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>> Alright, let's get started.
So let's continue on with Uncle Tom's Cabin.
I wanted to just go over some
of the things I said last time at the end.
Remember, just a few things to bear
in mind structurally about the novel.
The first is that it has this kind of double plot,
so it's moves both north and south
and again that's another way of reiterating the fact
that slavery is a national problem.
It's not simply something that is a Southern problem
that they need to deal with in a way Stow wants to indicate
that the entire country as Emerson came to realize
after the passage of the fugitive slave law,
is implicated in slavery.
And I think that's one of the reasons
that not only she creates the double plot
but has the worst villain in the novel and argue,
the worst villain in nineteenth century American literature,
Simon Lagree, hailed from the north and to be the embodiment
of a certain kind of market capitalism that just happens
to seize on trafficking human bodies as it's, as it's object.
Another thing that I want you to think about, structurally was
to think about the way in which the idea of Uncle Tom's Cabin,
the title of the book, suggests
that there's something important about,
you might say domestic situations.
This is a domestic novel.
And it's a domestic novel that falls
into the sentimental tradition, which means is
that it's a novel that's intended probable,
one way to think about what sentimentality does is
that it is intended primarily to appeal
to the reader's emotions rather than the intellect first.
I'd say it's, you might say it's a variation on the old,
the old idea that the goal of poetry used
by [inaudible] Johnson or Samuel Taylor Colege [assumed
spelling], well expressed.
The idea is to instruct by pleasing, right,
that literature has, is taken in the eighteenth century
to have adaptic function, but what separates it
from other forms of writing is
that it pleases the reader first.
You, you enjoy reading it and then you realize
that you've had found, had some kind of educative experience
at the, after you're done.
So this is a very [inaudible] item, what Stow was going
to do is she has a kind of analytical point to make,
she has an intellectual point to make about the evils of slavery.
But the way that she's going to make that point first is
by getting you in the heart strings.
She's going to grab onto those, pull those
and then finally make her intellectual point.
See its sentimental fiction, is a form that appeals first
and foremost to sentiment, to feeling and secondarily,
but very importantly, to intellect after that
and it's linked in the nineteenth century
to the idea of domesticity.
So domestic life as this fear of sentiment as opposed to the life
of the economy or of politics, which are meant to be linked
to the life of an intellect or of abstraction, you might say.
Remember she's interested in emotions
and a kind of palpable feeling.
That's what she wants to do.
She wants to create for her readers, something that is
like the experience that Senator Byrd has when having thought
about fugitive slaves in charactertures
or as abstractions or as you know the,
the people you would read about in court cases,
opens his back door and sees a young woman with a young child.
And then sees that child dressed in his dead son's clothes,
has a kind of visceral, emotional experience,
that in the end trumps his intellectual,
his intellectual experience.
And for Stow, you will remember, that is a way, that is a,
a form of improvement.
It's a mirrortive moment when he moves
from being simply a senator who thinks in legal abstractions
in laws and about caricatures from the press to someone who is
in some sense a man and can feel more fully.
So that's one of the other things that we want to say.
The house calls up the domestic situation,
the domestic situation brings in this whole discourse
of sentimentality, but also this therefore the house becomes one
of the central ways in which the nor, novel is organized.
So what we are really seeing is and we'll go through this
in a little bit more detail today is a kind of series
of domestic situations.
So we have a kind of opening domestic situation
on the Shelby Plantation and that presents us
with in some sense a kind of preparation of spheres.
Mr. Shelby is the man who runs the business,
apparently not very well since it's not doing very well
and he's having to sell his slaves.
His wife is a little bit cowed by his, isn't able really
to intervene on behalf of the slaves
that she's been trying to raise.
We see a variation on that in the Byrd household later,
where Mrs. Byrd is able to slowly
but surely what [inaudible] calls influence on her husband.
And we talked last time about the way in which the novel seems
to accept the separation of spheres into a masculine sphere
of economy and business, of politics and abstraction
and intellect on the one hand and a domestic,
feminine sphere that's about education and religion
and feeling and sentiment.
And one of the things that she's proposing is
that in the right state of affairs,
the domestic sphere should promote a strong influence
on the masculine sphere, not that it doesn't seem to propose
to us ever that women should up and becoming politic,
politicians and actually, literally intervene.
Instead, perhaps, that should work as Mrs. Byrd does, right?
That is another variation on the Shelby household
and we see a variety of these different variations
as the, the novel progresses.
That's another structuring thing I want you to think about.
When a novel does something like this, you might say it works
in a kind of factorial way.
The sum total of a novel is, is, is the product of a number
of factors which are
in sometimes variations on a single idea.
This could be in terms of character, could be in terms
of settings, scenes like this.
We, we, you want to think closely
about how the novel has created a system of value
and then explored this system of value by setting up variations
on how these values might be mixed together.
Right. So I said, there's a masculine sphere
and a feminine sphere, the novel clearly prefers many
of the aspects of the feminine sphere.
Right. But not every woman has the virtues of femininity.
It is not enough just to be a woman, in other words
and there are many men in this novel who do have some
of the virtues of femininity
and we see this very clearly in Saint Claire.
Saint Claire household where Augustine
and his wife really seemed to almost switch places,
it's almost like she's the man of the household who thinks
in these kinds of abstractions,
even though she constantly appeals like oh,
oh if you were a mother you would understand, you know.
We understand who the real mother
in that household is and it is not Marie.
It may be Augustine, probably more likely it's Mammy, right,
so there's a, there are interesting things going on in,
in these households in which these, these elements
of masculine, feminine are being reorganized
and tested as a result.
Right? One indication perhaps
that the feminine sphere alone isn't sufficient is
that you might say that part of, of what brings
down the Saint Claire household is
that Augustine Saint Claire lacks a little bit of a kind
of masculine, let's do it now.
He's kind of not enough of a man of action and that proves
to have a kind of tragic result.
And so again Stow is interested in the inter play
of these different values.
She believes in the separation of spheres, but she believes
in a system in which both spheres are necessary.
But there needs to be the correct relationship
between them and at the beginning of the novel
that relationship is a myth.
There's something wrong with it, okay?
That's one of the things that we want to say.
The third thing to say is that there is a kind, there are sort
of three major parts and this is kind of the opening part,
which focuses primarily I suppose on the Harris' story.
Then that long second part which is about the time in New Orleans
and the Saint Claire household, which I suggested
to you last time is much longer than it really should be
if we were going to have a well proportioned narrative in terms
of what action takes place, in terms of, we need to have
to tell a tight story, there shouldn't be that many chapters.
But it becomes, you might say, the time when the novel is,
seems to warm to her subject in which she creates some
of these indelible characters that people tend to remember
and when she allows these characters to start
to in having, become appealing to the reader
if everything is working in your, your,
you're reading according to her plan.
She's then able to bring in kind of some intellectual discourse
that she wants to have.
But then there's this third section that happens
after the death of Saint Claire, the death of Eva and the death
of Saint Claire in which we, we move into one
of the darkest phases of slavery.
