Essay On Mccord's Abolitionist Novel

understood in the time that men dealt with finances, politics, and business while women were the virtuous homemakers who remained silent on public matters. In McCord’s perspective among others, Stowe clearly violated the theoretical separate spheres between men and women by writing an abolitionist novel that changed how Americans and citizens from other countries felt about slavery. McCord further questioned Stowe’s virtue for including mulatto characters, such as Eliza, and claimed Stowe untruthfully conveyed the sexual exploitation of slaves. Despite McCord’s being in denial of slaves being raped by their white slave-holders, this was the truth. Stowe included a letter from James L. Hili that spoke of three instances where the slaves were
raped and instead of punishing the rapist, they ordered for the girl to be flogged. In another instance, Hili describes, “A man…executed a mortgage to my employer on a fine, likely boy…quick-witted, active, obedient, and remarkably faithful, trusty, and honest; so much so, that he was held up as an example. He had a wife that he loved; his owner cast his eyes upon her, and she became his paramour.” This same husband cut the throat of the slaveholder for raping his wife and then stabbed his wife twenty-seven times for what she could not help. When the slave husband was put to trial, a jury of twelve, in which Hili was on this jury, ruled that he must be hanged despite the causes of his actions.
Moreover, McCord declared the entire novel was a “work of fiction” and mocked Stowe’s characters for depicting unrealistic representations as she remarked how Tom was a “perfect angel, and her blacks are generally half angels; her Simon Legree is a perfect demon, and her whites are generally half demons.” McCord was outraged that Stowe chose to represent the mulatto as the homeless and helpless one rather than “the real negro.” McCord claims that this is Stowe’s form of racism as the “mulatto [is] represented as the man superior.” McCord explains that Stowe picked the mulatto to represent slaves rather than the “the real negro” and that Stowe used the slaves with “the slightest possible negro tint” as “an approach to the white man.” While McCord’s explanations are racist, they do convey a partial truth for why Stowe chose to use a mulatto character.
McCord fails in her understanding of the meaning of this because she is a strong supporter of slavery. Stowe may have used the mulatto as an approach to white readers, but this was the most effective method to change the way they felt about slavery by making the characters more relatable, even if by appearance alone. Being able to relate to the characters was powerful in the sense that it would evoke the most sympathy. By choosing a mulatto character, Stowe was not condemning slaves who had darker skin color, as Uncle Tom was not a mulatto and had the most honest characteristics of all the slave characters. While McCord further
claimed these representations were “a fiction in every sense of the word, Stowe addresses this accusation in the first chapter of The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Stowe confesses that the novel does provide “an inadequate representation of slavery; and it is so necessarily for this reason, —that slavery…is too dreadful for the purposes of art.” As far as McCord’s claim that Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a “work of fiction,” Stowe refutes this by stating her work was “a collection and arrangement of real incidents…mosaic of facts.” The characters Stowe created were perceived as exceptional cases, but for the most part, the characters were inspired by true events. In Homeless, Friendless, Penniless by Ronald L. Baker, one of the interviewees could have been a representation of Stowe’s Uncle Tom, as this man was a former slave named Tom who owned a cabin in Indiana not far from where Stowe lived. Furthermore, in Stowe’s Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, she included multiple news articles and interviews from policemen that proved the reality of numerous events that she included in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was by no means a work of fiction.
While many in the South opposed Stowe’s use of sentimentalism, readers from other countries praised Stowe for it and her novel became immensely popular. Among the numerous countries where Stowe’s novel became famous was in France, where French publishers created fourteen translations of the novel by 1853. Stowe wrote editions to France in hope for support, as they had abolished slavery in 1848, five years before her novel was published. Therefore, Stowe wrote prefaces to the French to accomplish an understanding that abolishing slavery was in alignment of God’s will and at the same time obtain the support of France for America’s anti-slavery cause. Granted, the novel influenced France’s majority opinion in favor of the North when the Civil War broke out. A French novelist, Amandine Aurore Lucile Dupin, who published under the pseudonym of George Sand, especially commended Stowe for her use of emotionalism. Sand says that it was for Stowe’s use of sentimentality that “people devour [the book], they cover it with tears.” Although true, the book was critiqued for the flaw of not being “artistic work” (viewed in France as formal unity, complexity, and rhetorical understatement) but Sand conveys that it is the flaws of the novel that make it lovable. The novel was written to be true and simple, for a range of different audiences, and was written not as a whole, but as a succession of events following the different lives of multiple characters. While not written as a whole, the different perspectives of both male and female slaves, slave-owners, as well as those who aided in the underground railroad, convey the slave system more wholly. Moreover, Sand instead praises Stowe’s work for penetrating the heart and filling readers with sympathy for the “poor negro lacerated by blows.” While Stowe aimed to evoke emotions, this is not all that she wanted. Stowe had a clear agenda by concluding the novel with a call to action. In the final chapter of the novel, “Concluding Remarks” Stowe gives a call to action by expressing, “But, what can any individual do? Of that, every individual can judge. There is one thing that every individual can do,—they can see to it that they feel right. An atmosphere of sympathetic influence encircles every human being; and the man or woman who feels strongly, healthy and justly, on the great interests of humanity, is a constant benefactor to the human race.”
