Book Review: Uncle Tom's Cabin

After a couple weeks of steady lunch-hour reading, I've made it through the 630 pages of Harriet Beecher Stowe's landmark Uncle Tom's Cabin. Published in 1852, it sold like wildfire, and informed the opinions of generations of Northerners on the nature and evils of slavery. As far as historical and social relevance, Stowe's work is unrivalled in American literature.

However, as literature, Uncle Tom's Cabin can be called weak at best. About 200 pages in Stowe hits her stride, which she only stumbles from in the melodramas of the last few chapters. It's clear what type of book she wished to write: something like Tolstoy or Dickens or Hugo, thick, detailed, interwoven; a dystopic "great American novel." However, her attempts at interweaving are choppy and ineffective at best, and muddling and distracting at worst. The greatest fault is her character sketches. The great writers of the 19th-century (or any century, indeed) were masters of human personality, and could paint a more lively, detailed character than you could even meet in real life. Stowe, while not lacking in archetypes, contrasts and mortality, shows that she lacks the fundamental writers gift, discussing characters at great length without going beyond her initial 5-minute sketch. Comparing this to "Huckleberry Finn", we can safely say that the writing style of Mark Twain, which seems to flow from the mighty Mississippi in style as much as in content, is much better suited to the tenor of the times in the middle states. Even a succesfully written European-style novel would have come off as cluttered and pretentious in the simple American landscape that Stowe describes.

As easy as it is to criticize the writing itself, and as disunited and piecemeal as the story is, we should not therefore simply dismiss the book. It met its highest goal - to expose to the emotions a system too evil for words. Each story within the book (there are many) exposes not individuals but a system. For all her failure to paint vivid people, her description - by storytelling - of the machine of American slavery is commendably compelling. The book also met its goal, not only in selling better than any other book written in the 19th century, but by compelling to action many whose minds were opposed to slavery but whose hearts had yet to be touched with the urgency and depravity of the problem.

InstantReplay recommends Uncle Tom's Cabin to those with a particular interest in American history, and in understanding not only slavery but the abolitionist psyche behind the book.