Reading "Uncle Tom's Cabin"

This past week, we have studied two literary critics who take a very different perspective on the problem of sentimentalism in Uncle Tom's Cabin. As we have discussed in class, "sentimentalism" is a rhetorical mode directed at the audience's emotions (or "sentiments") to convince this audience of the truth of the speaker's message. Both writers agree that Harriet Beecher Stowe used a sentimental, or melodramatic, rhetoric to communicate her political beliefs: narratives of suffering, injustice, and violence are intended to motivate her audience to action.

For James Baldwin, however, Stowe's "sentimentality" is symptomatic of her hypocrisy with respect to the political subject of her novel. The goal of a writer: "to find something a little closer to the truth...a devotion to the human being, his freedom and fulfillment, freedom that cannot be legislated, fulfillment that cannot be charted." For Baldwin, Stowe's "self-righteous, virtuous sentimentality... leaves unanswered and unnoticed the only important question: what it was, after all, that moved her people to these deeds." He excoriates her novel for this lack, arguing that ultimately, her sentimentality is nothing more than a mask for her racism, her belief that black souls and black bodies are "fallen" and in urgent need of salvation.

Jane Tompkins, on the other hand, argues this attitude towards Uncle Tom's Cabin is characteristic of a "male-dominated scholarly tradition," as critical "modernists"  have been typically dismissive of the genre of sentimental fiction. Although she does not mention Baldwin in particular, she argues that critics of modernism tend to praise the difficult, the complex, the psychological: none of which are characteristic of melodrama. By taking this attitude, one of the most important and popular traditions of feminine authorship in the American nineteenth century is dismissed out of hand. For Tompkins, then, the charge of sentimentality is itself problematic: she associates it with a sexism characteristic of American intellectual life. She argues that to understand the political potency of Harriet Beecher Stowe and other "melodramatic" writers of her era, it is absolutely necessary to re-evaluate sentimentality within its historical context.

And thus a conflict emerges. Baldwin reads Stowe's sentimentality as masking an implicit racism. Tompkins, in turn, might argue that Baldwin's criticism is itself characteristic of an unquestioned sexism. To complete this assignment: please find a passage from the novel that you feel is emblematic of either Baldwin's or Tompkin's argument, or both. Briefly summarizing the passage, explain to the classroom community how Baldwin or Tompkins might approach this section of the novel.

Although you do not need to, you may wish to place your response in the context of one or more of these GUIDING QUESTIONS:

Can these perspectives be reconciled? Is one critic's claim to understand the meaning of Uncle Tom's Cabin more valid, more true, or more important than the others? Is it possible to believe in the truth of both critical responses? What perspectives on literature, writing, or history might be implicit in these writers claims? Please feel free to answer any or all of these questions, responses are due on Wednesday.