Topic + Source Exploration: Group 1 - Social criticism, satire, and stereotypes

Members: Andrew, Darcy, Mia

Holly L. Derr, "The Pervading Influence of Uncle Tom's Cabin in American Culture", The Atlantic, 4 September 2013 

From Jane Tompkins's "Sentimental Power"

Tompkins addresses the role of religion and racial stereotypes in the novel and in fiction in general:

The power of a sentimental novel to move its audience depends upon the audience's being in possession of the conceptual categories that constitute character and event. That storehouse of assumptions includes attitudes towards the family and towards social institutions, a definition of power and its relation to individual human feeling, notions of political and social equality, and above all, a set of religious beliefs that organize and sustain the rest. Once in possession of the system of beliefs that undergirds the patterns of sentimental fiction, it is possible for modern readers to see how its tearful episodes and frequent violations of probability were invested with a structure of meanings that fixed these works, for nineteenth-century readers, not in the realm of fairy tale or escapist fantasy, but in the very bedrock of reality. I do not say that we can read sentimental fiction exactly as Stowe's audience did -- that would be impossible -- but that we can and should set aside the modernist prejudices that consign this fiction to oblivion, in order to see how and why it worked for its readers, in its time, with such unexampled effect (Casebook 67).