Two
days after finishing my reading of Uncle Tom’s Cabin for our August
reading group discussion, it was my privilege and pleasure to meet (in my very
own bookstore, no less) Joan D. Hedrick, the Pulitzer-winning biographer of Harriet
Beecher Stowe: A Life.
Here is an interview with Hedrick on Stowe from the Library of America that
provides a short introduction to the iconic American writer’s life and work.
My
conversations with Joan, following my evening bookstore event featuring Barbara Stark-Nemon, left me eager to read the biography, and I finished it this
morning, having devoured the story morning and night, compelled from the first
page.
In the northwestern corner of Connecticut the roads rise gradually
through heavily forested hills toward the town of Litchfield, Harriet Beecher
Stowe’s birthplace. Like much of her writing, Litchfield bears the strong stamp
of geography and local culture. This is emphatically a New England town.
I’m
hooked. I appreciate a “strong stamp of geography and local culture.”
But
no, I should be more honest. I was hooked before I even got the book, by Joan’s
telling me (and this is a strong thesis running through the biography) that it
was largely owing to the rise of American literary critics like Henry James –
actually, pretty specifically Henry James – that Uncle Tom’s Cabin was demoted to
something less than literature, making it now one of the least-read of famous
American novels. Everyone knows the title, some characters' names ("Uncle Tom" in a stereotype that hardly begins to do justice to his character in the book), and a few
scraps of the story, but it’s presumed to be “old-fashioned," rather than a classic novel. Joan asked me how our reading group
happened to choose Stowe’s book to read. Well, one person suggested it, and we
all agreed.
And
so, owing to a fortuitous coincidence, I moved quickly from the novel to the biography.
In
the New England and the West (i.e., Ohio) of Stowe’s young womanhood, writing
had not yet become professionalized but was practiced by both men and women,
often as what Hedrick calls “parlor literature,” read aloud to groups gathered
in the parlor, groups not yet separated by gender as they would be in the later
Victorian age. This was an important formative element in the making of Harriet
Beecher Stowe the writer.
Stowe’s
years in Cincinnati, on the Ohio side of the river dividing a free from a slave
state, gave her an orchestra seat on the fugitive slave issue, and passage of
the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, signed into law by President Millard Fillmore,
tipped her once and for all into the antislavery camp. The death of her beloved
Charley, perhaps the most dearly loved of her seven children, was a profound
grief, inspiring Stowe’s descriptions of a slave mother like Eliza threatened
with the loss of her child.
Uncle
Tom’s Cabin,
published in March of 1852, “sold 10,000 copies within the first week and
300,000 by the end of the first year.” Hedrick quotes from a review in the London Times, later
reprinted in the New York Daily Times, that the $10,000 the author received in the
first three months of sales was
...the largest sum of money ever received by any author, either
American or European, from the sale of a single work in so short a period of
time.
One
of Stowe’s gifts as a writer, Hedrick says, was her ability to address readers
in an intimate voice. Another was her ability to introduce characters with
distinctive regional voices of their own. Subsequent developments in American
literature, however, made of professional writers’ clubs an entirely male
affair, and reviews by Henry James in the Nation took a “professional
approach to book reviewing” went several steps further: Books, to be considered
literature, or art, now had to abjure anything the critic might label
sentimentality, earnestness, and moralism. Strangely, for someone priding
himself on “objectivity,” James apparently found it possible to pass judgment
on a book, if written by a woman, without reading it: “It was a woman’s book
and he knew the type,” Hedrick comments dryly.
As
the mother of seven living children who also suffered numerous miscarriages,
and as a daughter and sister often drawn into family schemes for setting up
schools, it is amazing that Harriet Beecher Stowe managed to write Uncle
Tom’s Cabin
at all, let alone other books and numerous published articles and private
letters. She did, of course, have servants. And, crucially, her husband and
children depended on her income to keep the household out of debt.
In
her later work, Hedrick notes that Stowe had recourse to a male narrator’s
voice, losing in the process her own natural advantages as a writer. She was
also prone to rushing into print without taking the time to revise and rewrite
that even her husband counseled her would help her work. So it is likely that
the obscurity of Stowe’s other novels today (“Did she write anything else?” is
a frequent question when one mentions her or UTC) is an accurate
measure of their worth. But the same cannot be said of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Yes,
parts of Uncle Tom’s Cabin reflect the author’s prejudices, but the
same might be said of the majority of novelists who hide their bias in the
voice of an omniscient narrator. And yes, the author makes religious appeals to
the reader. But how does either of these features of her writing affect a
reader’s sense of her characters as living, breathing human beings? Can anyone
read this novel and not be caught up in the characters’ lives, their hopes and
joys and fears and sorrows?
Hedrick neither romanticizes her subject nor tears an idol to shreds. She does not oversimplify the personality of Stowe or her culture and time. What emerges from this history of Harriet Beecher Stowe is the complicated portrait of a complex woman, determined to exercise her gifts but often blown off-course by the winds of personal conflict, social fads, finances, criticism (whether deserved or otherwise), and, as is true of almost all of us, contradictions within her own character.
If you read the novel first, you will want to read the biography, of which I barely began to scratch the surface in this post. If you begin with the biography, on the other hand, you will quickly reach for the novel.
Don't forget: this Thursday our guest at Dog Ears Books will be Luisa Lang Owen, reading from Casualty of War: A Childhood Remembered. We will convene at 7 p.m. in David Grath's gallery, but enter please through the bookstore.
