The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Harriet Beecher Stowe · Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly · a novel of two plots from one sale · a serial in the National Era, Washington, June 1851 to April 1852, and a book in two volumes from John P. Jewett, Boston, March 1852 · scored on the book text of 1852, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Novel of conscience addressed to the reader as a Christian and a citizen; domestic and sentimental novel turned to a political end; Passion story and Exodus in one plot
Mythos
The Passion of a slave sold for others’ debt who keeps faith and dies forgiving his torturers; the Exodus of a mother over a river of ice; the angel-child whose death converts
Phase
From the sale on a Kentucky farm, along two lines that part at once, one north to Canada and one south to New Orleans and the Red River, to a death in a shed and a family reunited abroad
Presentation
Fiction; an omniscient narrator who addresses the reader directly and preaches, chapter titles in the manner of Fielding, alternation between the northern and the southern line, and a closing chapter, “Concluding Remarks”, in the author’s own person
Register
From the comedy of the Kentucky road and the trader’s talk through the debates at a New Orleans table to the terror of the ice, the darkness of Cassy’s history and the grave plainness of Tom’s death, with sermon and apostrophe laid over all of it
Scale
Three families broken by one sale, a nation from Kentucky to Canada and the Red River, the market, the state and the church, and the sacred over all of it
Governing Proposition
A decent Kentucky farmer owes a slave trader money, and to pay it he sells two people: Tom, and Harry, the small son of Eliza. Eliza takes the child and runs north across the ice of the Ohio toward Canada; Tom goes south down the river to a kind master who dies before he frees him, and then to a cruel one who has him beaten to death. The wager of the novel is that slavery is not the cruelty of bad men but a system of property that turns every relation inside it, the kind master’s included, into a sale waiting for its occasion; and that a reader who has been made to feel this rightly has already begun to act.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The novel opens on a sale. Mr Shelby, a decent Kentucky farmer, owes money to Haley, a slave trader, and to clear the debt he sells two people: Tom, and Harry, the small son of Eliza. The first chapter is titled “In Which the Reader Is Introduced to a Man of Humanity”, in the manner of Fielding, and the book’s argument is already whole in it. No one here is cruel. The sale happens because a kind man owes money, and in a system of property a debt is enough.
The book ran first as a serial in the National Era, the Washington antislavery weekly, from June 1851 to April 1852, and came out as a book in two volumes from John P. Jewett of Boston in March 1852. Its sale was the fastest and largest of any American novel of its century. The work scored here is the book text of 1852 as it has been read since, ending in a chapter of “Concluding Remarks” in which Stowe speaks in her own person. Her Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin of 1853, a documentary defence of the novel, is context and not the work; so are the stage versions, the Tom shows that ran for decades and changed the book’s persons.
From the farm the plot divides. Eliza, learning that her son is sold, takes him and runs north; Tom, who could run too, will not, so that others are not sold in his place, and goes south with the trader. The two lines part in the opening chapters and never meet again, and their parting is the book’s plan: freedom and martyrdom as two results of one sale. The form keeps both alive by alternation, now the road north, now the river south, and the reader is never let forget the other line.
Movement II
Pursuit follows, and is first delayed by comedy. Sam and Andy hold up Haley on the Kentucky road, and Eliza gains her hours: comedy of real timing, and comedy about the same thing as the rest of the book, who controls a slave’s body and time. Then, in the chapter titled “The Mother’s Struggle”, Eliza reaches the Ohio and crosses it on the floating ice with Harry in her arms. It is the book’s true summit, physical terror and transport at once, and an Exodus over a river of ice to the free shore.
The free shore is not free. The next movement of the argument is titled “In Which It Appears That a Senator Is But a Man”. Senator Bird has voted for the Fugitive Slave Law; Eliza comes to his house, and he breaks the law in his own kitchen and drives her through the night to safety. Mrs Bird carries the North’s feeling and the senator its complicity: a law of the nation broken by a man who voted for it, once he has a single fugitive in front of him.
Beyond the senator’s house the northern line runs through a Quaker settlement and on to Canada, with Eliza’s husband George Harris, a hired-out slave who has also run. This is the line of the slave who resists, as Tom’s is the line of the slave who submits, and the book’s proof is that one law condemns them both. Here also the book is at its slackest: the settlement and the Harris story after the escape run long, and the narrator’s sermons settle over scenes that have made their point already.
