Heroines in Uncle Tom's Cabin

Abstract

LATE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY Harriet Beecher Stowe announced that God wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin (I852). The novel by then seemed too monumental even to its author to have been imagined by one woman.1 Earlier in her life, in contrast, Stowe had no doubt that she wrote the subversive book or that she was inspired to write it, despite marital and household irritations, precisely because she was a woman. In a letter to her husband ten years before the publication of the novel, and almost ninety years before Virginia Woolf's famous declaration of independence on behalf of all women writers in A Room of One's Own (I929), Harriet Beecher Stowe said: There is one thing must suggest. If am to write, must have a room to myself, which shall be my room.3 With her room came the mission to write what became America's best-known novel, and the mission fell to her, she believed, because she was a mother. She recalled for one of her grown children, I well remember the winter you were a baby and was writing 'Uncle Tom's Cabin.' My heart was bursting with the anguish excited by the cruelty and injustice our nation was showing to the slave, and praying God to let me do a little and to cause my cry for them to be heard. remember many a night weeping over you as you lay sleeping beside me, and thought of the slave mothers whose babies were torn from them.' One of her seven children died while still an infant. She says: It was at his dying bed and at his grave that learned what a poor slave mother may feel when her child is torn away from her.5 Authors'

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 — 54 citations exist upstream.