Race,” New England Quarterly 46 (Dec. 1973): 614-22; David Levin, “American Fiction as Historical Evidence: Reflections on Uncle Tom's Cabin,” Negro American Literature Forum 5 (Winter 1972): 132-36, 156; and Cushing Strout, “Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Portent of Millennium,” Yale Review 57 (Spring 1968): 375-85.

4. The emotional realities of the cross-racial relationships of white and black women during the mid-nineteenth century are more clearly reflected in their autobiographical writings, which will be examined in Chapter 2, but even there the writers' purposes in composing and publishing the diaries and slave narratives often modify such realities, or create new ones, and thereby produce works which, like most autobiographical writings, are more interesting as psychological studies than historical treatises.

5. Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Key to “Uncle Tom's Cabin” (Boston: John P. Jewett, 1853), p. iii.

6. For discussions of the plantation legend in fact and fiction, see Francis P. Gaines, The Southern Plantation: A Study in the Development and the Accuracy of a Tradition (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1925); William R. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character (New York: George Braziller, 1961); and Sterling Brown, The Negro in American Fiction (1937; rpt. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat, 1968). For a more recent analysis of the southern chivalric code, see Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor [: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982)].

7. David Levy, “Racial Stereotypes in Antislavery Fiction,” Phylon 31 (Fall 1970): 265.

8. See Catherine Starke's discussion of the symbolism of the black mammy in Black Portraiture in American Fiction: Stock Characters, Archetypes, and Individuals (New York: Basic Books, 1971), p. 251. Starke's chap. 3 is particularly interesting in its discussion of archetypal patterns in black characterization. Other recent book-length treatments of stereotyping of black characters are: Gross and Hardy, eds., Images of the Negro in American Literature [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1966]; George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971); and Jean Yellin, The Intricate Knot: Black Figures in American Literature, 1776-1863 (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1972). Most work in this area is built on Brown's The Negro in American Fiction.

9. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee, pp. 162-63.

10. Starke, Black Portraiture in American Fiction, p. 30.

11. Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860,” American Quarterly 18 (Summer 1966): 152.

12. For extended analyses of the female sphere in Uncle Tom's Cabin, see Alice C. Crozier, The Novels of Harriet Beecher Stowe (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1969); and Elizabeth Ammons, “Heroines in Uncle Tom's Cabin,” in Critical Essays on Harriet Beecher Stowe, ed. Elizabeth Ammons (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980), pp. 152-68.

13. Levin, “American Fiction as Historical Evidence,” p. 135.

14. Davis, “Mrs. Stowe's Characters-In-Situations,” p. 109.

15. Foster, The Rungless Ladder, p. 40.

16. Both Crozier and Ammons discuss this opposition in the novel of male and female spheres.

17. Nina Baym, Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820-1870 (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1978), p. 49.

18. Stowe, Key, pp. 8 and 12.

19. Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin, p. 13. Subsequent references will be designated parenthetically.

20. Stowe, Key, p. 133.

21. Levin, “American Fiction,” p. 154.

22. George Fredrickson writes: “The tyranny of slaveholders over affectionate and forgiving blacks seemed to be matched only by the brutality of males who took advantage of feminine tenderness and devotion; and the romantic reformist concept of female ‘superiority’ that developed during this period was very similar to the notion of the moral and spiritual preeminence of the Negro” (The Black Image, p. 114).

23. John Adams' Harriet Beecher Stowe (New York: Twayne, 1963) is one of several literary biographies to propound this theory. See also Forrest Wilson, Crusader in Crinoline: The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1941); Foster, The Rungless Ladder; Edward Wagenknecht, Harriet Beecher Stowe: The Known and the Unknown (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965); and E. Bruce Kirkham, The Building of “Uncle Tom's Cabin” (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1977).

24. Stowe's writing was a valuable source of extra income. Uncle Tom's Cabin, she hoped, would provide enough money for a silk dress. (Wilson, Cavalier and Yankee, p. 277).

25. See Ammons, “Heroines in Uncle Tom's Cabin,” p. 163. Kathryn Kish Sklar first used the term domestic feminism to characterize Catharine Beecher in Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New York: Norton, 1973). In her article “Four Novels of Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Androgyny,” Laurie Crumpacker discusses how domestic feminism fits with the notions of female identity reflected in Stowe's life and work. See American Novelists Revisited: Essays in Feminist Criticism, ed. Fritz Fleischmann (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982), pp. 78-106.