Movement III
On the river south a woman whose child has been sold from her drowns herself from the boat. The trade’s daily act, the book says, is the separation of mothers and children, and it says it again and again, through Eliza, through Mrs Bird, through this mother on the boat. Tom comes into the New Orleans house of St. Clare, with the child Eva, Ophelia from New England, and Dinah’s kitchen.
St. Clare is the most intelligent man in the book. He sees through every defence of slavery and argues it away at his own table, in a set of debates in dialogue; he is humane, ironic and unconvinced, and he changes nothing. Eva dies, an angel-child whose death converts, Topsy in part and her father in part; it is the book’s most famous elevation and its weakest, its visions and its gifts of her hair made for the tears they ask for. Topsy gives her own account of her making, as of a child who simply grew.
St. Clare means to free Tom. He dies before he has done it, and he has made no will. The promise is worth nothing, and Tom is sold at auction exactly as Shelby’s debt had sold him. This is the book’s central disclosure brought to its proof: the kind master’s slavery is the cruel master’s slavery deferred by one debt or one death. The best intentions the book can imagine are written in a system that does not record them.
Movement IV
Tom is bought by Simon Legree and taken to a cotton plantation on the Red River, the house of the master who is the book’s figure of Satan. Legree orders him to flog a woman in the field, and Tom refuses. He is beaten, and keeps faith; he is tempted to despair, and recovers. The refusal is the answer to the epithet the language later made of his name: Stowe’s Tom does not obey, and his endurance is resistance, not servility.
At night Cassy, a woman held on Legree’s plantation, tells Tom her history. It is the darkest thing in the book and has real terror: consciousness under domination, rendered with a force the narrator elsewhere spends on exhortation. Tom will not betray Cassy and the girl Emmeline to Legree. For that refusal he is beaten to death in the shed, and dies forgiving Sambo and Quimbo; both are converted by his death.
The Passion is complete and load-bearing: a man sold for another’s debt, who refused escape so that others would not be sold in his place, keeps faith in the house of the enemy and dies forgiving his torturers. Tom’s endurance under Legree rises to a grave height, and his death in the shed is the book’s highest tragic note. The book’s persons left it for the language: Simon Legree, Topsy and Little Eva became nouns in American speech, and so did Uncle Tom, against the book, as a word for a servile man.
Movement V
The late chapters gather recognitions. Cassy proves to be Eliza’s mother; George Harris’s sister is found in Madame de Thoux. These belong to a different physics from the rest of the book, coincidence rather than providence, the stage’s machinery more than the novel’s law. The Harrises remove to Liberia, and George argues for an African nation, a programme attached to a story whose moral law has been that a slave’s home is where he was made free. The ending is stitched, and the book’s racial theory, which treats some persons as souls and others as natures, shows most plainly here.
Then Stowe speaks in her own person. “Concluding Remarks” addresses the reader as a citizen and a Christian, and states the law by which the whole book has worked: the one thing every individual can do is “see to it that they feel right”. Feeling is evidence; the reader’s tears are the first step to the reader’s act. The domestic novel’s household, its mother and its dying child have been put to work on the nation’s central political question, under the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, by a woman writing in a country where the book would be suppressed and answered across the South.
It was answered at once, by the anti-Tom novels of 1852 to 1854, and has been answered since: by Baldwin, who in “Everybody’s Protest Novel” made it the type of the protest novel’s failure and the ancestor of Native Son; by Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada, which rewrites it; by Morrison’s fiction of slavery, in part an answer to its way of telling. Tolstoy put it among the highest examples of religious art. It has been in print without a break since 1852. The writers who answered it mostly answered against it, and that too is a measure of what it did.
Act III · The Twelve
The spine is required. Remove the northern line and the book loses its proof that the slave who resists, George Harris, Eliza on the ice, and the slave who submits, Tom, are condemned by the same law; remove the New Orleans house and it loses its central argument, that a humane, intelligent, unconvinced master changes nothing. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is how much is attached to that spine: sermon laid over scenes that have already made their point, the Quaker settlement and the Harris line after the escape run long and slack, a run of coincidental recognitions late in the book that the argument does not compel, and the removal to Liberia at the close, a programme attached to a story. Perhaps a sixth could go with gain.
