AML
4503: American Romanticism
Spring 2001
Prof. Bruce Harvey
WHY
HARRIET BEECHER STOWE'S UNCLE TOM'S CABIN
WAS SO POPULAR IN THE 19th-CENTURY AND WHY IT CONTINUES TO BE POPULAR
(DON'T FORGET TO CHECK OUT THE STOWE WEBSITES LISTED IN THE AUTHOR LINK SECTION)
1) It yoked the most important political issue of the day--slavery (one could respond with outrage, racialist paternalism, or voyeurism when reading about the abuse of Uncle Tom and the other black characters)--to
2) the religious ethos of Christ's love, redemptive power, and sacrifice to, in turn,
3) a "female" value-system or aesthetic that sanctified the home, sentimentality, and maternal love: the values of the heart vs. patriarchal cruelty/capitalist complicity in slave system).
WHY UTC IS AT ONCE RADICAL AND CONSERVATIVE/EVEN RACIST
--it rewrites the story of Christic sacrifice as the story of a slave: that is radical
--it makes the main character's power one of passive resistance or passive transcendence as it were: Tom's death does not change the status quo of the slavery system within the confines of the novel
UTC'S
CONNECTION TO ROMANTICISM
(READ THE HANDOUTS ON "AMERICAN ROMANTICISM" AND "AMERICAN
RENAISSANCE"!!!)
--Romanticism, most fundamentally, is about interior psychological or
metaphysical freedom or what inhibits that freedom
--Our syllabus intentionally juxtaposes
Douglass and Stowe, who write about political freedom
--Yet Stowe's vision is not all that far
from Transcendentalism in some respects
--Emerson advocates freeing the mind rather than acting in the world politically
--Stowe advocates changing the heart rather than direct political change
--Romanticism, abolitionism and other
reform movements, along with evangelicalism/heart-Christianity: all are part of
a larger post-18th century trend towards embracing feeling or
affective states of being
--Poe wants you to
feel claustrophobic, or exhilarated, or dazed as a prelude to unknowable
spiritual ecstasies; in some ways there is very little difference between Poe's
characters' almost ecstatic rush to their doom/transcendence (Pym at the end of
AGP) and Uncle Tom's exaltation as he dies before the whip