And there's an interesting thing,
just to give you an overview, the interesting thing that seems
to happen at the end of the novel in which the very premises
or sufficiency of sentimentality itself are in question.
Maybe sentimental isn't enough,
maybe you need other literary technologies
and in this case it turns out to be gothic.
As the story starts to explore about what the relations
between the sentimental and the gothic might be
and then we'll see at the end how you might say she resolves a
potential conflict between these two things.
Alright. Just a couple, just to get us back up to speed
so we remember where we were last week,
remember that Stow thinks of writing instrumentally, right.
She doesn't mean to be thought of as an artist,
she doesn't have those kinds of aspirations in the way
that somebody might, Hawthorne
or Melville might have been said to have.
She thinks of writing instrumentally at first
to earn money, right, she wins fifty dollars in a prize wheel
and realizes that she can supplement her family income
through writing.
That's one thing.
It's an extension of her motherly duties there,
to help out in that way and later
when she writes Uncle Tom's Cabin, she concedes it
as a further extension of her maternal duties, right.
She writes the editor of The National Era in 1851,
up to this year I have always felt
that I had no particular call to meddle with this subject.
And I dreaded to expose even my own mind to the full force
of its exciting power but I feel now that the time has come
when even a woman or a child who can speak a word for freedom
and humanity is bound to speak.
We can no longer sit on the sidelines, right.
It's come time, the men, the, the inference here
that we might have is that men and ministers, you know all
of these things that are part
of the masculine sphere are letting the country down.
Now it's come the time that even women
and children have to speak.
Alright, so that's one thing.
Retrospectively she comes back to think of this later
on when she writes a preface to an 1879 edition.
I think I told you later on in her career,
when she's very much the woman of letters, she likes to write
about herself in the third person, so she says,
she was convinced that the presentation of slavery alone
in its most dreadful forms would be a picture
of such unrelieved horror and darkness
as nobody could be induced to look at.
Of said purpose, she sought to light up the darkness
by humorous and grotesque episodes in the presentation
of the milder and more amusing phases of slavery
for which her recollection of the never failing wit,
that should be wit, and drollery of her former colored friends
in Ohio, gave her abundant material.
And this is exactly the kind of statement
that people subsequently find problematic, right?
I mean the idea that there could be any milder or amusing phases
of slavery, something that seems anathomous to us now.
But you can imagine it, that one of the things she's do,
she does to both appeal to the emotions, it's not only going
to be to the tragic emotions, but she's going to try
to create things that you can enjoy, is to appeal
to certain kinds of essentialist stereotypes.
Which have to do with the way in which African Americans sing
or dance or certain, you know, certain kinds
of down home practicalities, for example, in Mammy,
in Chloe's kitchen or Mammy's kitchen are,
are things that Stow uses to kind of leaven the story up
and make it seem a little bit less oppressive
than it might be.
And that's one of the things that we should remember
about the, the strategy of the novel is that in some sense one
of the things she's doing is suggesting that this is a time
when these three oppressed groups, women, children
and slaves actually can have a voice.
Needs intervene, but again the style of the novel goes along
with this general idea about influence, they're not going
to intervene directly, bless you,
we're not going to write a tract.
We're going to write a fiction which can exert a certain kind
of influence and part of the necessary trickery
of that fiction is that we're going to have to present,
we're going to have to have some comic relief.
For her, the ready to hand comic relief comes really in the wit
that she finds in African American culture.
Again, today that wit puts us off
because it's been exaggerated so much in the later part
of the nineteenth century in things like Tom Shows
and other forms of, of minstrels on stage that we find it kind
of off putting, right.
So I want you to again think about the ways
in which Stow is finding a set of,
you might even call them kind of literary tactics
that she can deploy and I would suggest to you
that she deploys them rather consciously.
Again, I suggested last time that she was deploying these
as part of emotive act of sentimentality that she learns
from Stern and Dickens, and very much Dickens.
Right, right, if any of you have read Dickens,
either in high school or the context of a Lit course here,
you'll remember that you know, Dickens has,
is a social reformer in many ways.
And there's some very dark things in Dickens,
just you know, think about child abuse in Hard Times
or in Oliver Twist and all of these novels are lightened
by kind of moments of comic relief and by comic characters.
There's a sense in which Stow is trying
to translate the Dickensian idiom into American letters
and that's part of what her project is.
Alright, one of the things to bear
in mind then is this idea of the lowly.
And for her the lowly means not only Africans who are enslaved
in the United States but also other people who are set aside.
Women and children and so these three groups are very much
linked together in the novel's imagination.
And I want you to understand
that they are not incidentally linked together, it's very much,
it seems to be by design.
The novel creates moments
of comparison among these different groups.
And we might say it's, it's a dangerous strategy,
not just for, for you know,
the picture of African American culture, alright, I mean,
not just because in, we can see in the subsequent career
of the novel for African American intellectuals.
This novel became an [inaudible] because it seemed to portray it
as a desirable cultural affect, the subservience
of African American men and,
and women to some other set of values.
But you can see how even in terms of the novels secondary,
but still important, feminist agenda,
this idea of submitting forms possibly a new rational
for the submission of women, right?
And we're writing in a time
when women still have not achieved equal rights,
so you might say for awhile this novel became not at all useful
for feminist thinkers or for people who were interested
in promoting women's suffrage or other kinds of feminist causes.
And again it's only later on in the middle of the 1960's really
that it starts to be reclaimed as part of a general reclamation
of thinking about kinds of writing that don't fit a kind
of modernist prototype, right?
So these are all some of the things that I want you
to be bearing in mind as we think, as we look at a few
of the more details, right.
So one of the ways, to put this in a nutshell, I will suggest
to you that this is a novel that is deeply critically of
and even sets itself against forms of racial
and patriarchal oppression, okay.
I said, I'll say it again.
It sets itself deliberately against forms of racial
and patriarchal oppression.
It does so by tactically making use of a number of stereotypes
that we would think of as racist and sexist.
Okay, it's using what today we would call racist
and sexist stereotypes, I would call them modes
of essentialist thinking.
But it's using the essentialist modes,
which are typically thought of as inclusion with patriarchal
and racial oppression against patriarchal
and racial oppression.
So for example, let's take a look at some examples of this
and you'll see what I mean, I think, very vividly.
Take a look on page, oh how about page forty four,
this is an early example about this, of this.
The little boy walk, comes in, Mr. Shelby says hello Jim Crow,
whistling and snapping a bunch
of raisin [inaudible] and pick that up now.
The child scampered with all his little strength
out for the prize while his master laughed.
Come here Jim Crow, he said.
The child came up and the master patted the curly head
and chucked him under the chin.
Now Jim, show this gentleman how you can dance and sing.
Alright, so that is the master's behavior.
This is the nararator.
The boy commenced one of those wild,
grotesque songs common among the Negroes in a rich clear voice,
accompanying his singing with many comic evolutions
of a hands, feet and whole body,
all in perfect time to the music.
