Domestic(ating) excess: Women's roles inUncle Tom's cabinand its adaptations

Abstract

In this essay, I examine Stowe's novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, in relation to some of its theatrical adaptations in order to highlight some of the strengths and limitations of her novelistic rhetoric, especially as regards her vision of women's roles and functions in the slavery debate in particular and social life in general. I show how Stowe's attempt to move the slavery debate from the male‐dominated, corrupting influence of the public sphere into the domestic sphere, where it could be overseen by good Christian women, led very quickly to a highly public contest among various interpretations, misinterpretations, adaptations, rebuttals, and parodies of Stowe's book, And this led, ironically enough, to a kind of reformation of the public sphere in the form of middle‐class cultural hegemony over the institutions of theater, art, and entertainment.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 6 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.