Numerous critics (including Helen Waite Papashvily in 1956 and Philip Fisher in 1985) have discussed Uncle Tom’s Cabin as being in the tradition of fictional sentimentalism, a tradition that also includes many of the works of such nineteenth-century realists as Walter Scott and Maria Edgeworth, whom Stowe took as models. Other critics have suggested an element of the Gothic in Stowe’s book; most notably, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, writing in 1979 (The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination), see Cassy as an ironic example of a Gothic archetype, the “madwoman in the attic.” And if the relationship between sentimentalism and the Gothic had never been otherwise noted, one could hardly escape it in this novel, where a real Gothic power lurks like a deep shadow behind its own ironic evocation in the closing chapters.
Sentimentalism can be recognized by the presence of various elements within a fictional work. One is the assumption that heartfelt feeling (often seen as a feminine attribute) is better, more trustworthy, than intellect or reason. Chapter IX (“In Which it Appears That a Senator Is but a Man”) is only the most emphatic illustration of this assumption in the novel. Another such element is stress on the importance of morality; yet another is the presence of certain sentimental character types, of which—although no character in this novel is entirely stereotypical—George Harris (the “tamed” sentimental hero), Eliza (the innocent heroine), and St. Clare (the “Byronic” or untamed hero) are to a great extent examples. The primacy of marriage and the family, and the special importance of the relationship between mother and child, are also typical.
But sentimentalism and the Gothic are often closely linked, both historically and thematically, and almost all examples of Gothic literature have strong sentimental underpinnings. Moreover, while not all sentimentalist works have Gothic elements, many do—for example, the novels of Charles Dickens, which Uncle Tom’s Cabin resembles in numerous ways. Among the elements that most frequently identify the Gothic in literature are themes of oppression and guilt (which are often characterized as being handed down through generations), inequality in power struggles (with, often, the feminine or “feminized” characters suffering in consequence of such struggles), and stereotypical Gothic characters (typical sentimental characters exaggerated: the innocent heroine becomes a helpless victim, the “tamed” hero is powerless to save her, the “untamed” hero—out of control, his “masculine” attributes of aggression and acquisitiveness unchecked—becomes the Gothic villain or monster). These elements, too, are present in Stowe’s novel, as the reader will recognize—even the Gothic characters, although their relationships with each other are unconventional.
Also identifying the Gothic are a number of typical objects, characters, motifs, or incidents that writer Thomas Thornburg, in “The Quester and the Castle: A Study in the Gothic Novel with Special Emphasis on Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” has called “trappings” of the Gothic. Among the most familiar of these are the ruined mansion, the haunted house or castle, the lost or misdirected letter, the dark and winding road or labyrinth, the “wasteland” or barrens, nightmares (what Thornburg calls “Gothic dreams,” including birth dreams), and, of course, the vampire. These “trappings” appear in abundance, especially from Chapter XXXI onward, and the title of Chapter XXXII (“Dark Places”) suggest that Stowe consciously brought them in. Legree’s unkempt house and yard, once beautiful, have fallen into ruin; the house is said to be haunted (by the ghost of an imprisoned slave, perhaps a suicide); a dark and winding road, through “cypress swamps and pine barrens,” leads to the plantation; Legree, drunk on brandy and overwhelmed with guilt, has nights of terrible dreams (mostly involving his mother); Ophelia’s letter to Mrs. Shelby, which might have saved Tom’s life, goes astray; and Cassy, warning Tom about their master, whom she knows all too well, describes Legree as a vampire.
The Gothic elements virtually disappear after the novel’s climax, at the beginning of Chapter XXXVIII (“The Victory”), when Tom’s vision and his renewal of faith render even Legree harmless (harmless, that is, to Tom’s soul); the villain stamps and curses, but he senses his own ineffectuality, and the “haunted house” scheme that Cassy cooks up is a parody of the Gothic. Ironically, only Legree is frightened now, and his bad dreams (helped along by the liquor he takes to dull them) quickly kill him—a horrible death, the narrator tells us, but one that she doesn’t even glorify by describing. Still, while they dominate the chapters from XXXII through the beginning of XXXVIII, the Gothic elements are effective in deepening the spiritual darkness that confronts and threatens Tom. But serving the novel’s atmosphere is not their only function.