The boy commenced one of those wild,
grotesque songs common among the Negroes.
So today we would say, hum, that seems that like kind
of has a racist tinge to it.
Now, what I want you to see is that,
I don't think this is racist because it's not disapproving
of it, it's not meaning to use this representation as a,
as a rationale for the subjection.
Of anything, of, of African Americans, anything,
it's quite approving of the fact that there's something melodious
about their culture that they have.
And again, you might imagine it as being all part
of the domestic sphere over against a masculine sphere
that doesn't have time for things like this.
Alright, so again, this is, this is again a moment
in which the novel is making use of an essentialist stereotype
that African Americans are have, have a naturally gift,
are naturally gifted as singers
or have a natural affinity towards music.
Things like that.
Let's find another one.
How about page seventy seven.
This is singing also.
There getting together to celebrate.
Middle paragraph, after awhile the singing commenced
to the evident delight of all present.
Not even all the disadvantage
of nasal intonation could prevent the effect
of a naturally fine voices in airs it once wild and spirited.
I take it that that means, you know, they're not trained,
they still have nasal intonations,
they're not tutored in singing.
Never the less they have the kind of natural advantage,
naturally fine voices.
The words were sometimes the well known and common hymns sung
in the churches about, sometimes of a wilder,
more indefinite character picked up at camp meetings.
The chorus of one of them, which ran as follows was sung
with great energy and function.
Die on the field of battle, die on the field
of battle glory of my soul.
That's such and such, so it goes on in this kind of mode.
See if we go on, we could even go on, there were others
which made incessant mention of Jordan's banks, Canon's fields
and the New Jerusalem.
For the *** mind, impassioned
and imaginative always attaches itself to hymns and expressions
of a vivid and pictorial nature.
And as they sung, some laughed and some cried
and some clapped hands or shook hands rejoicingly
with each other as if they had fairly gained the other side
of the river, right.
And we would say there's something slightly patronizing
perhaps, about that description.
But one of the things to say is, the novel in so far
as a novel is attributing something childlike
to the African American temperament,
to the African American intellect,
it thinks that's a good thing.
The two most Christ like characters in the novel Tom
and Eva, both have a kind of childlike appreciation
for the world and for other people, right?
So the novel is deliberately making a link between Tom
and Eva and parted lays the ground work for that
by creating the slightly and tantalized idea
of what the *** mind, as it would put it, is all about.
Let's see, this becomes explicit actually in the next example
that I've got for you, page 135.
This is in Eliza's, this is Eliza's escape,
so it's about twelve chapters into eight, twelve pages
into Chapter eight or so.
In this edition, it's the middle of 135.
Now there's no more use in making believe be angry,
in making believe be angry with a *** than with a child.
Both instinctively see the true state of the case,
though all attempts to affect the contrary.
And Sam was in no wise disheartened by this rebuke,
though he assumed an air of doful gravity and stood
with the corners of his mouth lowered
in most penitential style.
Master quite right, quite, it was ugly on me,
there's no disputing that, [inaudible] master
and misses wouldn't encourage no such works.
I'm sensible, that all about a poor *** like me,
[inaudible] attempted to act ugly sometimes
when fellars will cut up such shines
as that master [inaudible].
He ain't no gentleman no way, any ways been raised
as I have been can't help but seemed alright.
Right. So there's a deliberate [inaudible],
deliberate bringing together
of these two forms of representation.
And you can go on and on, right, the page 253 in this, I'll,
I'll put some notes afterwards
that African Americans are described as exotic.
A little bit later on, cooking is described
as an indigenous talent of the African race, right.
So I want you to see is the kind of racist
and sexist stereotypes are pretty much identical
in the novel.
They're clearly mapped onto one another
and the masculine characteristics
of white male characters are often and, are often
and almost consistently contrasted
with the feminine qualities, not only of white women
but also of black men.
Let's take a look in chapter ten, this is page 162.
I think it's probably the third paragraph of chapter ten.
Let's start with the second.
Tom sat by with his testament open on his knee
and his head leaning upon his hand, but neither spoke.
It was yet early and the children lay all asleep together
in their little rude trundle bed.
Tom who had to the full, the gentle domestic heart,
which wove for them, has been a peculiar characteristic
of his unhappy race, got up and walked silently
to look at his children.
It's the last time, he said.
Now again, this is a moment when we see this kind of mixture
of things, so again, you're going
to say there's something patronizing about this.
The peculiar characteristic of his unsym,
his unhappy race, right.
It's written from a seeming vantage point
of white narrative superiority and yet this is a moment
of deep path thoughts in which the narrative has profound
sympathy for Tom and the plight that he has.
Alright, again, I want you to see how this is working.
These are passages that are designed
to create sympathy for Tom.
And you might say in so far as Eva and Tom are set
up to be kind of Christ like figures, the function
that Eva plays in the novel, is in fact not only Christ like
but in the certain sense,
she plays the role of John the Baptist.
We affect really, onto her, we, we, invest her, we have a lot
of our emotions as readers get.
They get focused on her and when she dies,
they focus some place else and it's almost
as if we've been taught now to have a focus on Tom.
And there's a sense in which his death replays her death.
Lives up even to the promise of, of selflessness
that her death implies, and in some sense, the novel helps us
to appreciate Tom by first finding someone
with whom we more readily appreciate,
a young innocent girl who's all dressed in white.
Shouldn't have that much, almost always dressed in white,
as opposed to Pearl who you'll meet in like next week,
almost always dressed in red.
They make an interesting contrast.
Please don't write a paper about that, please.
But there's a sense in which part of [inaudible] function is
to prepare us for Tom.
That she sucks us in by getting us used to think about Ava
and then we transfer many of those same emotions onto Tom.
There is a slave who defies the stereotypes
that I've just been talking about.
Anybody think of an example?
Yes?
>> [inaudible]
>> George Harris.
Right. So George Harris would seem
to be an exception to this rule.
Except why is it that George is different?
Remember anything about George
that makes him particularly interesting
or different from Tom?
Yes.
>> [inaudible] OK.
>> [inaudible]
>> And?
>> [inaudible]
>> OK, he's and there's something else about him too.
His genes.
>> [inaudible]
>> Right. He's Malato [assumed spelling].
Take a look at page 182 in the chapter that's called,
An Improper State of Mind.
It's about ten pages into chapter 11.
So this is at the bottom of 182.
We were remarkable pason [assumed spelling]
that George was, by his father's side of white descent.
His mother was one of those unfortunates of her race.
Marked out by personal beauty to be the slave of the passions
of her possessor and the mother of children
who may never know a father.
From one of the proudest families in Kentucky,
he had inherited a fine, set of fine European features
and a high, indomitable spirit.
From his mother he had received only a slight Malato tinge,
amply compensated by it's accompanying rich, dark eyes.
A slight change in the tint of the skin and the color
of his hair, had metamorphosed him
into the Spanish looking fellow he had then appeared.
And as gracefulness of movement
and gentlemanly manners had always been perfectly natural
to him, he found no difficulty
in playing the bold part he had adopted.
