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PARTISAN REVIEW
shown in twenty lurid scenes. But more intimately and feelingly, she
objected to slavery as a "patriarchal institution." Her slaves , that is ,
are stand-ins for women; their trials and tribulations are those of
women , nothing before them but lives of "toil and drudgery." Uncle
Tom, for example, who has a "feminine" nature and speaks in "a
voice as tender as a woman's" also has "in full, the gentle, domestic
heart, which woe for them! has been a peculiar characteristic of his
unhappy race." The African race, we read, is "not naturally daring
and enterprising, but home-loving and affectionate"; it is naturally
soft, patient, sensitive, forgiving, and religious - in short, womanly.
Uncle Tom, as Leslie Fiedler notes, "is really a white mother in
blackface and drag." Similarly the one likeable white male among
the major characters is St. Clare, who is "remarkable for an extreme
and marked sensitiveness of character, more akin to the softness of
woman than the ordinary hardness of his own sex." St. Clare is
redeemed from his ordinary male hardness by the death of little Eva
and the memory of his mother: "The most brutal man cannot live in
association with a strong female influence and not be greatly con–
trolled by it." His dying word is "mother."
Conversely, you can always tell the bad guys because they
drink (they hang out in "some filthy tavern , or some low haunt of
vulgar debauchery"); they are irreligious; they disparage women ;
they are lecherous . What really heated Mrs. Stowe's imagination
was the use to which male slave owners put their pretty slave girls.
Simon Legree, St. Clare's negative image, drunk, blaspheming,
haunted to near madness by the memory of his saintly mother, beats
Tom to death when Tom won't tell him where the escaped slaves
Cassy and Emmeline are hiding. Cassy is Legree's concubine ; Em–
meline , if Legree has his way, is to replace her . But Legree dies for
his sins - "Excess had brought on that frightful disease that seems to
throw the lurid shadows of a coming retribution back into the pres–
ent life." As St. Clare's mother appeared at his death bed to usher
him into paradise, so Legree's mother appears at
his
death bed to
send him to the other place: "At his dying bed, stood a stern, white ,
inexorable figure, saying 'Come! Come! Come!'" Margaret Mitch–
ell, in
Gone with the Wind,
puts an ice pack on Mrs . Stowe's prurient
fever . She describes Yankee women, who "accepting
Uncle Tom's
Cabin
as revelation . . . evidenced what Scarlett felt was a very nasty
and ill-bred interest in slave concubinage ."
By then the first great wave of American womanist writing had
receded , pushed back by the winds of social change, by literary
