American Literature to 1900: Reading Questions and Information

Reading Questions and Background

Friday 4/4/97

Location: [Reed College] [Department of English] [Laura Arnold][ Nation and Narration]Daily Readings

Uncle Tom's Cabin, Women Writers, and the "Great American Novel"

Readings for Friday:

Uncle Tom's Cabin, Chapters XV- XIX (239-325)
Ann Douglas, "Feminine Disestablishment," The Feminization of American Culture: 3-13 & 44- 79.

Background:

In her January 1996 article "Say It Ain't So, Huck" in Harper's Magazine, Jane Smiley argued that Uncle Tom's Cabin should take the place of Huckleberry Finn as the "Great American novel. " (Smiley had reread Huck Finn while she spent three months in bed with a broken leg and was rather bitter about the whole experience.) Her vindication of Stowe's novel over Twain's reflects an interesting trend, though, in American thought and literary culture, of which Ann Douglas' Feminization of American Culture and Jane Tompkins' Sensational Designs is a integral part (see the essays for Friday and Monday). While the New Critics and early Cold War era critics (labeled by Smiley as "Propaganda Era critics") had rejected women's literature as "un-American," more feminist critics in the 1980s and 90s have sought to explain the ways in which a women's tradition is essential for explaining mainstream American culture.

For Lionel Trilling, T.S. Eliot, Leslie Fiedler, and Joseph Wood Krutch, Huckleberry Finn was a "great novel" (Trilling 1950), the "greatest novel" (Eliot 1950) and "a world-class novel" (Lauriat Lane Jr. 1955) in part because of Twain's style and his use of the river, colloquial speech, male-male friendships (Smiley 61-62). Smiley rejects these criteria, though, because, "to invest The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with 'greatness' is to underwrite the very simplistic and evasive theory of what racism is and to promulgate it, philosophically , in school and the media as well as in academic journals" (Smiley 63). For Smiley, Uncle Tom's Cabin is a better candidate for the position of the "great American novel" because it (and slavery) is "clearly and unmistakably a tragedy. No whitewash, no secrets, but evil, suffering, imagination, endurance, and redemption--just like life"--in essence it is a didactic, religious, sentimental novel (Smiley 67). While she does not articulate it as such, what Smiley is arguing, in part, is that Uncle Tom's Cabin is "great" because it reflects values that nineteenth-century readers would have identified with the cult of domesticity (see below). Smiley argues that "if 'great' literature has any purpose, it is to help us face up to our responsibilities instead of enabling us to avoid them once again by lighting out for the territory" (Smiley 67). Do you agree with such an assessment? What are the ramifications of such a pronouncement? What does it say about America and American culture? Does Uncle Tom's Cabin live up to such a call? If so where and how?

The Cult of Domesticity and True Womanhood (1820-1860):

1. Ideology presented in women's magazines, gift annuals, and religious literature.

2. Four cardinal virtues: piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity

A. Religion as women's "divine right," gift from God: Women work to redeem the nation and world. (Separate/Different but Equal)

B. Purity: in women's magazines, derangement often follows of virtue.

Sentimental Novels tell of destruction of those who are haphazard about their virtue.

C. Submission: women are weak and timid and in need of protection: "true feminine genius is ever timid, doubtful, and clingingly dependent; a perpetual childhood" (Advice Manual to young girls) Women should be seen and not heard.

D. Domesticity: a woman's place is the home. Women should be comforters and nurturers, Books are dangerous--needlepoint is good.

3. Exemplars of "True Womanhood" were patriots, and its opponents were enemies "of God, of civilization, and of the Republic."

Bibliography

Smiley, Jane, "Say It Ain't So, Huck," Harper's vol. 292 No. 1748. Jan 1996: 61-70.

Welter, Barbara. Dimity Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century.

Athens: Ohio UP, 1976: 21-41.

Click here to see a copy of the syllabus

Laura.Arnold@Reed.edu