Classics Revisited
The stubborn nature of truth
BY RAVI VYAS
Uncle Tom's Cabin, or, Life Among the Lowly, Harriet Beecher Stowe, first published 1852, reprinted in several different editions. The Penguin edition, price £4.99, is perhaps the most user-friendly.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN once suggested that Harriet Beecher's Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin ((1852) started the Civil War. For the 19th century, this was America's most famous novel and Stowe the most famous American author. Sentimentally written, it is remarkable portrait of slave experience, portraying the cruelties and suffering inflicted on black slaves of the Southern plantations, and above all, their basic humanity in the midst of the most terrible sufferings. A good writer, it is said, is also a social historian — the operative word is also. Uncle Tom's Cabin, then, is essential reading both as a novel and as a social document — compelling and dramatic, full of vividly wrought characters, wonderful dialogue in the local lingo, and ideas that were sophisticated in their time and remain so today in large parts of the world.
Stowe's story begins simply — a Kentucky plantation owner gets into financial difficulties and to save his farm, he decides to sell two of his slaves — his farm manager, Tom, and Eliza, the child of his wife's favourite house slave. The scenes of farewells would be familiar to us who have seen the underside of rural India and its grinding poverty where daughters are "married off" to lessen burdens of the family.
Fluctuating fortunes
Eliza escapes with her son, jumping from ice floe to ice floe across the frozen Ohio river in the north. Tom is taken on a riverboat down the Mississippi. After the death of his owner's daughter, the saintly Eva, and the death of his owner in a bar brawl, he is sold to Simon Legree, whose plantation is an agricultural concentration camp in the swamps of Louisiana. At the plantation, Tom meets Legree's concubine, Cassey and advises her to escape. When she does, Legree beats Tom to death for not informing him of Cassey's plans. Finally, Eliza, her son, and Eliza's husband, George, are reunited in Canada at the end of the novel.
But a novel doesn't tell just a story, however suspenseful, full of heroic action and dangerous encounters as Uncle Tom certainly is. It is first of all "language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree". Language that begins with speech, and the speech of the common man at that: spare, frugal, hard-boiled, close to the bone. Here's an extract taken at random:
"Who was your mother?" "Never had none," said the child, with another grin. "Never had any mother!" "What do you mean?" "Where were you born?" persisted Topsy: "never had no father, nor mother, nor nothin." "I was raised by a speculator."
"Do you know who made you?" Nobody as I knows on," said the child, with a short laugh... . "I `spect I growed. Don't think nobody never made me."
"`I's wicked — I is. I's mighty wicked, anyhow. I can't help it."
Importance of ideas
Above all, a novel, if it has to last, must be a philosophy expressed in images. The philosophy may disappear into the images, nonetheless a work that has to endure cannot do without profound ideas. It is this fusion of experience and thought, of life and reflection on what it's all about that makes a great novel.
Stowe's larger purpose was to explore the lower depths of the American South: how the institution of slavery fitted into and corrupted American life in the 19th century. The novel took up the two most controversial subjects in America, black-and-white relations and religion, and addressed them directly and if it remains hugely relevant today it is because of the unresolved dilemmas surrounding these subjects. "The past is never quite past," as Faulkner, who also wrote on the American South, had put it and that's why Uncle Tom is so relevant today.
At one level the novel can be seen as a tirade against the system; Stowe arouses pity, horror and anger in order to get her readers to do something. "You can't just stand aside and do nothing against the injustices that are being heaped on the slaves," she is saying all the time. You have to do something and these exhortations come through in the discussions between characters that develop Stowe's arguments against slavery and oppression just as she develops the complexity of her characters. Gertrude Stein is supposed to have explained to Hemingway that "remarks are not literature"; discussions and conversations where the literary "guard" is down, and feelings take over, is what really matters. (After all, the basic substance of imaginative literature is not reason but emotion which is what Uncle Tom is really all about.)
The substance of literature
It is in the discussions between such characters like Ophelia and Augustine and Cassey and Tom that Stowe develops her arguments against the system and the need to overthrow it. As the passages quoted above show, the language is cold and stark, like the world outside. Truth is stubborn, Stowe is stubborn and neither lets the other down.
Afro-American literature has come a long way since mid-19th century but it was Uncle Tom's Cabin which started it all. No one interested in American history, or in the history of the novel, or the work of women writers can afford to miss this great piece of literature.
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