That of a gentleman traveling with his domestic.
So I want you to see here how he's
in some sense the exception who proves the rule.
He has inherited not only European features
from his white father, but that kind
of high, indomitable spirit.
OK? I want you to think about that and think
about whether it is that the Harris', that George Harris is
in some sense the hero of the novel or whether in fact,
it is kind of a very mixed blessing
to have inherited these things.
Right? Part of what we realize in the novel is
that there isn't, the novel at the end cannot imagine a place
for the Harris' in the United States and they are
in some sense relegated off to Liberia.
Part of it is this kind of weird mixture of George.
One thing that George, George is not the natural,
George isn't something that's not the natural Christian
that Tom is and that works against him
in the imagination of the novel.
Let's take a look at one of these other households
that we haven't had much of a chance to talk about yet.
This is the quaker settlement and it's in chapter,
well it starts, it's chapter 13, which is 214 in this edition.
Let me. This is an illustration of characters
from the quaker settlements and again,
that's Maliza [assumed spelling] right.
So we're meant to understand that Maliza also is very fair.
Now, let's take look at page 222 here.
There's an interesting passage here for us to look at.
Bottom of the page.
So this is about again, twelve pages into the chapter maybe.
It comes after a break.
The chapter, the paragraph begins the next morning was a
cheerful one at the quaker house.
A little bit further on.
While therefore John ran to the spring for fresh water
and Simeon the 2nd sifted meal for corn cakes
and Mary ground coffee, Rachel, Rachel Holiday, moved gently
and quietly about, making biscuits, cutting up chicken
and diffusing a sort of sunny radiance
over the whole proceeding generally.
If there was any danger of friction or collision
from the ill regulated zeal of so many young operators,
her gentle come come or I wouldn't now,
was quite sufficient to allay the difficulty.
Bards have written of the sestus of Venus, that turned the heads
of all the world in it's successive generations,
we had rather, for our part, have the sestus
of Rachel Holiday that kept heads from being turned
and made everything go on harmoniously.
We think it is more suited to our modern days, decidedly.
Right? So she has a kind of matriarchal authority.
It seems to work effortlessly, but does it work
through direct punishment?
Not exactly.
It works with something that's much more like influence.
Come come, she says or I wouldn't now.
Right? Gently.
Just kind of, it's almost like you have, she's just kind
of keeping order on a kind of a system that's chaotic
or entropic of all these particles.
She keeps them from colliding
from one another, with one another.
Interestingly, her authority never seems to be challenged
by the quaker men in the settlement.
Next paragraph.
While all other preparations were going on,
Simeon the elder stood
in his short sleeves before a little looking glass
in the corner, engaged
in the anti patriarchal operation of shaving.
The anti patriarchal Why is that, anti patriarchal?
Another joke.
What? Yes?
>> [inaudible]
>> Yes, I'm just, think about old testament patriarchs too.
Long beard, right?
So if you shave, it's being anti patriarchal That's kind
of a joke right, but it's one of the things that signals
that the whole idea of what constitutes a patriarch
and who usually runs settlements like this,
is on the novels mind.
Just through that little grace note.
If you will.
Everything went on socialably.
So quietly, so harmoniously in the great kitchen.
It seemed so pleasant to everyone
to do just what they were doing.
There was such an atmosphere of mutual confidence
and good fellowship, everywhere.
Even the knives and forks had a social clatter as they went
on to the table and the chicken and ham had a cheerful
and joyous fizzle in the pan,
as if they rather enjoyed being cooked than otherwise.
Seems like a little one of those kind
of like Warner Brothers cartoons.
Right? Something happy about it.
It's just about as unrealistic as a cartoon as well
or you might say, for the novels imagination, it understands it
as a kind of Utopian space.
It's not really, genuinely possible and it is impossible
for the Harris' to stay here for very long.
And when George and Eliza and little Harry came out,
they met such a hardy rejoicing welcome,
no wonder it seemed to them like a dream.
And as far as they are concerned, it is a dream.
Right? So one of the things to say
within the topographical imagination of the novel is
that to move, move north, away from Ohio and Kentucky,
to move north towards Canada, is to move towards freedom.
That's one thing that we would say is going on.
There's also a hint that it's also doing something else.
It's to move from the public world of a plantation
or a senator's house, to something more private.
A kind of settlement and a matriarchal settlement.
So to move from a world of power,
in the senator's household,
to a world where power is exerted differently here,
through feminine influence.
And one of the things we might say is that the ultimate result
for George Harris of this move northward,
is the increasing influence of this feminine influence on him.
So at the end, something about that high, indomitable spirit
of his leads him to be tempered a little bit.
And we'll take a look at that again.
OK? Thus, the movement north.
The movement south is a little bit different
and it's a little bit strange as well.
New Orleans house of Augustine and Marie St. Clair,
is as I suggested already, a kind of strange variation
on the opening domestic situation.
In fact, it's probably the most unusual one
because the masculine, feminine seems split
up in interesting and different ways.
Let's see, I think I have,
now one of the things to notice about this.
Is that it is a courtyard in the Moorish style.
Right? So one of the things
that we would say is it's kind of elaborate.
Its even baroque.
There's something voluptuous about it.
These are words that Stowe uses and one of the things to suggest
about that is that it is in some sense a kind of reflection
of St. Clair's personality.
To have this kind of household.
Of house. All right?
I want you to remember this though, this image.
We'll come back to it.
It's got the courtyard, it's got fountains inside,
it's got this enclosed garden space, got these arches here,
these kind of terraces on the top.
OK, that's the way it looks.
We'll see another house a little bit later on that's a variation
on that particular situation.
Now inside the house we have Marie and Augustine
and as I suggested to you, there's a funny way in which
when the values were poured into each of them,
they didn't get poured in exactly the way we'd expect.
Marie is kind of selfish and masculine.
And Augustine has a lot, where his greatest influence comes,
not from his father he says, but from his mother, he tells us.
Let's take a look at the chapter that's called,
Tom's Mistress and her Opinions.
This is well, let's take a look on page 277 of this edition
and that is I don't know, about seventeen
or eighteen pages into chapter 16.
Right? Again think about how I've mapped things out right.
Where does religion belong in going to church,
which sphere does those belong to.
Marie kind of knows what the values
of the feminine sphere is supposed to be.
She knows what she's supposed to be,
she just in some sense chooses not to do it
or rather she chooses to manipulate those values
to generate sentiment or sympathy for herself.
Right? As opposed to someone earlier, even Emily Shelby
and certainly Misses Bird, these are values
in which they seem sincerely to live, Marie's seems to have kind
of a relationship to bad faith to some of these values.
So, top of the page.
Ava looked down, cast an aggrieve and turned slowly.
I say, Marie, let the child alone.
She shall do as she pleases, say St. Clair.
St. Clair, how will she ever get along in the world, said Marie.
Well, Lord knows, said St. Clair, but she'll get along
in heaven better than you or I.
Oh papa don't, said Ava, softly touching his elbow.
