LITR
4232: American Renaissance
University
of Houston-Clear Lake, spring 2002
Index to Student Research Projects
Ronda
C. Dunn
LITR 4232
April 18, 2002
An
Analysis of Uncle Tom's Cabin: Tom and Eva, Stowe's Two Dying Christs
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, produced in the reddish-white heat of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s inspired indignation, is a mine of nineteenth- century presuppositions and literary conventions, which have often been studied. I think that it is important to note, that Mrs. Stowe continually draws upon her deep New England Christian background, and that especially in the death scenes (those staples of Victorian novels) she models her two main characters upon diverse aspects of Christ as he is presented in different strands of the New Testament. Eva approaches death like the Christ of the Last Discourse in St. John’s gospel, Uncle Tom like the Suffering Servant of the synoptic tradition.
Appropriately for her role as John’s Christ, Little Eva has the Eden color-scheme of blue, gold, and white and a certain likeness to a dove. She always dresses in white, and when Eva and Tom first meet, she seems to him “something almost divine; and whenever her golden head and deep blue eyes peered out upon him from behind some dusky cotton-bale, or looked down upon him over some ridge of packages, he half believed that he saw one of the angels stepped out of his New Testament.” Her name, again, suits her particular type of Christ likeness. “‘Evangeline! rightly named,”’ her father apostrophizes her; “‘hath not God made thee an evangel to me?”’ (I, 262). She is so named (by kind of antonomasia) because she sums up in herself the essential message of the gospel, that of love.
This love is, however, that of a person destined knowingly to death. Christ at John’s Last Supper “knew that his hour was come when he should depart out of this world unto the Father,” and knew “that the Father had put all things into his hands, and that he was come from God, and went to God,” an so he consistently announced his coming death: “Yet a little while I am with you ”; “Whither I go thou canst not follow me now, but thou shalt follow me afterwards”; “I go to prepare a place for you”; “I go unto my Father”; “Now I go my way to him that sent me”; “A little while and ye shall not see me”; “I leave the world and go to the Father”; “I come to thee.” (KJV). Eva has a similar awareness of her impending death, and she also announces it at all appropriate times. “‘I’m going there,’ she said, ‘to the spirits bright, Tom; I'm going before long' (II. 65); “‘I am going, and never to come back. I am going, before long. . .. I want to go, …I long to go”’ (II, 85-86); “‘It’s only a little while I shall be with you”’ (II, 94); “‘I am going to leave you. In a few more weeks you will see me no more”’ (II, 102). In all but one of her predictions, Eva naturally falls into the “I am” format so typical of John’s Christ; and the other statement, “‘It’s only a little while I shall be with you,”’ is almost a direct quotation from John 13:33, cited above.
The emphasis toward the end of Eva’s life also resembles that of Christ’s Last Supper allocution in falling not on the suffering, which will attend the death, but on the death-as-departure. Eva undergoes a few moments of pain and her father a few moments of agony, but this rapidly gives way to a serenity of blessed expectation:
"As St. Clare raised his head, he saw a spasm of mortal agony pass over the face; --she struggled for breath, and threw up her little hands. “0 God, this is dreadful!” he said, turning away in agony, and wringing Tom’ s and, scarce conscious what he was doing. “0 Tom, my boy, it is killing me!” Tom had his master’s hands between his own; and, with tears streaming down his dark cheeks, looked up for help where he had always been used to look. “Pray that this may be cut short!” said St. Clare...”this wrings my heart.” “Oh, bless the Lord! it’s over, - -it’s over, dear Master!” said Tom, “look at her.” The child lay panting on her pillows, as one exhausted, - -the large clear eyes rolled up and fixed. And, what said those eyes, that spoke so much of heaven? Earth was past, and earthly pain; but so solemn, so mysterious, was the triumphant brightness of that face, that it choked even the sobs of sorrow. They pressed around her, in breathless stillness.
“Eva,” said to. St. Clare, gently. She did not hear.
“Oh, Eva, tell us what you see:
What is it?” said her father. A bright, glorious smile passed
over her face and she said, brokenly,
“Oh! live, --joy,--peace!” gave one sigh, and passes from death unto Life! (II, 113).
There are indeed a few motifs that connect Eva with the Suffering Servant. Thus, she refers to herself as a lamb (II, 85) and as a sheep (II. 100), each time in near association with her approaching death. But as we will see, suffering is not one of Eva’s major functions in the book; that is left largely to her correlative, Tom.
