Other People’s Glass Houses: Uncle Tom’s Cabin Review

The Story

Through the catalyst of the Shelbys, a Kentucky family, falling into debt, the fate of their slaves changes forever. At the prospect of her young son being sold away from her, Eliza takes him and runs for Canada without fully understanding the distance or difficulties involved, trusting that her husband will come after them and they will all be reuinited in freedom. Tom, bound by his integrity, accepts being sold from his family, leaving behind wife and children, trusting in the promise of being redeemed by the Shelbys once they have the means again.

Both Eliza and Tom’s journeys are perilous and trying, encountering friendly hands as well as cruel tormentors. One is reunited with family, the other never takes a free breath in this life. Both trust in God, and both have their faith in him rewarded.

Throughout, Stowe creates thrilling episodes of escape, horror, divine retribution, tragedies, backstories, haunting, redemption and damnation, all peopled with a wide range of personalities and backgrounds for her characters.

The Setting

This pre-Civil War novel details the wrongs sanctioned by slavery in the southern states in 1862, together with the hypocritical and permissive attitude of the northern, or “free” states. Not only that, though, it suggests a way of emancipation that is based strongly on Christian principles found in the Bible, not neglecting political reforms and the hopeful development of the nation of Liberia.

This is a polemic novel about what was at the time an incredibly divisive and provocative subject (arguably still is, though from different angles), and Harriet Beecher Stowe pulls no punches. She is clear from the beginning about her intention for writing the novel, and she does not compromise.

The Execution

Knowing the passion Stowe had for this subject and the admitted intention behind writing the novel in the first place and at the time she did, I can’t help but be struck by what a masterful storyteller and character writer she is. Though this is obviously her most famous work, she wrote other novels afterward, many of which are available for free on Project Gutenberg. (I’ve downloaded several with plans of reading them!)

Her characterizations and even dialogues sometimes reminded me of Charles Dickens, and she by no means comes out lesser in the comparison! In a sense, the comparison is apt, considering Dickens’ frequent asides and harrangues calling attention to social issues in his novels as well.

Alas, if Stowe shares his strengths, she does not escape his weaknesses–there is a tidy “relating” of many of the characters at the end of the novel, who coincidentally find one another and have touching reunions, which although not unbelievable does strike one as slightly convenient or trite. Little Eva in Uncle Tom’s Cabin also takes on a similarly sappy angelic cast as does Little Nell from The Old Curiosity Shop, and beggars belief in the conception of such a character, even while the pathos of her illness might bring a sympathic tear to the eye.

In general, though, Stowe characterizes thoroughly and uniquely, such as the way Haley likes to justify himself as a “humane” slave trader. He compares himself to more unscrupulous sorts and, after the manner of the Pharisee, thinks, “At least I’m not as bad as that sinner over there.”¹ Similarly, the slave holders who deal with Haley would say the same thing about themselves in comparison to him. This is a continuous theme throughout the novel: moral relativity.

“The whole framework of society, both in Europe and America, is made up of various things which will not stand the scrutiny of any very ideal standard of morality. It’s pretty generally understood that men don’t aspire after absolute right, but only to do about as well as the rest of the world.”²

Augustine St. Clare in Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Stowe contrasts these repugnant slavers with the seeming respectability of those who deal with them as slave-holders, but will not allow that the slave-holders are distinct from the traders in moral culpability, no matter how kind or benevolent they may personally be. St. Clare, who initially buys Tom from Haley, is a perfect example of this.

The Argument

While Stowe characterizes Augustine St. Clare personally as good, considerate, and kind, he is participating in what he sees is an unjust system mainly by trying to ignore it or overcompensate by letting his slaves do whatever they want. Stowe describes this as “A sort of chronic remorse [that] went with him everywhere,” but it was “not strong enough to make any decided change in his course; and this very remorse reacted again into indulgence.”³

His case is perhaps most damning because he knows intellectually what is right, but his actions don’t reflect it in any productive or practical way. This struggle with this inconsistency of conviction and action within him thematically drives the central events of the novel, which are humorous and heartrending at various points.

St. Clare’s foil is his cousin, Ophelia, who doesn’t think it’s much use ruminating over things judging whys and wherefores, but that when somebody knows what their duty is, they should simply set to and do it. She’s a poster child for “idle hands are the devil’s playground” and thinks that the laziness it allows in the slave-owners is what’s mainly wrong with outsourcing work to slaves.

Being from the northern states she is decidedly against slavery, but also carries prejudice against black people and seems to be under the impression that simply freeing the slaves and sending them away to Africa somewhere as-is, out of sight and out of mind, would suit the case.

St. Clare points out the obvious flaws in this thinking, given the extensive mental and emotional damage that would still be in effect on those raised in slavery.

