Why Harriet matters

Study shows ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ merits spot in literary canon but overstates influence

June 12, 2011|By Dan Cryer, Globe Correspondent

Harriet Beecher Stowe imbued the characters of Uncle Tom and Little Eva…

MIGHTIER THAN THE SWORD: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Battle for America
By David S. Reynolds
Norton, 351 pp, illustrated, $27.95

Once derided as a sensational, sentimental piece of antislavery propaganda, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin’’ has been admitted, more or less, into the American literary canon. Overcoming the sneers of mid-20th-century New Critics, the novel now stands alongside the works of Hawthorne and Dickinson. Certainly it has its mawkish moments and a tendency to preach — much like any book by Dickens — but the critical transition is essentially complete.

In “Mightier Than the Sword,’’ David S. Reynolds, author of acclaimed books on Walt Whitman and John Brown, aims to solidify the novel’s reputation, assess its immediate impact, and measure its long tail throughout American culture. He is most successful at reaching the first two goals, only partially so on the last.

Few would doubt Reynolds’s judgments that “no book in American history molded public opinion more powerfully’’ and that its creator, Harriet Beecher Stowe, was the nation’s most famous woman of her time. During the 19th century, her book sold more copies here than any other, save the Bible.

Born in 1811 into a family of preachers and social reformers, Stowe absorbed a Protestantism that abandoned Puritanism’s angry God for a more benevolent “Divine Friend.’’ In an era rife with spiritualism, she embraced a religion of angels, apparitions, and celestial bliss that eased the woes and sorrows of this world. These views would color her renderings of Uncle Tom and the dying girl Eva, her Christ-like figures of religious purity, one black, one white.

Reynolds argues convincingly that Stowe’s genius lay in packaging “daring ideas and images in conventional wrapping.’’ For example, she drew on female types then common in popular fiction, such as the adventurous feminist and the fallen woman, to enliven her narrative, but then reinvented them to create richer characters. Thus Eliza escaping to freedom across the icy Ohio River with her son acts as both loving mother and lawbreaker. “[E]ven the most degraded females’’ (including Cassy and Topsy), Reynolds notes, “attract our sympathy because they have an innate goodness that can flower as Christian virtue.’’

Stowe’s depiction of slaves took them well beyond stereotypes, endowing them with a wide range of character and emotion. Their comic antics and nonstandard English disguised plenty of intelligence and cunning. And Tom, far from a shambling yes-man, displayed, in Reynolds’s words, “perseverance in virtue’’ that blends goodness and power.