A political novel written from a point of view favoring a particular faction is a political instrument in effect even if not in intent. A writer may sternly tell himself at the outset that he will be completely impartial, only to have the reviewers note all sorts of bias, real or imagined, of which he may not have been conscious. This happened to Turgenev when he published Fathers and Sons, and it continues to happen every year. The intensity of the authors’ feelings varies from obsessive preoccupation to passing interest. The novels in this chapter were included because they contain definite opinions, sometimes appeals, on political subjects. Some of them never exhort the reader or seem to lead him by the hand to the author’s point of view. But each of them contains material capable of influencing the reader’s opinions about some phase of political activity. If a novelist gains a reader’s support for a cause, arouses his distaste for a course of action, or simply produces a reevaluation of previously accepted beliefs, his work has served as a political instrument just as surely as a pamphlet mailed by a national committee or a handbill stuffed into the mailboxes of a sleeping city.
THE UNITED STATES
Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Civil War
Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a prime example of the novel as political instrument both in intent and effect. Harriet Beecher Stowe declared in her preface that
The object of these sketches is to awaken sympathy and feeling for the African race, as they exist among us; to show their wrongs and sorrows, under a system so necessarily cruel and unjust as to defeat and do away with the good effects of all that can be attempted for them....
The book did more than awaken sympathy; its millions of copies helped rouse the growing anti-slavery sentiment in the North, creating in part the political climate out of which the Civil War grew and mustering moral support for its prosecution. But the novel’s effects were not confined to America. In Literary History of the United States Dixon Wecter called it “the most influential novel in all history,” and Harold Blodgett noted that it was used in the campaign that secured England’s Reform Act of 1867. Raymond Weaver, in his introduction to the Modern Library edition, notes that half a million Englishwomen signed an address of thanks to the author, and that Russians were said to have emancipated their serfs after reading the book. The hero of Edgar Lee Masters’ Children of the Market Place says the book “was not really true,” but he records the praise it won from Macaulay, Longfellow, George Sand, and Heine, and adds, “The winds of destiny previously let loose were blowing madly now.”
Translated into nineteen languages, the novel was also dramatized. Eliza’s flight across the ice and Simon Legree’s cruelty have become hackneyed, but the author did not rely exclusively on such melodrama and tugging at the heartstrings. The plot is interlarded with case histories of slavery—mothers whose children were taken from them, women sold for “breeders,” men taken from their families and sent down into the deep South. The reader may feel that Legree is a villain so fiendish as to be unbelievable; he may find the angelic Little Eva’s death scene, in which she cuts off golden curls and distributes them to the sobbing family and retainers, cloying or emetic. There are other characters, though, worth observing. Senator Bird of Ohio, who had formerly supported the Fugitive Slave Act, shelters Eliza before sending her to a Kentuckian who had freed his slaves and now runs a stop on the Underground Railway. Artistically the novel is very bad. Its structure sprawls, its melodrama creaks, and its sentiment oozes over hundreds of pages peopled more often by cardboard figures than believable human beings. This is another case, however, in which the reading public paid no attention to critical standards. Mrs. Stowe concluded her novel with the warning that
not surer is the eternal law by which the millstone sinks in the ocean, than that stronger law, by which injustice and cruelty shall bring on nations the wrath of Almighty God!
Her words were prophetic, and her book helped to bring about the dies irae of which she spoke.
Albion Tourgée: The Blunders of Reconstruction