“But, suppose we should rise up tomorrow and emancipate, who would educate these millions, and teach them how to use their freedom?… If we emancipate, are you willing to educate?”⁴

Augustine St. Clare in Uncle Tom’s Cabin

He challenges the reach of Ophelia’s touted Christian principles and care for her fellow-man with what seems like a flippant dare to care for and educate the child Topsy, who has been savagely mistreated by her former owners and has developed the habits of lying and stealing. Ophelia takes his criticism of her prejudice to heart, stating, “[O]ne might almost think you were a professor [of religion], to hear you talk,” to which St. Clare responds characteristically:

“Not at all; not a professor…and, what is worse, I’m afraid, not a practiser, either.”
“What makes you talk so, then?”
“Nothing is easier than talking,” said St. Clare. “I believe Shakespeare makes somebody say, ‘I could sooner show twenty what were good to be done, than be one of the twenty to follow my own showing.’ Nothing like division of labor. My forte lies in talking, and yours, Cousin, lies in doing.”⁵

Conversely, Ophelia has no patience for St. Clare’s laissez-faire approach to things and insists on his taking some actions, repeatedly saying variations of “Now is the only time there ever is to do a thing in.”⁶ It’s St. Clare’s taking this advice to heart too late that leads to the biggest catastrophe in the novel.

Both characters, through interactions and experience, come to challenge and develop each other’s ideas into more consistent and morally responsible convictions.

The Characters

Various other characters have similar dynamics in smaller roles, particularly married couples such as Mr. and Mrs. Shelby, Senator and Mrs. Bird, and even Eliza and her husband George. There’s a pattern of moral influence that is decidely religious and female in these relationships, as well as that of St. Clare and Ophelia, but those are by no means the only dynamics or types of characters.

There is the vapid and casually cruel Mrs. St. Clare who believes unapologetically in keeping slaves down to assert her own superiority. There are the plainly principled Quaker couples who rebel against the law in solidarity, to harbour and assist escaping slaves. There are Sam and Andy leading Haley on a wild goose chase with all the wit and feigned innocence of the best tricksters in fiction. There is the highly educated Cassy whose mental strength and intensity possess a strange power over the brutish Simon Legree and leads to a harrowing episode of tormented conscience to rival any in Dickens.

And of course the titular Tom maintaining a consistent and symbolic character of unflagging nobility and self-possession throughout.

In fact, a criticism of the novel is Tom’s lack of real human feeling in the sense of desire for his family or taking personal affront or active resistance to any of the injustices that befall him. But it seems Stowe has done that on purpose to instead emphasize Tom as a symbol, as she does with his cabin as a memorial to freedom. After all, Tom still wishes for his personal freedom over the relative comfort and ease of his life serving St. Clare, whom he comes to genuinely care for.

As a symbol, though, Tom can’t have personal or selfish loves, because he must be free to embody Christ’s love for humanity at large. Obviously it does express itself in love for particular people, namely Eva and St. Clare, but that is perhaps the limitation of the archetype. Tom being a Christ-figure at all is fairly subversive and shocking to Stowe’s audience. But to minimize the overtly Christian and Biblical grounding of her themes and arguments would be as dishonest as it would be a disservice to her convictions.

Speaking of archetypes, I think by now in literary circles there has been enough hue and cry for proper representations of Frankenstein’s monster, who is an educated and articulate philosopher in Shelley’s novel, and there should be some attention turned to justice and proper representation for Tom, who in Stowe’s novel is a transcendent figure of human spirit and identity made in God’s image.

The Conclusion

I don’t claim that every criticism of Stowe’s portrayal of slavery or those who are enslaved have no basis–she resorts to some caricaturization and generalizations that strike one now as dated or condescending, even when they include positive traits. However, I think that where it provokes thought, it provokes learning, whether about the topic or about my own assumptions.

It’s also important to avoid presentism and remember her society, her purpose, and her audience: she is addressing southern slave-holders and northern slavery apologists in a professedly Christian society and presenting them with human characters in a dramatization of what is a reality for millions across the country.

Forcible dissolution of families, exploitation of young girls, dehumanization, rampant abuse, and enforced ignorance and corruption of character are only a few of the things that she covers in various episodes, but their appearance is sobering and enlightening. She doesn’t leave room for anyone reading her book to use the excuse, “But I didn’t know,” again because she has now exposed it.

It is really a call to action as much as it is a philosophical, moral, and dramatic exploration of the slave system and its workings in the lives it destroys. As St. Clare says in one of his more honest moments, “One should have expected some terrible enormities charged to those who are excluded from Heaven, as the reason; but no–they are condemned for not doing positive good, as if that included every possible harm.” Ophelia, as usual, has a practical and direct take: “Perhaps… it is impossible for a person who does no good not to do harm.”⁷

There’s so much more to say about this novel that I can’t hope to touch on everything or give every part or plot point its due. It is a masterwork of the nineteenth century and still has relevance today, not only by reminding us of past unjust systems enforced by dehumanizing others and prioritizing profit and self-interest over morality, but of warning us against complacency about similarly motivated injustice in our own time. It is definitely worth the read.

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This has been my fourteenth Classics Club book review! Check out the rest of my list here.

1. King James Bible, Luke 18:9-14. ↩︎
2. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (The Reader’s Digest Association, 1991), 174. ↩︎
3. Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 192. ↩︎
4. Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 290. ↩︎
5. Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 169. ↩︎
6. Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 285. ↩︎
7. Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 289. ↩︎