Score: 7.3 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and it holds: slavery is a system of property that turns every relation inside it, the kind master’s included, into a sale waiting for its occasion. Shelby is decent and sells because he owes Haley money; St. Clare sees through every defence of the system, argues it away at his own table, and dies without a will, so his promise of freedom is worth nothing. The second disclosure, carried by Eliza, Mrs Bird and the sold mother who drowns herself from the river boat, is that the trade’s daily act is the separation of mothers and children, and that the free North is complicit through the Fugitive Slave Law. Held below the summit because the book’s racial theory, the gentle and affectionate nature it calls African, is asserted as truth and does not hold.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Elevation comes often and at a known pitch. Eliza crossing the Ohio on the floating ice with her child in her arms is a true summit, terror and transport at once, and the book knows it. Tom’s endurance under Legree rises to a grave height: his refusal to flog the woman in the field, and his death in the shed forgiving Sambo and Quimbo. Cassy’s history, told to Tom at night, is the darkest thing in the book and has real terror. Eva’s death is the book’s most famous elevation and its weakest: its visions and its gifts of her hair are made for the tears they ask for, and the mood is pressed rather than earned. The narrator’s apostrophes to the reader often stand between a scene and its force.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Myth here is built, not evoked. Tom’s story is a Passion, load-bearing from the sale to the shed: he is sold for another man’s debt, refuses escape so that others are not sold in his place, keeps faith in the house of the master who is the book’s figure of Satan, is tempted to despair and recovers, and dies forgiving his torturers, two of whom are converted by his death. Eliza’s crossing is an Exodus over a river of ice to the free shore; Eva is the angel-child whose death converts. The persons left the book and became nouns in American speech: Uncle Tom, Topsy, Simon Legree, Little Eva. Held at the gate rather than above it because the particular often thins to the type, and the servile Uncle Tom of the language is the stage’s figure more than Stowe’s.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The inheritance was the domestic and sentimental novel of the American 1840s, the evangelical tract, and the slave narratives: Douglass’s of 1845, and Henson’s, which Stowe used. The turn was to set the machinery of the domestic novel, the household, the mother, the dying child, the conversion, to work on the nation’s central political question, and to address the reader as a voter and a Christian with a duty to act. No novel before it had been made a political instrument at this scale, and a woman wrote it under the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, in a country where the South suppressed and answered it. The stake was real. What holds the axis is that the formal means were inherited whole: Stowe changed what the sentimental novel was for, not how a novel is made.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Substitute another form and something is lost. The book knows what it knows through the sentimental contract with the reader, in which feeling is evidence and the reader’s tears are the first step to the reader’s act, and “Concluding Remarks” states that law outright: what every individual can do is “see to it that they feel right”. The double plot is knowing form too: the north line and the south line part from one farm and make freedom and martyrdom two results of one sale, and the alternation keeps both alive. Held where it is because much of the form is container rather than instrument: the sermons could be cut without the book knowing less, the late recognitions are the stage’s machinery, and the New Orleans chapters are a set of debates in dialogue that a tract could also carry.
Score: 7.7 / 10
The return has been long and changing, and its nature must be named. The book was read first as a call to conscience, then as a period piece, then by James Baldwin, in “Everybody’s Protest Novel” (1949), as the type of the protest novel’s failure, then from the 1980s as a work of cultural power whose sentimentality was its politics, and since as a central text in arguments about race, sympathy and the white liberal imagination. That is a great deal of re-examination, and it has not exhausted itself. But most of the yield is in what the book did and believed, not in meanings found new in its sentences; a reader returning to the text finds its arguments where they were. St. Clare and Cassy keep yielding; Tom, Eva and the narrator less.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The field is the novel in English and its public life. The intrinsic force is less than the reach: the book reorganised what a novel could do in public, not what a novel could do as an art, and the writers who answered it mostly answered against it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it provoked a genre written to refute it, the anti-Tom novels of 1852 to 1854; it fixed the protest novel as a form later writers had to work inside or against, and Baldwin’s essay names it as the ancestor of Native Son; Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada rewrites it; Toni Morrison’s fiction of slavery is in part an answer to its way of telling; and Tolstoy, in What Is Art?, named it among the highest examples of religious art. Reach near the summit, force well below.
