This week, I’ve decided to post my thoughts on teaching an important but challenging text. I’m curious to know whether people have found other texts or approaches helpful, and also what approaches seem to work when two or more sessions can’t be devoted to the novel.
In teaching Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) in an undergraduate survey of U.S. intellectual and cultural history, my immediate goals are twofold: first, to use the novel to illuminate the complexities of slavery, race, gender and religion in the antebellum United States; and second, to acquaint students with the ways in which ideas and culture reflect, drive, and are frequently outmoded by social and political change. I have found the book to be a remarkable tool for conveying the importance of evaluating a work of art in its historical context, and for inspiring students to consider how much or little of that context remains relevant today.
In my experience, the novel demands and warrants at least two course sessions. Prior to discussing the novel, I deliver a fifteen-minute lecture on Stowe and the tremendous impact of the novel, using as much contemporary visual evidence as possible, such as illustrated editions and theatrical broadsides of both the novel and the satires it inspired. By looking at pro-slavery and abolitionist imagery (Kirk Savage’s Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America is an excellent resource) students begin to think about how Stowe’s novel challenged and reinforced antebellum whites’ ideas of Africans and African slavery. This visual material efficiently captures how the novel’s reception has changed over time, and gives students a chance to think about the effects Stowe and her contemporaries anticipated the novel having. That last question segues gracefully into a discussion of the disagreements among gradual and “ultraist” abolitionists so evident in the novel.
Despite having studied the period and possibly having read the book in high school, students are usually confused about how Stowe could be both against slavery, and yet racist; a celebrator of African contributions to American life, who nevertheless supported Liberian colonization; and an outspoken woman author who nevertheless endorsed a view of gender roles extremely conservative by today’s standards. To help students make sense of these issues, I prefer to expose them in earlier sessions to short excerpts of texts illustrative of the novel’s social context. Catherine Beecher’s debates with Angelina Grimké concerning the Bible’s position on slavery helps students make sense of the Protestant themes of the novel. Frederick Douglass’s “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” cues students to the dilemma of Stowe’s uncertainty whether slaves could ever be American. The Seneca Falls “Declaration of Sentiments,” published just four years before the novel’s publication, helps introduce students to the relationship between abolition and women’s rights, and positions Stowe’s work on the continuum of the latter. Finally, Thoreau’s opposition to the Mexican-American War in “Civil Disobedience” helps students consider the colonialist implications of the novel. Having already read at least parts of these texts, students are better prepared to appreciate the connections in the novel between domesticity and slavery, race and nationhood, and other issues.
By the second session, students have already begun to evaluate how challenging (or not) Stowe’s views were. At some point, I like to ask students to step back and consider a more difficult question: to what extent does Stowe and her contemporaries’ concept of “race” mean, in contemporary terms, “culture”? This question allows the discussion to pivot to the present. To what extent does our contemporary concept of culture still depend on race? Why is it that most readers find Stowe’s use of dialect offensive, even as many Americans would today insist on the equality of contemporary dialect? When do the politics of multiculturalism become essentialist? These big questions helps remind students of the intellectual barriers to conceptualizing difference not only in Stowe’s time, but also in our own. They serve as a fitting conclusion for our discussion of the novel, insofar as they help students think about the ways in which we remain heirs to the ideas and problems of the 19th century.
Great post Justin. I’d like to know more about the specific way you do this. If my math is correct, you assign the novel, images from Savage’s _Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves_, and at least four additional primary sources. How much time are spending on Stowe?
I have not taught Stowe before, but I’d certainly like to. If I can push you a bit, what aspects of this process do you think would translate well to the U.S. history survey? Is there a particular excerpt from the novel, a handful of Savage’s illustrations, and a document or two that could, at least, get to a few of these really interesting interpretive questions you’re after?
I have taught Stowe before in the U.S. survery, but have never assigned it as reading because I worry the students would get bogged down in the sentimental prose. I spend about 20-30 minutes when I lecture on anti-slavery/abolition, but I use it more as an example of the incredible impact popular culture can have on the larger historical narrative. I usually read aloud the section when Uncle Tom is first introduced to give students an idea of his physical description and his character in the original story. Then we look at a series of images portraying Tom from early engravings to minstrel show advertisements to Hollywood stills, which very usefully show the transformation of Tom from the strong, moral center to an old, complacent slave.
I also used Stowe as a comparative to Harry Potter in a class on American material culture when we were looking at literature as material culture from the perspective of the “history of the book.” Students read a couple of chapters from each book and then I lectured extensively, and very similarly to the US survey, about the history of the evolution of Tom’s character and of popular perceptions of the novel as a whole over time. Students were able to connect to the ways others used Stowe’s characters, how the characters became pop cultural references, the controversial nature of both books, and the connections of both books across the Atlantic that reveal the lasting impact Anglicisms have in American culture.
Your point of how to get students to understand that abolitionists and anti-slavery advocates were also racist is a frustrating one I’ve also encountered, though I find that minority students often don’t struggle with it as much because they have a more nuanced everyday experience with racism in our own culture. I usually draw upon good old Abe Lincoln and his various views on slavery, but his consistent racism.
I think the most valuable point you raise here is getting the students to think about the meanings of race and culture today and how they both operate. This is how we can get non-history students to find value in knowing and learning the past, by understanding how it informs their present and their future.
Ben, that’s a great question, and I think Katie’s response is dead-on. If time is limited, I might suggest assigning Chapter 12 from the novel, which includes characters debating the Bible’s position on slavery and the destruction of a slave family (the greatest evil, so far as Stowe was concerned). The nuances of Stowe’s attitudes toward race may beyond the scope of a lecture in the general survey, but an image which efficiently conveys white paternalism, and which would be effectively combined with many of Lincoln’s racist anti-slavery pronouncements (Katie could probably suggest one) is J. Waeshle’s lithograph “Emancipation of the Slaves,” casting Lincoln as the strong emancipator of a submissive looking slave. That image, in turn, could be juxtaposed against the African-American sculptor’s Mary Edmonia Lewis’s “Forever Free,” which depicts a the freed male slave’s masculinity much more confidently. The freedman can be contrasted with his female counterpart to show a view of gender roles that Stowe would probably endorse, bringing the whole discussion full circle.