Eva is instrumental in formulating and demonstrating the theme of Christian love, which the Beecher family tradition saw as the essence of the gospel- -the evangelium- -and which is unquestionably the leading feature of the Johannine writings. In addition to proving that love is the solution to all problems, Eva also speaks about it frequently and emphatically. Eva, replying to her father’s question, says that she likes living Southern-style with a houseful of servants because “‘it makes so many more around you to love, you know”’ (I, 266). Chiding her cousin Henrique for striking his servant, she asks his love for Dodo as a substitute for the little slave’s mother’s love (II, 79-80). And just before her death scene, she assures Topsy that “‘people can love you, if you are black,”’ and then goes on to stifle the girl’s denials by affirming, “‘Oh, Topsy, poor child, I love you, I love you, because you haven’t had any father, or mother, or friends; --because you’ve been a poor, abused child! I love you, and I want you to be good.”’ Mrs. Stowe next assures us that “Yes, in that moment, a ray of real belief, a ray of heavenly love, had penetrated the darkness of Topsy's heathen soul.” Then Eva proceeds, “‘ Don’ t you know that Jesus loves all alike? He is just as willing to love you as me. He loves you just as I do”’ (II, 93-94). And from this moment Topsy begins to be a good girl.
The great locus for Eva’s announcement of the theme of love is of course her death scene. She summons the whole household, free and slave alike, gives them locks of her golden hair as keepsakes, and then catechizes them in a manner reminiscent of such Johannine passages as these; “As the Father hath loved me, so have I loved you, continue ye in my love. . . This is my commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you. Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his Lord doeth: but I have called you friends” (John 15:9, 12-15).
“I sent for you all, my dear friends,” said Eva, “because I love you. I love you all; and I have something to say to you, which I want you always to remember. . .. I am going to leave you. In a few more weeks you will see me no more” (II, 102; Mrs. Stowe’s ellipsis).
After she is interrupted briefly by groans, Eva continues, “‘If you love me you must not interrupt me so”’ (II, 103), which recalls in a humorously diminished fashion Christ’s “If ye love me, keep my commandments” (John 14:15); and further on in the same episode she assures the gathering that “‘ I have prayed for you”’ (II, 103), just as Christ at the Last Supper addressed the Father concerning the apostles, saying, “I pray for them. . .. I pray not that thou shouldst take them out of the world, but that thou shouldst keep them from evil. . .. Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word” (John 17:9, 15, and 20).
With all this in mind, it should come as no surprise that Eva is deviously if only symbolically equated with the infant Jesus in Tom’s eyes, thus composing what Leslie Fiedler has sarcastically referred to as the Protestant Piety- -the man holding the death-doomed dying blonde girl.4 “He loved her,” Mrs. Stowe tells us, “as something frail and earthly, yet almost worshipped her as something heavenly and divine. He gazed on her as the Italian sailor gazes on his image of the child Jesus” (II, 61). And that Mrs. Stowe herself realized this identification, at least in retrospect, is shown from her reference to Eva in her Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin as “an impersonation in childish form of the love of Christ.” Nor is it odd that Christ can be “impersonated” by a girl, for Charles Stowe tells us that his mother said she intended her novel “to show how Jesus Christ, who liveth and was dead, and is now alive and forevermore, has still a mother’s love for the poor and lowly.”
Just as Eva participates in a lesser way in some few of Christ’s Suffering Servant motifs, so Tom shares with Eva occasional marks of the Johannine Christ. For instance, St. Clare says, “‘Tom, you love me,”’ and he does not deny it (II, 122); and when Tom is dying, he says of everyone on the Shelby place, “‘Pears like I loves ‘em all I loves every creatur’ everywhar! --it’s nothing but love!”’ (II, 280). Tom’s main function, however, is to represent in the book not the Christ who teaches, preaches, heals, unifies, and loves but the Christ who fulfills his destiny by suffering and dying. That this is another valid aspect of the New Testament picture of Jesus is clear enough, but it is a matter that is far more scattered, complicated, and various than that of the few straightforward chapters that make up John’s version of the Last Supper.
The Suffering Servant motifs were enunciated first of all by the author of chapters 40-55 of the Old Testament Book of Isaiah. These chapters contain four “Servant Songs,“ and most of the pertinent material is contained in the fourth song, especially this passage:
Isaiah 53:2 ...He hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him.
3. He is despised and rejected of men: a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief:
and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
4. Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.
5. But he was wounded for our transgressions; he was bruised for our iniquities:
the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with stripes we are healed.
6. All we, like sheep, have gone astray; we have turned everyone of his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.
7. He was oppressed, and he was afflicted; yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.
When the first preachers of the Christian message and the earlier writers of the New Testament, especially the synoptics (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), were searching for categories and terminologies in which to express the meaning of Christ’s death, they seized upon this passage (and certain parallels, such as Psalm 22 and the Lamentations of Jeremiah) to aid them in constructing their statements. Similarly, Mrs. Stowe’s presentation of a black Christian slave, Uncle Tom, fell readily into the Bible’s wealth of Servant material, so that just as Eva corresponds to the loving and unifying Christ of John’s Last Supper discourse, Tom corresponds to the suffering and dying Christ whom the New Testament writers modeled on Isaiah’s ‘ebed Yahweh.