Score: 8.6 / 10
One hundred and seventy-four years, weighed on form, presence and surface. The form is whole: never lost, in print without a break since 1852, its first edition and its serial both known. Presence is continuous and wide: the fastest and largest sale of any American novel of its century, taught across the United States, translated early. Sales and the long life of the stage versions are presence, which counts for little on its own. What holds the axis at the foot of its band: its presence is now in large part the academy’s and the historian’s, its persons survive in the language chiefly as epithets the book did not intend, and much of its surface is argument with the Fugitive Slave Law and the church politics of 1850, fixed to its moment.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Judged on Stowe’s English, with no translation between, and argued from the prose as known, not measured. The command is real in places: the Shelby sale, Sam and Andy delaying Haley’s pursuit with comedy of real timing, the crossing of the ice, the Bird kitchen, the auction, Cassy’s night history. The dialogue is lively, and the ear for several registers is good: Haley’s trader talk, St. Clare’s ironies, Ophelia’s New England, Dinah’s kitchen. The chapter titles in the manner of Fielding show a self-aware making the book does not keep up. Charged: prose at large loose and over-coloured, a narrator who intrudes to explain and exhort, dialect often taken from the minstrel stage, contrived recognitions and a stitched ending. The making carries the scenes and not the whole.
Score: 7.4 / 10
One law is meant to govern, and mostly does: a providential Christianity under which every sale is a sin weighed somewhere, every death of a believer a victory and every master’s evasion a debt. Take the two most distant elements, Sam and Andy’s farce on the Kentucky road and the shed where Tom is beaten to death: they obey the same law, since the comedy too is about who controls a slave’s body and time. The law is strained in three places. The Liberian ending, where George Harris argues for an African nation, sits ill with a book whose law is that a slave’s home is where he was made free; the racial theory treats some persons as souls and others as natures; and the recognitions belong to a different physics, coincidence rather than providence.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Many orders, held and mostly joined. The family: three families broken, the Shelbys, the Harrises and Tom’s, and the St. Clares in their failure. Labour: the cotton field, the household, the hired-out slave, as George Harris is. The market: the trader, the auction, debt as the engine of the plot. The state: the Fugitive Slave Law, and a senator who voted for it breaking it in his own kitchen. The church: the clergy who defend the system, Tom’s Bible, the Quakers. The nation, from Kentucky and Ohio down the river to the Red River and north to Canada; consciousness under domination in Cassy, Topsy and Tom’s despair; the sacred over all. One sale holds them. What is thin is interiority: few persons are rendered from inside, the slaves least of all.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.1 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.0, then Pressure on Tradition and The Encompassed at 8.6 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.5. A text in print without a break since 1852; a reach that provoked a genre written to refute it and fixed the protest novel as a form later writers had to work inside or against; the family, the market, the state, the church and the nation joined in the consequences of one sale; and persons, Tom, Topsy, Legree and Eva, who left the book and became nouns in American speech.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.3. A required spine with perhaps a sixth attached that could go with gain: the sermons laid over finished scenes, the slack Quaker and Harris chapters, the late recognitions and the Liberian close. Next above it, The Made at 7.4: scenes built and driven, carried by prose that is loose and over-coloured at large, a narrator who exhorts, dialect from the minstrel stage and a stitched ending.
The Necessity Cap is unmet: The Inevitable at 7.3 falls two tenths short of the threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 7.7, The Made at 7.4, The Inner Law at 7.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.0 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5 and The Archetypal Deep meets it exactly at 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.4 falls a tenth short and The Swerve at 8.0 five tenths short. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Inevitable, 7.3, and The Made, 7.4, both below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.6. Two of the five summit conditions are met, the Coherence Floor and the Megethos Floor. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 8.1, from a sum of 96.9, in the band of Tier IV, short of the 9.0 that the summit requires, and the Necessity Cap would close the summit to it at any aggregate.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly, scored as the book text of 1852 as it has been read since: first published as a serial in the National Era, Washington, from June 1851 to April 1852, and issued in two volumes by John P. Jewett, Boston, in March 1852, ending in the chapter “Concluding Remarks”. Stowe’s A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853) is named as context and is not scored; the stage versions are presence, not the text. No text of the novel was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on Stowe’s English, with no translation between. Events are paraphrased, and English is quoted only where its words are certain: three chapter titles and one phrase of the closing chapter. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the number of chapters, the book’s length in words, its first year’s sales in figures, the title and number of the chapter of Eva’s death, the wording of Topsy’s account of herself, the number of the anti-Tom novels and their titles, the attribution of a phrase of the later criticism, and the extent of the early translations.