Strategies of Influence: Uncle Toms Cabin and the Feminine Ego :: Uncle Toms Cabin Stowe Essays

Strategies of Influence Uncle Toms Cabin and the Feminine EgoWorks Cited Missing... despite the influence of the womens movement, despite the explosion of cook in nineteenth cytosine American social history, and despite the new historicism that is infiltrating literary studies, the women, like Stowe, whose names were household words in the nineteenth century ... remain excluded from the literary canon. And while it has recently become fashionable to study their works as theoretical accounts of cultural deformation, even critics who declare themselves feminists still refer to their novels as trash. (Tompkins 123) In a chapter of her book Sensational Designs The Cultural Work of American Fiction 1790-1860 dedicated exclusively to Harriet Beecher Stowes best-selling sentimental novel Uncle Toms Cabin, Jane Tompkins argues against the prevailing little opinion that Stowes novel is an unsophisticated, abortive attempt to write meaningfully about the peculiar institution which divided American culture in the mid-nineteenth century. Tompkins suggests that the novels popularity, long considered a reason for suspicion bordering on disgust, is actually a reason for paying close attention to it (Tompkins 124). Tompkins makes a good point perhaps Uncle Toms Cabin makes sense impertinent of the bounds of the conventional critical approaches which can only view Stowes novel as an example of cultural deformation. In this essay, I want to discuss the shipway in which Stowes protagonist Tom manipulates and exemplifies the theory of feminine influence (as discussed in Ann Douglas analysis of nineteenth century womens writings) which moderate white women advocated as means for reforming (and in the end subverting) the prevailing patriarchal social system in response to the Industrial Revolution far from deforming its culture, Uncle Toms Cabin actually reflects the rhetoric which the women of the nineteenth century employ to redefine their position in a new, industrialist economy. In her short story Womans Rights, published in the April 1850 issue of the popular Godeys Ladys Book, Haddie Lane explores and defines the concept of womens rights through the example of her Aunt Debbie. Aunt Debbie, exasperated by Haddies sauciness and its rationalization as womans rights, takes Haddie on a tour of her daily rounds to teach her the true meaning of womanhood. As we accompany them along their charitable visits to the sick, the impoverished, and other unfortunates, Aunt Debbies definition of womens rights is explicitly articulated as Haddie realizes the moral meaning of each successive stop. After tour a once-gay schoolmate who now staggers under the weight of her infirm (and abusive) elderly father, Haddie voices her revelation