It troubles mother.
Well cousin, are you ready to go to the meeting?,
said Miss Ophelia [assumed spelling],
turning square about on St. Clair.
I'm not going, thank you.
Ah, I do wish St. Clair ever would go to church, said Marie,
but he hasn't a particle of religion about him.
It really isn't respectable I know it, said St. Clair.
You ladies go to church to learn how to get along
in the world I suppose and your piety sheds respectability
on us.
If I did go at all, I would go where Mamie goes.
There's something to keep a fellow awake there at least.
What? Those shouting methodists.
Horrible, said Marie.
Anything but the dead sea of your respectable churches Marie.
Positively, it's too much to ask of a man.
Ava, do you like to go?
Come stay at home and play with me.
Thank you papa, but I'd rather go to church.
Isn't it dreadful tiresome, said St. Clair?
Well I think it is tiresome some,
said Ava, and I'm sleepy, too.
But I try to keep awake.
Right out of the mouths of babes.
What do you go for then?
Why you know papa, she said in a whisper.
Cousin told me that God wants to have us
and he gives us everything you know.
And it isn't much to do it if he wants us to.
It isn't so very tiresome at all.
You sweet, little obliging soul, said St. Clair kissing her.
Go along, that's a good girl.
And pray for me.
Certainly, I always do, said the child as she sprang
after her mother into the carriage.
Right? So there's a whole set of things
that are being laid out here.
A whole discourse of respectability and that's part
of the discourse that Stowe is taking aim at.
She hates this idea of Christian respectability.
All these women like Marie who go to church and listen
to ministers and do nothing, at best, about slavery
and at worst, are actually promulgator of slavery
in the way that Marie turns out to be.
Right? So there's one thing.
There's the idea that there's a more authentic form
of Christianity that is available here.
It isn't the church that Marie goes to,
it's the one that Mamie goes to.
And immediately you see here, as in elsewhere in this section,
a kind of comparison and contrast set up between Marie
and Mamie Who's the real mothering figure
in this household?
Well there's actually several and they learn
from Mamie Mamie will be one of them.
St. Clair might be another and Ava herself might be a kind
of mothering figure by the time we're done.
Let's take a look a little bit earlier on to get a contrast
between Marie and St. Clair.
Let's see.
Or actually no, just let's press a little bit further
on this idea of Christian respectability.
This is page 208 in Incident of Lawful Trade.
And it's a moment that should remind us of the way in which,
this should remind us in the way that,
that Stowe abraids the south for their attitudes
and the moment then she props up senator Bird.
This is 208 in the chapter called,
Incidents of Lawful Trade, about sixteen pages in or so.
The traitor had arrived at that stage of Christian
and political perfection, which has been recommended
by some preachers and politicians of the north lately,
in which he had completely overcome every humane weakness
and prejudice.
His heart was exactly where your sir and mine, could be brought
with proper effort and cultivation.
Right? So this is the effect of respectability.
This is the effect of civilization.
We have the kind of Christian
that this traitor concedes himself to be.
The wild look of anguish and utter despair
that the woman cast on him,
might disturb one less practiced,
but he was used to it.
He had seen that same look hundreds of times.
And then she addresses the reader.
You can get used to such things too, my friend.
And it is a great object of our recent efforts
to make our whole northern community use to them,
for the glory of the union.
Right? So she takes a dig again at the fugitive slave law.
And this is an example then again
about what the purpose of the novel is.
People like Marie, people like this traitor,
have become the dominant representatives
of respectable Christianity We need something else other
than that.
OK, so that's one thing to bear in mind.
Let's go back now to just, let's go back to take a look
at Marie one more time.
This is on page 268.
OK and I want to you know, to set a contrast
of the novel as taking off.
Right? So that's a form of respectable Christianity
And there's different forms of motherhood.
There's kind of respectable motherhood, I suppose in the way
that Marie practices it and there's real motherhood.
On 268, this is in the chapter that's called, Tom's Mistress,
about eight pages into it.
Don't you believe that the lord made them of one blood with us,
said Miss Ophelia shortly.
No indeed, not I.
Pretty story, truly.
They are a degraded race.
Don't you think they've got immortal souls said Miss Ophelia
with increasing indignation.
Oh well, said Marie yawning, that of course.
Nobody doubts that.
But just putting them on any sort
of equality with us you know.
As if we really could be compared.
Why it's impossible.
Now St. Clair really has talked to me as if keeping Mamie
from her husband was like keeping me from mine.
There's no comparing in this way.
Mamie couldn't have the feelings that I should.
It's a different thing altogether.
Of course it is and yet St. Clair pretends not to see it.
Right? So that's one of the things.
Again that's a moment of a little irony,
in which we the reader, clearly see it
and St. Clair is not only, is not exactly pretending not
to see it, but there's a sense in which you might say
that what St. Clair is attempting to do is operate
in the way that somebody in the feminine sphere might do.
Through influence.
And we might say that that perhaps isn't' quite
good enough.
All right, let's talk about one
of the more disturbing representations of childhood
and femininity and that's Topsy Topsy of all the characters
in the novel, is most likely to offend people as a kind
of racist representation.
Right? And there's clearly I mean,
is as far as the novel is all about setting up contrasts,
there's clearly a contrast that's set
up between Topsy and little Ava.
I mean Topsy is really dark and little Ava is really white.
And Topsy and little Ava is really well behaved
and Topsy is really not.
OK. Let's take a look in chapter 20, this is page 364 in the OK
and we'll see how Miss Ophelia,
who takes up the care of Topsy, decides.
Now Miss Ophelia is a woman
from the north right, she's a reformer.
She comes in with systems right.
There's not that funny moment when she tries
to make Dinah's kitchen, systematic and of course,
it's disastrous Top of 364.
It's your system makes such children,
said Miss Ophelia I know it, but they are made.
They exist.
What is to be done with them?
Well I can't say I thank you for the experiment,
but then as it appears to be a duty, I shall persevere and try
and do the best I can, said Miss Ophelia And Miss Ophelia,
after this hour, did labor with a commendable degree of zeal
and energy on her new subject.
She instituted regular hours and employments for her
and undertook to teach her to read and sew.
Now, Topsy has her preferences.
She's not just some wild child and these are the preferences.
In the former art, reading, the child was quick enough.
She learned her letters as if by magic and was very soon able
to read plain reading.
She's a little natural Frederick Douglas, right.
But the sewing was a more difficult matter.
The creature was as live as a cat and as active as a monkey
and the confinement of sewing was her abomination
So she broke her needles, threw them slyly at the window,
down in chinks of the walls.
She tangled, broke, dirtied the thread
or with a sly movement would throw away a spool altogether.
Her emotions were almost as quick as that
of a practiced conjurer and her command
of her face quite as great.
And though Miss Ophelia could not help feeling
that so many accidents could not possibly happen in succession,
yet she could not without a watchfulness
which would have leave her no time
for anything else, detect her.
What's going on there?
In that passage.
I mean, what are Topsy's preferences all about?
