Uncle Tom's Cabin: Critical Commentary

Critical Commentary: Who Gets to Create the Lasting Images? The problem of Black Representation in Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Sophia Cantave (p.582)

Sophia Cantave wrote Who Gets to Create the Lasting Images? The problem of Black Representation in Uncle Tom’s Cabin which talks about Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin in a critical manner. She raises several points about slavery and how books about slavery during that time period never fully expressed the absolute horrors of slavery. Specifically, Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig were criticized heavily for their romanticized version of slavery. Harriet Wilson mentioned in her preface, “I have purposefully omitted what would most provoke shame in our good anti-slavery friends at home” (Cantave). I haven’t read Harriet Wilson’s book, but I can attest to the fact that Uncle Tom’s Cabin was too fluffy when it came to the slavey accounts. Stowe surely had a wide variety of characters and shared a good number of views that could have been held by slaves, but it didn’t cover the true atrocities slaves suffered.

The writer acknowledges that the book is a very inadequate representation of slavery [because] slavery, in some of its working, is too dreadful for the purposes of art. A work which should represent it strictly as it is would be a work which could not be read; and all works which ever mean to give pleasure must draw a veil somewhere, or they cannot succeed”. In fiction, therefore, one can “find refuge from the hard and the terrible, by inventing scenes and characters of a more pleasing nature.” (Cantave)

Cantave makes a good point, here. In class, we've discussed how Stowe was more romantic when it came to slavery. This explains why; authors felt slavery was too horrible, so horrible that people wouldn't read it. So by making it lighter, it would then be readable. The only scene that may have shed some light on what slaves endured is at the end when Tom is tortured to death, but even that scene was romanticized with the dialogue between him and George at the end. Cantave claims many of Stowe’s characters were unrelatable; African Americans especially had a problem with Topsy. “Many middle-class African Americans want to forget, or get past, the images of Topsy ‘just growing’ of Sambo and Quimbo, of Sam and Andy, of Chloe and Uncle Tom himself” (Cantave).

Although Stowe’s account of slavery isn’t told as brutally as it actually was, I don’t know if she could’ve written it any other way. In today’s society, it’s more acceptable to be blunt when it comes to real life events, but I can imagine then it was already risque to be writing about slaves abandoning their owners. Another reason, perhaps, slavery wasn't told as gruesomely as it was in the books Cantave mentions is because they were fiction books; maybe people wouldn't have processed the reality of slavery in the same manner had it been based on true accounts. I agree with Cantave when it comes to slave stories being to light when it came to details about slavery. I don't think it was as common to find people who were compassionate towards there slaves, and in Uncle Tom's Cabin, we get four families who either treat their slaves kindly and/or help slaves escape (Shelby, Bird, the Quakers, LeClaire) and only one evil business man (Haley) and one cruel owner (Legree). Cantave helps point out these odds by showing stating how unrealistic the slave stories were due to the lack of cruelty experienced.