26. Quoted in Samuel Sillen, Women against Slavery (New York: Masses & Mainstream, 1955), p. 39. See also Jean Lebedun, “Harriet Beecher Stowe's Interest in Sojourner Truth,” American Literature 46 (Nov. 1974): 362-63.

27. Severn Duvall, “Uncle Tom's Cabin: The Sinister Side of the Patriarchy,” in Gross and Hardy, eds., Images of the Negro in American Literature, pp. 175-79. Reprinted from New England Quarterly 36 (1963): 3-22.

    Perhaps the most accurate measure of the feminist undercurrents in Uncle Tom's Cabin and of the impact of a woman's having extended the literary and cultural spheres prescribed for female fiction in order to castigate what was basically a patriarchal system may be found in some of the argumentum ad feminam responses to the book. The Weekly Picayune of New Orleans, 30 August 1852, labeled Stowe's authorship “a desecration of woman's nature … a sorry and a rare sight even in this age of feminine aspirations to rivalry with man in all his harshest of traits and all his most unamiable pursuits.” From the Southern Literary Messenger of June 1853 came the vituperative attack characterizing Stowe as “an obscure Yankee schoolmistress, eaten up with fanaticism, festering with the malignant virus of abolitionism, self-sanctified by the virtues of a Pharisaic religion devoted to the assertion of women's rights, and an enthusiastic believer in many neoteric heresies.”

    Quoted in Arthur Maurice, “Famous Novels and Their Contemporary Critics: Uncle Tom's Cabin,” Bookman 17 (Mar. 1903): 26, 23-24.

    Most scholars attribute to William Gilmore Simms the anonymous “A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin,” Southern Quarterly Review 7 (July 1853): 214-54, in which Stowe's Key, as well as Uncle Tom's Cabin, are soundly criticized as being the work of a “woman-reasoner.” See Severn Duvall, “W. G. Simms' Review of Mrs. Stowe,” American Literature 30 (March 1958): 107-17, who argues that the review articulates Simms's theories of literature, employs antifeminism similar to his attack on Harriet Martineau, and echoes previous essays.

28. Keith Melder, Beginnings of Sisterhood: The American Woman's Rights Movement, 1800-1850 (New York: Schocken, 1977), p. 76.

29. Liberator, 3 March 1832, p. 34; 2 Jan. 1837, p. 2.

30. Melder, Beginnings, pp. 60-61.

31. Ammons, “Heroines in Uncle Tom's Cabin,” p. 156.

32. Charles Edward Stowe, The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1889), p. 198. Stowe's sympathy with black mothers who lost their children also may have been indirectly aroused by the popular poem “The African Mother at Her Daughter's Grave” by Lydia H. Sigourney, which appeared in the 1834 volume Poems (Philadelphia: Key & Biddle) and was reprinted many times.

33. Stowe, Key, p. 12.

34. Ibid., p. 34.

35. Duvall, “Uncle Tom's Cabin,” pp. 176-77.

    See, for instance, Mary Chesnut's famous remark: “Harriet Beecher Stowe did not hit the sorest spot. She makes Legree a bachelor.” Mary Chesnut's Civil War, ed. C. Vann Woodward (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1981), p. 168.

36. The most complete list, which includes William Gilmore Simms's Woodcraft (which some scholars do not count as a direct fictional response to Uncle Tom's Cabin), may be found in Jean W. Ashton, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Reference Guide (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1977), appendix 1, pp. 137-38. Other lists and studies of these novels are found in Jeannette Tandy, “Pro-Slavery Propaganda in American Fiction of the Fifties,” South Atlantic Quarterly 21 (Jan. 1922): 41-50; (April 1922): 170-78; Margaret Browne, “Southern Reactions to Uncle Tom's Cabin” (M.A. thesis, Duke Univ., 1941); and Barrie Hayne, “Yankee in the Patriarchy: T. B. Thorpe's Reply to Uncle Tom's Cabin,” American Quarterly 20 (1968): 180-95.

37. Eastman, Aunt Phillis's Cabin [: or, Southern Life as It Is (1852; rpt. New York: Negro Universities Press, 1960], p. 111. Subsequent references will be designated parenthetically. The notation is Eastman's.

38. Tandy, “Pro-Slavery Propaganda,” (Jan. 1922), p. 44.

39. Adrienne Rich, “Disloyal to Civilization: Feminism, Racism, Gynephobia,” in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978 (New York: Norton, 1979), p. 310.