What does she like?
Reading. With what is that associated?
Man the masculine sphere.
About getting out of slavery from Frederick Douglas.
What doesn't she like?
Sewing. Right?
What is sewing associated with?
Women's work.
Right? Topsy is a little rebel and there's a funny way
in which she's behaving according
to a set of principles.
So I want to suggest to you that even here,
Stowe is reinforcing her method.
Right? Topsy and Topsy becomes a prime example of the way
which some of these values
of masculine feminine can be interestingly blended
and there are certain kinds of relegation of women
to certain kinds of work, such as sewing, that make,
it's another way of saying that there's a tie here
between slavery and what Stowe refers to as domestic slavery.
Right? Now a very interesting thing happens with Topsy
and Miss Ophelia I asked you to think about this.
So the irony of course
about Miss Ophelia is a couple of things.
She walks into the St. Clair household
and immediately she sees Ava kissing Mamie
and she's like, ugh.
You know, well your young southern girls do something I
couldn't possibly do.
Right? So clearly Miss Ophelia is a racist.
She's a northern, anti slavery, abolishist, but former racist.
OK. So what does Miss Ophelia need to learn to do?
She needs to get beyond that category of race
or that thing that puts her off.
She needs to be able to touch and embrace.
She needs the magic of the real presence of distress.
Right? And she is transformed by the death of little Ava.
She actually, it becomes a transformative thing.
She manages to embrace Topsy.
And to be a real mother to Topsy.
Right? That's the story.
Except it's not quite that simple.
There's one step that needs to be taken between having,
you know, doing that you know,
being able to be Miss Ophelia being of a kind
of a real mothering figure for Topsy and where she was before
and it's a legal step.
So what is it?
What does she have to do?
What did she have to do?
Yes.
>> [inaudible]
>> Very good.
She has to own Topsy.
Right? So the white, northern, abolishonist lady,
who reads all the good things, pilgrims progress and you know,
[inaudible] and all this kind of stuff is on her bookshelf.
She has to gain possession.
She tells St. Clair, I want to do it, we need to do it.
He's like all right, we'll do it.
No, do it now.
Right? She has a little, enough of that kind of masculinity
in her, she says, well do it now.
Would that he have done it now for all of his slaves?
But Topsy is saved from the dissolution
of the south household, because Miss Ophelia has
to become the thing that's an aphama to her.
She becomes a slave owner, in order she can gain possession
of Topsy and free Topsy.
So she works within the system, but that becomes the irony.
Again, northerners, if they want to make a change, have to admit
that they are implicated in slavery.
They have to own up to it.
Literally.
And then they can actually do some good.
Right? So that's not accidental again.
It's part of a very complicated way
in which the narrative has set up,
to implicate both southerners and northerners.
And again, the most famous northern implication is Simon
Legree [assumed spelling].
A northerner and ardent capitalist who cares more
than anything else, about making money.
There's a way in which the greed hasn't quite eternalized the
anti black racism that seems to motivate many of the characters,
but he's happy to use it as a kind of tool.
Let's turn to chapter 31 now, the second,
this is the last part of the novel.
It's page 480 in the Penguin.
This is a part of the novel that portrays slavery
at it's most corrosive.
It's called, the middle passage, and it's designed
to in some sense, suggest that Tom's final passage
to Legree's plantation is a recapitulation
of the horrible middle passage from Africa to the new world
that captured Africans were forced to endure.
Many of them dying on the way.
I mean, packed like sardines into these ships.
Influence may not be enough in this section of the novel.
Right? Read the first three paragraphs of chapter 31.
On the lower part of a small,
mean boat on the Red River, Tom sat.
Chains on this wrists, chains on his feet and a weight heavier
than chains lay on his heart.
All that faded from his sky, moon and star, all had passed
by him as the trees and banks were now passing
to return no more.
Kentucky home with wife and children and indulgent owners,
St. Clair home of Ava with saint like eyes.
The proud, gay, handsome, seemingly careless
yet ever kind St. Clair.
Hours of ease and indulgent leisure.
Novel has been recapitulated for us.
All gone. And in place there of what remains?
Another novel, narrator steps back.
In personal construction.
It is one of these bitterest apportionments of lot of slavery
and again, we're going to have one
of these essentialist summing up moments, that the ***,
sympathetic and assimilative
after acquiring [inaudible] fine family, the taste and feelings
which formed the atmosphere of such a place.
Is not the less liable to become the bond slave
of a coarsest and most brutal.
Just as a chair or table
which once decorated the superb saloon, comes at last, battered
and defaced, to the bar room of some fility tavern
or some low haunt of vulgar debauchery.
And again, I want you to see how this works.
Right? It seems to be patronizing,
but it's making the same point you might say,
that Phyllis Wheatley [assumed spelling] makes in that poem
on being brought from Africa to America.
She even uses the same word, refined.
The African American is sympathetic and assimilative.
These are good things.
All right?
They are clearly educable.
A naturally take to these kinds of refinements.
But the logical possessive individualism is such that
if you aren't free, you're no better than a chair or a table
and subject to all of the kind
of vicissitude the property is subject to.
The great difference is that the chair
and table cannot feel and the man can.
Right? So what do you see out of that category now?
Established earlier on in the chapter with senator Bird,
is being redeployed here.
A man can feel.
For even a legal enactment that he shall be taken reputed
and judge in law to be a chattel personal,
cannot blot out his soul with it's own private little world
of memories, hopes, fears, loves and desires.
Right? So clearly there's a kind of natural law that's being
in some sense contradicted by the laws of the land.
Mister Simon Legree, Tom's master, had purchased slaves
at place and another in New Orleans, to the number of eight
and driven them handcuffed, in couples of two and two,
down to the good steamer pirate, which lay at the levee,
ready for a trip up the Red River.
OK, no accident that it's called the Red River.
No accident that the ship is called the pirate,
the steamer is called the pirate.
Right?
Probably it's an actual reference to the moment
in Douglas' narrative where he thinks about the right
or his owner to own him and take any of his wages
as simply the right of the pirate
on the high seas to take by force.
Right? Let's go about seven pages on to a description
of the landscape in the, actually it's the beginning
of the next chapter called, Dark Places.
They're now off the river and onto the landscape.
It was a wild forsaken road,
now winding through dreary pine barons,
where the wind whispered warnfully.
Now over long causeways through song cypress swamp,
the doleful trees rising out of the slimy, spongy ground,
hung with long wreath of funeral brack moss.
Whatever [inaudible] loathsome form
of the moccasin snake might be seen sliding among broken stumps
and shattered branches that lay here
and there, rotting to the water.
The approach to Legree's plantation in other words,
which is very deep in these kind of eerie, Louisiana,
swampy wilderness, draws on Gothic conventions.
I mean, this is kind of a mild version
of that disgusting passage that I read you from Monk Lewis.
Right? Think about it.
It's a kind of dream landscape, a closed world that's separate
from the world of the everyday, somehow cut off.
Repeated images of darkness and death, decay.
Kind of sense of evil portrays this whole thing.