Tom is, for instance, presented as the slave of God. When George Shelby comes to Simon Legree’ s plantation and tells the dying Tom he will buy him and take him back to Kentucky, Tom replies, “‘Oh, Mas’r George, ye’ re too late. The Lord’s bought me, and is going to take me home, --and I long to go. Heaven is better than Kintuck”’ (II, 280). Further, he identifies himself with the suffering Christ three times: first, when he is beaten for the first time, he asks Cassy to read what the authoress calls “the last scenes in the life of Him by whose stripes we are healed” (II, 202; see Isaiah 53:5); second, when he foresees the fatal final beating, he takes as his own Christ’s words, “‘Into thy hands I conmend my spirit”’ (II, 271); and finally, when he tells Legree, “‘If taking every drop of blood in this poor old body would save your precious soul, I’d give ‘em as freely, as the Lord gave his for me”’ (II, 273). Next, Harriet Beecher Stowe equates Tom with the suffering Christ in an extensive passage. As she interprets the fatal beating (while refusing to describe it), she introduces this extensive meditation:
But, of old, there was One whose suffering changed an instrument of torture, degradation, and shame, into a symbol of glory, honor, and immortal life; and, where his spirit is neither degrading stripes /Isaiah 53:57, nor blood, nor insults, can make the Christian’s last struggle less than glorious.
Was he alone, that long night, whose brave, loving spirit was bearing up, in that old shed, against buffeting and brutal stripes?
Nay! There stood by him One,--seen by him alone,-- “like unto the Son of God.”
The tempter stood by him, too, --blinded by furious, despotic will, --every moment pressing him to shun that agony by the betrayal of the innocent. But like the brave, true heart was firm on the Eternal Pock. Like his Master, he know that, if he saved other, himself he could not save (II, 274).
Other fragments associate Tom more closely with the Suffering Servant vocabulary. While he is aboard the steamboat carrying him south, he meets a young slave girl whose child has been sold away from her. She is described as “a crushed reed,” one of the motifs of the first of the Servant Songs (Isaiah 42:3--”The bruised reed he shall not break”); though Tom tries to console her, at night she leaps overboard to her death. Mrs. Stowe does not inform the reader of Tom’s reactions (he is the only character aware of the suicide), but instead refers to the “man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief” of Isaiah 53:3: “Patience! ye whose hearts swell indignant at wrongs like these. Not one throb of anguish, not one tear of the oppressed, is forgotten by the Man of Sorrows, the Lord of Glory” (I, 192). Though the primary reference is to Christ, the juxtaposition with Tom is too close to be ignored: he is performing the function on earth that the other Man of Sorrows performs in heaven.
Tom is, of course, bruised severely twice while he is owned by Simon Legree, though only in connection with the first time does the authoress employ the word (Isaiah 53:5; II, 228-245). The silence motif, a part of Isaiah 53:7, is a very important one in the Servant Songs and in the Passion narratives (see Isaiah 43:2 as well as 53:7, above; Matthew 26:63, 27:12, Mark 15:
61, 15:3, Luke 23:9, John 19:9) and Tom is often explicitly stated to remain silent. The first time is when he carries his box of belongings away from the Shelby farm on his way to Louisiana (I, 146); it is worth noting here that the death scene of Uncle Tom was the first portion of the novel to have been composed, so that it governs Tom in the whole novel. He is also silent when Legree sarcastically asks, “‘Ye couldn’t treat a poor sinner, now, to a bit of a sermon, could ye, --eh?”’ (II, 228); this occurs just before the narrator takes note of his bruised condition, mentioned above. The next mention of Tom’s silence is in connection with another motif from Isaiah 53:7 --the likeness of the Servant to a lamb and a sheep:
“Well, old boy,” Legree said, “you find your religion don’t work, it seems! I thought I should get that through your wool, at last!”
The cruel taunt was more than hunger and cold and nakedness. Tom was silent (II, 242 see also I, 47).
And finally, Tom “stood silent” when questioned about the whereabouts of Cassy and Emmeline (II, 272), whom Legree believes to have run away. Here of course he keeps quiet on behalf of others, and as we shall see his silence eventually makes the escape of these two possible.
The servant’s refusal to participate in evil (“he had done no violence, neither was any deceit in his mouth,” Isaiah 53:9) Tom matches with his refusal either to cooperate in doing evil or to lie to avoid blame. “‘This yer thing I can’t feel it right to do,”’ he tells Legree; “‘and, Mas’r, I never shall do it, --never!”’ (II, l96) He says this knowing that he has at least a beating coming, but in all such circumstances he is ready to say “‘I’ll die first” (II, 196; see II, 273).
