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 9 ("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.