And then we get to the, let's see, that's Dark Passages.
Let's take a look at Legree's plantation.
OK. Legree's plantation is an interesting thing.
It seems to embody decay itself.
Take a look on page 491.
Actually bottom of 490.
There's about three, three and some pages into this chapter.
Legree had been drinking to that degree that he was inclining
to be very gracious and it was about this time
that the enclosures of the plantation rose to view.
The estate had formally belonged to a gentleman
of opulence and taste.
We've seen a gentleman of opulence and taste, right?
Augustine St. Clair.
The estate had formerly belonged to a gentleman of opulence
and taste, who had bestowed some considerable attention
to the adornment of his grounds.
Having died insolvent, it had been purchased at a bargain
by Legree, who used it, as he did everything else,
merely as an implement for money making.
The place had that ragged, forlorn appearance,
which is always produced by the evidence that the care
of a former owner has been left to go to utter decay.
Right? It's decay embodied.
What was once a smooth shaven lawn before the house,
dotted here and there with ornamental shrubs,
was now covered with frousy tangled grass,
with horse post set up here and there in it.
Where the turf was stamped away and the ground littered
with broken pails, cobs of corn and other slovenly remains.
Here and there a mildew Jessamine
or honeysuckle hung raggedly from some ornamental support,
which had been pushed to one side
by being used as a horse post.
What once was a large garden was now all grown over with weeds,
though which here and there some, through which here
and there, some solitary, exotic reared it's forsaken head.
What had been a conservatory now stood, had now no window shades
and though the moldering,
moldering shelves stood some dry forsaken flower pots with sticks
in them, who's dried leaves showed
that they had once been plants.
Now Stowe was drawing here again, on the whithered garden.
Right? It goes back all the way to puritan record.
The idea that the new world had been a wilderness.
It had then become a garden.
But then through spiritual neglect and decay,
it's become this horrible wilderness again.
Right? That whole period of the Jeremiah,
is in fact being evoked by this.
And the topographical imagination
of the novel continues to think about the ways
in which houses might be expressive of some kinds
of larger spiritual states.
In that sense, you might say, this is a Gothic landscape.
It seems to express the interior decay of Legree himself.
Skip a paragraph.
The house had been large and handsome.
It was built in a manner common at the south.
A wide veranda of two stories running around every part
of the house in to which each outer door opened.
The lower tiers supported by brick pillars.
But the place looked desolate and uncomfortable.
Some windows stopped up with boards,
some with shattered panes
and shutters hanging by a single hinge.
All telling of coarse neglect and discomfort.
Now I want you to think about this.
It's built in a manner common in the south.
It's a wide veranda of two stories,
running around every part of the house
into which the outer door opened.
Right? So you can see the veranda out there.
Does that remind you of anything else?
I should have put the slides right next to one another.
But to me it seems
like a deliberate inversion of this house.
Which is also two stories.
Owned by a person who has a kind of rich sensibility.
Has a broke, well cared for garden on the inside.
Legree's house has the veranda on the second floor,
going around on the outside.
And I don't think that little detail is in fact incidental.
I think what these two houses compare
to one another are meant, it's meant to suggest, what happens
to something like the St. Clair mansion, when it's not run
by somebody like St. Clair.
It too easily forms the kind of decay.
It becomes something that is an embodiment of the worst places
of slavery, like that.
So you could see in them a kind of progression.
We move from one place that seems pretty good,
to another place that's awful.
And yet, I think the novel is suggesting even more than that,
by having this kind of inversion you might say.
It's as if this is the St. Clair household turned inside out.
And when you turn the St. Clair household inside out,
you not only get the verandas and garden on the outside,
but what you get is what was at the dark heart
of the St. Clair household all along.
Right? You turn it out and it's a slave holders house.
All right, one of the things you might say is that Legree,
this you know, it's almost in a sense then that St. Clair
and Legree's plantations, function as almost
like type and anti type.
St. Clair's is the type, the fulfillment of it,
the true meaning of it is not understood until we get
to Legree's plantation
and we realize these are both slave holding,
slave holding plantations, households.
And it looked kind of nice, because St. Clair seemed
like a kind of good guy.
But he was irresponsible in a certain way and his actions
or lack of actions have led,
have led to Tom's being relocated
from the one to the other.
But I want to think the novel is creating a certain kind
of equivalent.
It's only a hop, skip and a jump
and an accidental stabbing perhaps, to go from one phase
of slavery to another.
And the over arching point is
that they are both phases of slavery.
All right, so I think that Stowe was very careful in the way
that she describes this house and the way
in which she puts these things together.
Let's take a look on page 512, a little bit further on.
Cassie tells Tom about precisely how isolated he is.
This is in the quadroon story.
Right? And Cassie and Tom were having this kind
of interaction together and she tells him
about how bad things really are.
You see, said the woman.
You don't know anything.
Let's see, here's Cassie talking to Tom.
I do. I've been on this place five years, body and soul,
under this man's foot and I hate him as I do the devil.
Here you are on a lone plantation,
ten miles from any other.
In the swamps.
Not a white person here, who could testify.
Again invoking the conditions of future slave law.
If you were burned alive, if you were scalded, cut into pieces,
set up for the dogs to tear or hung up and whipped to death.
There's no law here of god or man, that can do you or any one
of us the least good of this man.
There's no earthly thing that he's too good to do.
I could make anyone's hair rise and their teeth chatter,
if I could only tell what I have been seeing and knowing to hear.
And so she resolves to kill Legree
and Tom talks her out of it.
Right? There's a part of what he's learned from little Ava.
So she does something else.
What does she do?
She mobilizes one phase of the Gothic Right?
She mobilizes that kind of hoax Gothic that we saw
and we've talked about it in terms of Ann [inaudible],
we saw in Washington Irving's, Legend of Sleepy Hollow.
Right? So just as Brawn Bones impersonates Ichabod Crane,
the headless,
I mean impersonates the headless horseman in order
to drive Ichabod Crane off,
Cassie impersonates a ghost as well.
Somebody out of this term.
Legree's past, in order to frighten Legree
and enable her own escape.
And one of the things I want to suggest to you is
that Stowe is making use, deliberately making use
of that tradition of Gothic fiction.
She's not interested in the, she's not interested in the kind
of charnal house, disgusting Gothic of Lewis
and Walpo [assumed spelling] and all these other writers.
Rather she sees that that's what slavery is about.
So again, you might say Stowe is manipulating literary forms.
She's suggesting that slavery is embodied
by that kind of Gothic fiction.
She takes another kind of Gothic fiction, the hoax kind
of Gothic fiction and turns it against that other kind.
Right? And enables, therefore you might say,
to have Gothic fiction become compatible with sentimentality.
Finally, towards the, so that we get that, right.
Cassie haunting Legree.
And one of the things to notice about this, this the way
in which this works, is that it isn't quite so clear right.
I mean, think about how it works psychologically.
Tom is carrying around a relic, a kind of talisman.
Right? You people, do you remember what it is
that he's carrying around?
