Strategies of Influence: Uncle Toms Cabin and the Feminine Ego :: Uncle Toms Cabin Stowe Essays

Strategies of Influence Uncle Toms Cabin and the distaff EgoWorks Cited Missing... disdain the influence of the womens movement, despite the fusillade of work in ordinal century American social history, and despite the new historicism that is infiltrating literary studies, the women, like Stowe, whose names were household words in the nineteenth century ... remain excluded from the literary canon. And while it has recently pop off fashionable to study their works as examples of cultural deformation, even critics who defend themselves feminists still refer to their novels as trash. (Tompkins 123) In a chapter of her book lurid Designs The Cultural Work of American Fiction 1790-1860 dedicated exclusively to Harriet Beecher Stowes popular sentimental novel Uncle Toms Cabin, Jane Tompkins argues against the prevailing critical opinion that Stowes novel is an unsophisticated, bootless attempt to write meaningfully about the peculiar institution which separate American culture in the mid-nineteenth century. Tompkins suggests that the novels popularity, long considered a reason for distrustfulness bordering on disgust, is actually a reason for paying close attention to it (Tompkins 124). Tompkins makes a good point perhaps Uncle Toms Cabin makes sense outside of the edge of the conventional critical approaches which can only view Stowes novel as an example of cultural deformation. In this essay, I want to discuss the slipway in which Stowes protagonist Tom manipulates and exemplifies the theory of feminine influence (as discussed in Ann Douglas analysis of nineteenth century womens writings) which moderate white women advocated as factor for reforming (and eventually subverting) the prevailing patriarchal social system in reaction to the Industrial Revolution far from deforming its culture, Uncle Toms Cabin actually reflects the rhetoric which the women of the nineteenth century used to redefine their position in a new, industrialist economy. In her shor t story Womans Rights, published in the April 1850 issue of the popular Godeys Ladys Book, Haddie course explores and defines the concept of womens rights through the example of her Aunt Debbie. Aunt Debbie, exasperated by Haddies sauciness and its rationalization as womans rights, takes Haddie on a tour of her perfunctory rounds to teach her the true meaning of womanhood. As we accompany them along their harmonic visits to the sick, the impoverished, and other unfortunates, Aunt Debbies definition of womens rights is explicitly articulated as Haddie realizes the good meaning of each successive stop. After visiting a once-gay schoolmate who now staggers under the weight of her infirm (and abusive) elderly father, Haddie voices her revelation