Chapters 15 and 16 slow down the action of the novel for description and background information, including embedded narratives of St. Clare, Ophelia, Marie, and Mammy. Except for St. Clare's story, these are very fragmentary, but all contribute to the novel in various ways. Part of the reason for the slowing of the action in this part of the novel, as critics have noted, was Stowe's unfamiliarity with New Orleans (whose descriptions she got from one of her brothers who lived in that city); at this point, as her main plot moves out of the familiar Ohio Valley, the writer seems to hesitate slightly. But she will pick up speed later.
Mammy's story, like those of other slave characters, illustrates the theme of slavery's effect upon the family, the separation of wife from husband, mother from children. Of course other kinds of loss and separation must have been just as common, and in fact the embedded narratives of "John, aged thirty" and George Harris and his sister Emily deal with men's separation from wife and sister. However, most of these embedded narratives are emotionally affecting from a woman's point of view, especially that of a mother. Perhaps this was inevitable, since Stowe was a woman and a mother who had recently lost a child at the time of writing the book. But this apparent bias may also be due at least in part to the fashionable sentimentalizing of the mother-child relationship common in the mid-nineteenth century and to the fact that many of Stowe's readers were women. Stowe was accustomed (as her narrator's asides to female readers suggest) to working on women's emotional and moral consciousness in her writing; women's political impact could not be direct, but women could make their convictions felt by exerting pressure on their male relatives, as the earlier Senator Bird episode illustrates.
