Reading Checkpoint #6: Analysis to Argumentation

Eva and Topsy (and Augustine and Ophelia)

For Reading Checkpoint #6 make a comment of as many words as needed in which you:

• Identify a general theme or topic you might address in Essay #1 -- you are not required to use substantial portions of Close Reading #1 or #2 in your essay, but I encourage you to use what you can.

• Try to limit or decide on which characters or aspects of this topic or theme you'll discuss in about 5-7 double spaced pages (only about 2.5-3.5 pages single spaced!)

Useful Links

Essay #1 Assignment - due to e314bannedbooks[at]gmail.com by midnight on Sunday, March 9th.

Identify a general topic before worrying about an argument. Once you post, we'll look over and discuss how argumentative claims might be made out of a range of topics.

Guides to Argumentative Thesis Writing (we'll continue to work on these on Thursday and next week)

@UT Undergraduate Writing Center (UWC)

@ Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL) (this guide distinguishes between thesis types -- see argumentative -- more details on debatable theses here)

Previews of arguments from next week's critical readings: 

James Baldwin in "Everybody's Protest Novel" 

"Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a very bad novel, having, in its self-righteous, virtuous sentimentality, much in common with Little Women. Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty. Uncle Tom’s Cabin—like its multitudinous, hard-boiled descendants—is a catalogue of violence. This is explained by the nature of Mrs. Stowe’s subject matter, her laudable determination to flinch from nothing in presenting the complete picture; an explanation which falters only if we pause to ask whether or not her picture is indeed complete; and what constriction or failure of perception forced her to so depend on the description of brutality—unmotivated, senseless—and to leave unanswered and unnoticed the only important question: what it was, after all, that moved her people to such deeds" (Baldwin 12)

Jane Tompkins

The very grounds on which sentimental fiction has been dismissed by its detractors, grounds which have come to seem universal standards of aesthetic judgment, were established in a struggle to supplant the tradition of evangelical piety and moral commitment these novelists represent. In reaction against their world view, and perhaps even more against their success, twentieth-century critics have taught generations of students to equate popularity with debasement, emotionality with ineffectiveness, religiosity with fakery, domesticity with triviality, and all of these, implicitly, with womanly inferiority. In this view, sentimental novels written by women in the nineteenth century were responsible for a series of cultural evils whose regrets still plague us: the degeneration of American religion from theological rigor to anti-intellectual consumerism, the rationalization of an unjust economic order, the propagation of the debased images of modern mass culture, and the encouragement of self-indulgence and narcissism in literature's most avid readers—women. To the extent that they protested the evils of society, their protest is seen as duplicitous—the product and expression of the wry values they pretended to condemn. Unwittingly or not, so the story goes, they were apologists for an oppressive social order...these women are generally thought to have traded in false stereotypes, dishing out weak-minded pap to nourish the prejudices of an ill-educated and underemployed readership. 

The thesis I will argue in this chapter is diametrically opposed to these portrayals. It holds that the popular domestic novel of the nineteenth century represents a monumental effort to reorganize culture from the woman's point of view; that this body of work is remarkable for its intellectual complexity, ambition, and resourcefulness; and that, in certain cases, it offers a critique of American society far more devastating than any delivered by better-known critics such as Hawthorne and Melville. Finally, it suggests that the enormous popularity of these novels, which has been cause for suspicion bordering on disgust, is a reason for paying close attention to them. Uncle Tom's Cabin was, in almost any terms one can think of, the most important book of the century. It was the first American novel ever to sell over a million copies and its impact is generally thought to have been incalculable. Expressive of and responsible for the values of its time, it also belongs to a genre, the sentimental novel, whose chief characteristic is that it is written by, for, and about women" (Tompkins 64-5). 

Gillian Brown

"Slavery disregards this opposition between the family at home and the exterior workplace. The distinction between work and family is eradicated in the slave, for whom there is no separation between economic and private status. When people themselves are 'articles' subject to 'mercantile dealings,' when 'the souls and bodies of men' are 'equivalent to money' (II, 317), women can no longer keep houses that provide refuge from marketplace activities. Slavery, according to Uncle Tom's Cabin, undermines women's housework by bringing the confusion of the marketplace into the center of the family shelter, into the kitchen. The real horror that slavery holds for the "mothers of America"(II, 316) to whom Stowe addressed her antislavery appeal is the suggestion that the family life nurtured by women is not immune from the economic life outside it " (Brown 505).  

"More than the tragedy of the slave mothers who "are constantly made childless by the American slave trade" (II, 316), the security of free white American mothers and the family institution they guard concerns Stowe. While the slave economy doesn't threaten American mothers with selling their children, it does limit their authority and efficacy when it creates households with "no time, no place, no order" (I, 304). In fashioning her abolitionist protest as a defense of nineteenth-century domestic values, Stowe designates slavery as a domestic issue for American women to adjudicate and manage. The call to the mothers of America for the abolition of slavery is a summons to fortify the home, to rescue domesticity from shiftlessness and slavery" (Brown 505-6).