[On March 20, 1852,
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s titanic novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published
in book form for the first time. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful
of Stowe contexts, leading up to a special post on the wonderful Stowe Center
in Hartford!]
On two reasons
why it’s crucial for us to remember Stowe’s second novel.
I highlighted
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred: A Tale of the Great
Dismal Swamp (1855) in this
post on cultural representations of slave rebellions, and as usual when I
mention a prior post, I’ll cut this paragraph short and ask you to check out
that post as a starting point for further thoughts on her fictional follow-up
to Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Welcome back! I
mentioned in that post that I hadn’t read Dred
since graduate school, and that remains the case, meaning I don’t remember its
details nearly well enough to engage them in this post. What I can do, though,
is highlight a couple reasons why the novel should be on all of our reading
lists, or at the very least should occupy a space in our collective memories
alongside UTC. I wrote yesterday that
better remembering Stowe’s decades-long abolitionist work helps us see UTC as far from an isolated text or
moment, but we don’t even have to go outside her literary career in order to do
that; Dred was published less than
three years after UTC and makes clear
that Stowe was committed to depicting that social and national issue through
multiple literary and cultural lenses. Moreover, some of the critiques most
frequently directed at UTC and
especially its title character—his passive acquiescence to the horrors of
slavery, for example—are directly countered by Dred and its title character, the leader of a
slave rebellion modeled on historical
figures like Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner. Between the two novels, Stowe
represents many different forms of both slavery and resistance, and at the very
least we owe it to her to read both of them.
I would go one
step further, however. It’s true that (in both my memory of it and the critical
consensus about it) Dred is a
less aesthetically and stylistically successful novel than UTC, and that may well have contributed to its failure to achieve
the same level
of sales and prominence (although no other 19th century novel
got anywhere close to UTC, of
course). But I would argue that it was Dred’s
subject matter and tone, its focus on a story of slave rebellion and its
pessimistic (even apocalyptic at times) depiction of the American future if
slavery remained legal, that made it a far more difficult pill for American
audiences to swallow, at the time of its release and ever since. Helen Hunt
Jackson wrote of her inclusion of romance within her reform novel Ramona “I
have sugared the pill,” and for better or for worse that sugar is what
audiences have most remembered from that book; similarly, Stowe’s readers seem
to have focused most fully on the sentimental (white) character of Little
Eva and her tragic death. Dred
contains no such sugar, just painful medicine—and it’s all the more important
for our collective health, here in 2020, that we take it.
Next
StoweStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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