This call to action as well as the rest of the novel had an extensive effect on both Northern and Southern societies as countless novels were written by both men and women in response to Stowe’s novel. A majority of these responses were Anti-Tom novels that either defended the lives of slaves on plantations by conveying them to be content with their lives and unfit for freedom, while others even went as far to criticize Northerners for creating white slaves in the working class. One of the most famous Anti-Tom novels was Aunt Phillis’s Cabin by Mary Henderson. Henderson’s purpose of the novel was to convey how slaves were happier in the South in comparison to freed slaves in the North. Henderson denounced Stowe’s statement that there have been countless witnesses who have seen parallels to “the tragical fate of Tom” by claiming that no such witness exists. Henderson claims that the event of Mr. Shelby selling Tom in the first place would have never occurred in reality as “no master would be fool enough to sell the best hand on his estate…even for urgent debt.” Henderson argues Stowe’s idea based on common sense, but in reality, these events likely occurred, there are exceptions, and those who have had to make these difficult decisions due to debt are not likely to talk about such a situation in daily conversation. For Henderson to claim that no such witness exists for such an event is ignorance. There are usually exceptions and she can have no idea either whether this occurs more often than the occasional instance, because slave-owners would be less inclined to talk about such private matters such as serious debt and selling a “slave who had nursed him and his children.” As for Stowe’s concluding remarks, Henderson sardonically answers Stowe’s question of “What can any individual do? by saying, “Christian men and women should find enough to occupy them in their families, and in an undoubted sphere of duty.” The amount of irony in this statement is outstanding as Henderson is a female author who is also writing about the politics of slavery, only she is pro-slavery. However, this further cements the ideas that nineteenth century society had in mind of what women should and should not be involved in. Overall, Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin conveys what she finds to be the acceptable and unacceptable aspects of slavery.
Stowe emphasizes one of the acceptable aspects is that some slaveholders, such as the Shelbys and the St. Clares, truly do care about their slaves. On the other hand, an unacceptable aspect that she highlights is how there are certain slaveholders, such as Legree, who are ruthless yet there are laws in place that allow the murder and inhumane treatment of slaves to go unpunished. Another acceptable aspect that Stowe tries to convey in her novel is the idea of colonization as a possible solution to end slavery but most readers view this as an objectionable solution. Another unacceptable aspect that Stowe emphasizes is how wrongly the public mind views slaves as holding no feelings for their loved ones or children, which is why Stowe set out with an agenda to change this mindset. Stowe emphasizes the misery slaves feel when they are separated from their families and how even when they are being treated fair by their slaveholders, the slaves would still rather have their freedom, as any individual would. Another sore subject that Stowe includes about the unacceptable aspects of slavery is perceived through her use of the mulatto characters to remind readers that the majority of mulatto slaves that exist were due to white men raping the slaves. While Stowe’s novel may have comprised what appeared to be only the exceptions of the slave systems, the reality is that
they are not exceptions but existing cases, as she provides multiple interviews and news article of slaves experiencing nearly the same events of what she portrays in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. While many criticized Stowe for not staying in her sphere of influence, those who criticized the most were female authors who were hypocrites by essentially writing novels in response to Stowe which involved politics and pro-slavery. Most importantly, Stowe accomplished what she set out to do and that was change how the public felt about slavery. Before, Northerners were uninformed about the slave system because it was not a particular problem in their lives. However, when Stowe wrote this emotional novel, she made the Northerners and citizens from other countries care about slavery in the South. People sympathized for the slaves and this book was a contributing factor to starting the civil war as it made Southerners even more angry at Northerners. If it was not, Abraham Lincoln would not have greeted Stowe in 1862 by saying, “So you’re the little woman who wrote this book that started this great war.” Ultimately, slavery was emancipated in 1865, barely over a decade after Stowe’s novel was published. Stowe cultivated readers’ ideas about the acceptable and unacceptable aspects of slavery by using a Romantic Style to awaken the strongest compassion for the oppressed and lead to the abhorrence of the slave system for millions of readers.