Slavery and Mass Society in Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Abstract

The linkage suggested by Harriet Martineau between the institution of slavery and a nervous irritability induced by print culture which threatens to undo the transcendent vision at the heart of the American republic is written large in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Stowe’s own familiarity with the medical condition of nervous irritability, both in herself and in her family, is noted by her biographer Joan Hedrick,¹ and I will argue in this chapter that it allows her to equate ‘her experience as a woman with that of an oppressed slave and a suffering Messiah’ (145) in the way that Hedrick argues is key to the novel’s achievement. Nervous irritability, as we shall see, is at once the bodily spectre haunting Uncle Tom’s achievement of a transcendent vision, and its enabling condition.