But the Servant’s death is not the end of the story, either in the Old Testament, the New, or Uncle Tom’s Cabin. “When thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper his hand”; “Therefore will I divide him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong; because he hath poured out his soul unto death” (Isaiah 53:10 and 12). Because the Suffering Servant has died--not merely in spite of his death--he is granted victory:
Tom began to draw his breath with long, deep inspirations, and his broad chest rose and fell, heavily. The expression of his face was that of a conqueror.
“Who- -who- -who shall separate us from the love of Christ?” he said, in a voice that contended with mortal weakness, and fell asleep (II, 281).
And Uncle Tom’s triumph does not stop there, for his keeping Cassy and Emmeline’s secret enables them to flee northward. His powerless passivity, silence, suffering, and death- -his acceptance of the will of Yahweh (II, 150), his patience under all the trials of the Deep South (II, 243 and 247)--bring about a “comic” movement in the novel that matches the northward escape of Eliza and George Harris.
In this connection it should be recalled that in the medieval and renaissance European tradition, north was the symbol of evil. Thus the devil in the Friar’s Tale claims to be from “fer in the north contree / Wher, as I hope, som-tyme I shal thee see,” Donne in The Good-Morrow claims a perfect love unmixed with evil or death, “Without sharp north, without declining west,” and Satan in Paradise Lost takes his fellow rebels “with flying march where we possess / The Quarters of the North.” But in an age more typographically and cartographically aware, north (which is always up on a map) can be associated with upwardness and therefore with goodness, especially in the Miltonic symbolic system so familiar in New England. South thus becomes equated with evil, so that to be “sold down the river” comes to apply topographically, cartographically, and morally (I, 143). The northern part of the United States is good, the south bad; but granted the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, Canada is even better than the North. Thus Eliza’s and George’s flights across the Ohio River and the Great Lakes to Canada, where Cassy and Emmeline finally catch up with them, provide a comic countermovement to the tragic-melodramatic southward and deathward movement of Uncle Tom.
But this comic
movement manifests a reversal of another ordinary European convention, that of
gender. Tom, the “male " is the character who suffers passively and
patiently in a very feminine fashion, and on the other hand the dynamic
members of the northbound groups are, except for George Harris, such assertive
and therefore relatively masculine women as Cassy and Eliza. Eliza may be
equipped with a few of the nineteenth-century conventional traits of female
gentility- - fainting at appropriate moments, for instance- -but she and the
even more aggressive Cassy are in many ways more dominantly masculine than
Uncle Tom. The situation suggests that what Leslie Fiedler claims of
Richardson’s novels applies also to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, that even more
than Jesus Christ, a good woman is man’s savior. Eliza
initiates action and saves Harry; the womanly Tom- -the “Uncle Tom”
stereotype repudiated by contemporary blacks - -endures passively so that the
assertive Cassy can reach salvation. But to say that masculine and feminine
roles have been reversed in Uncle Tom’s Cabin is less accurate than to
say that they have been merged: Little Eva and Uncle Tom are, as we have shown,
equally if differently Christ himself, the same feminine Christ who in Mrs.
Stowe’s mind “has still a mother’s love for the poor and lowly.”
Works
Cited:
Stowe,
Harriet Beecher. , Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Columbus: Charles B. Merrill,
1961), I, 213. This is a paperback reproduction of the first edition. Subsequent
citations will be listed in the text by volume and page number.
Quotations
are from the Holy Bible, King James Version: John 13:1, 3; 13:33; 13:35;
14:2; 14:12 and 28; 16:5; 16:19; 16:28; 17:11 and 13. In the quotations,
“you” refers to the apostles, “thee” to the Father.
Wagenknecht,
Edward, Harriet Beecher Stowe: The Known and the Unknown
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 219. He mentions Lyman,
Henry Ward, and Harriet.
Fiedler,
Leslie A., Love and Death in the American Novel
(New York: Dell, 1967), p. 269.
Stowe,
Harriet Beecher, A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (Port Washington: Kennikat
Press, 1968), P.30
Stowe,
Charles,. Life of Harriet
Beecher Stowe (Boston:
Houghton, Mifflin, 1899), p. 154.
Cullmann, Oscar, The Christology of the New Testament (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1959), for treatment of the Hebrew words ‘ebed (slave-servant-child) and ben (servant-child-son) and the Greek word doulos (slave-servant), pais (servant-child), and huios (child-son).
Fiedler, Leslie A., The Return of the Vanishing American (New York:
Stein and Day, 1968), p. 68.