Something that he received.
What's that?
>> [inaudible]
>> And what else?
>> [inaudible]
>> A lock of Ava's hair.
Right? This beautiful, gold hair.
And when he sees it, Legree has this kind
of freak out moment right.
For one thing it reminds him of the moment
when he received a lock of hair
from his mother whom he clearly you know,
was a Christian woman whom he clearly didn't treat very well
and whom he deeply disappointed.
And he's racked by a certain kind of guilt.
So that in this context, you might say
in the very deepest form of context, something weird happens
to the idea of influence.
It isn't so much that the outward force has changed,
but it's the way in which they are able to perceive changes.
So that even saintly little Ava's lock of hair,
becomes this kind of weird, sinister thing
in Legree's imagination.
He imagines it just kind of curling
around his fingers if it's alive.
You might say that is a sign, that he is beyond redemption.
He can't actually be saved.
Right? And so that's one of the things that,
I think one of that things that, one of the reasons
that Stowe brings the Gothic into this sentimental fiction
at all is to suggest the limit of sentimentality
and also the limits perhaps even of Christian sensibility.
There are some people who are going to go to hell.
There are some people who cannot be saved.
And perhaps what the novel suggests is that we need
to concentrate on saving those who can be saved and not worry
about those like Legree.
We get to the final moment of the novel,
the one that you might say is the final building block
that Stowe needs before writing on.
Right? Remember I told you she has this vision
that the communion table, after her son has died of her,
of a slave being whipped to death by his master
and forgiving that slave, that master with his dying breath.
And that's what we see.
Although again, mostly the very worst part
of it occurs off stage.
Again, Stowe is not really interested
in dramatizing that for us.
We only see sometimes the aftermath
of Tom's fatal, final beating.
But here's a funny, OK, so we don't need to belabor that.
And I take it all of you are too hard boiled.
Nobody shed a tear when they look at that.
Sad. But think about this from a narrative point of view.
That should be the climax of the novel right.
But it isn't the climax of the novel.
Why is that?
Possibly it's to suggest that if Tom is a kind of Christ figure,
we don't, we can't culminate in his death.
We need to see what he might say is the most important thing
about the life of Christ and the life of Tom,
the after effects that it has.
And what are the after effects that we have here?
Cassie is saved.
Cassie does not become a murderous, Cassie is saved.
Right? Tom presumably goes to heaven and or is you know,
within the imagination of the novel, he also acts as a kind
of force for redemption, even the other slaves
who are complicit in his death,
are kind of awed by his behavior.
But the final thing that we see is that at the end of the novel,
he emerges almost as a kind of symbol.
I mean, there's a kind of weird resurrection of Tom at the end,
when young George Shelby manages to return and we find
out that all this stuff has been going on in the back story.
We kind of come around full circle.
We come around back to uncle Tom's cabin, once again.
And we see that the cabin is in some sense set up as the final,
it's almost like the first domestic situation we want
to think about but from the beginning
of the novel is Uncle Tom's Cabin,
it becomes a kind of symbol at the end.
And there's a kind of [inaudible]
that takes places here.
Right? So this is where we would say,
oh like sentimental fiction, all of this is truly unbelievable.
How could all of these people have been related?
That's part of the sentimentality,
that's part of what puts audiences today off I suppose,
is that it all gets tied up neatly.
But one of the things that Stowe would answer
if she was a novelist behind this, is she would say,
there's a reason that all these extensible coincidences come
to pass at the end.
There's a reason that there's been a kind of controlling,
there seems to be a kind of controlling force
in the background waiting, you know,
happening with the Shelby's,
even though we don't know about it.
What's the name that we would give to this?
The name that we might give to this is providence.
Right? I mean ultimately I want you to see that Stowe would say
that there isn't a such thing as coincidence
within sentimental fiction.
There's a sense in which all of this is part of a kind
of larger Christian plan.
And so finally where Stowe ends up here,
in her concluding remarks section, is in some sense
to break the fiction entirely.
The last image that we have
in the chapter that's called, The Liberators.
That's the second to last chapter, is this image of,
let me see if I have it for you.
Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Right? George is able to reinvoked uncle Tom,
now just kind of a ghostly spiritual presence.
It was on his grave my friends, that I resolve before God,
that I would never own another slave while it was possible
to free him.
And nobody, through me, should ever run the risk
of the being parted from home and friends and dying
on a lonely plantation as he died.
So when you rejoice in your freedom, think that you owe it
to that good old soul and pay it back in kindness
to his wife and children.
Think of your freedom every time you see Uncle Tom's Cabin
and let it be a memorial to put you all in mind to follow
in his steps and be honest and faithful
and Christian as he was.
Right? And that is the form
that Tom resurrection you might say, takes place in that.
One of the things that we realize at the end is
that we've been reading this very long novel,
that we thought was a kind of fiction and in the end,
it may be a fiction but it also takes the form
of something else.
A sermon. And so Stowe in some sense, breaks the,
she breaks the frame of the fiction at the very end and goes
and it's like all those little bits and pieces
of direct address to the reader come front and center at the end
and we find out who the audience for this really is.
Right? So page 621.
It's about five pages into the conclusion.
She writes about herself in the third person.
No longer as the kind of, now the narrative voice takes
on the voice of the author.
The author hopes she has done justice to that nobility,
generosity, humanity, which in many cases characterize
individuals at the south.
Such instances save us from utter despair of our kind,
but she asks any person who knows the world,
are such characters common anywhere.
For many years of her life, the author avoided reading
or put illusion to the subject
of slavery considering too painful to be inquired to.
Right? It's like that think I showed you
from the 1879 preface.
And she goes on, as the concluding remarks continue,
to basically offer up her final suggestion
of what people can do.
And as I told you last time, if you're expecting some kind
of legislative programs, some alternative
to the future slave law, you're going to be disappointed.
The bottom of 624.
She has addressed herself now to the mothers
and daughters of the free states.
But she asks at the bottom of 624, 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.
And I want you to think about a pun
that might be implicit in those worlds.
It isn't quite grammatical, but I think it's a pun nevertheless.
An atmosphere of sympathetic influence encircles every human
being and a man or woman who feels strongly, healthy,
healthfully and justly on the great interest of humanity,
is a constant benefactor to the human race.
At the end, what this novel is promoting,
is a kind of grass roots movement,
linked to Christianity, linked to the idea of feeling
and then feeling correctly and then feeling that you are right.
And it has tried to teach you how to feel properly,
to create that sense of understanding things,
not in terms of abstractions, but in palpable realities.
It's taught you how to respond to narrative,
not primarily first through the head, but through the emotions
and in the end the novel is suggesting that if you take
that approach to reading and to life as a whole,
you will in the end find that you feel right.
That you are in the right and if everyone did this,
it would be a radically different country.
OK, we'll leave it there.
As you go on to Hawthorn, I want you to think
about the differences between Hawthorn's technique
and Stowe's.
How does Hawthorn seem to make use
of allegory while demonstrating it's limitations?