Critical Commentary

I chose to read the article by Jane P. Tompkins, "Sentimental Power: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Politics of Literary History".

The overall subject that I would like to focus on is that fact that she believes our books being taught in schools are showing oppression to women on purpose.  That critics and teachers are teaching students to "equate popularity with debasement, emotionality with ineffectiveness...  domesticity with triviality, and all of these, implicitly, with womanly inferiority," (Tompkins 540).  She states that Harriet Beecher Stowe Stowe has allowed her works to become this "sentimental novel" to be ridiculed and be fed to weak and under-educated housewives.  But she goes back on this theory, stating that the novel was written for and about women, being representative of the time.  She describes the book not being held to standards with such writers as Whitman or Thoreau, saying that Stowe is under appreciated in such a man dominated world, people equating her in the "damned mob of scribbling women".  An example of what Tompkins calls "sentimental" writing in Stowe's work is of the death of little Eva.  She states that it is full of emotion but doesn't say anything more about how wondrously horrible the death is within the story.  But Tompkins says it does: it shows the truest form of heroism within the novel.  She compares this to being Christ-like, of Christ dying for the powerful people showing how truly powerful He is.

I don't know whether to agree or disagree with Tompkins on her theories.  In the first half, she explains that the book is teaching that women are to be seen as lower class than that of men, which is correctly depicted in the tale.  She would agree with what I just said because in her second theory she states that the novel is just representative of the time period.  Women like Stowe are not held to the same standards as "legends" such as Whitman or Thoreau, and it seems unfair to do so just because of the "sentimental" fiction that this book is.  While I do say this, I do think that this book is presenting a way of demoting women by showing that their power is only really in the household, if that.  In her example of sentimental fiction, I do agree that Eva's death can be seen as Christ-like.  We discussed this in class on how Tom's death was Christ-like, and this seems to be held to the same standard.  In Christianity, it is one of the most prestigious acts to do - sacrifice.  Sacrificing yourself for others more powerful than you would prove to them that you are the most powerful indeed.  While I do not agree on everything Tompkins has said, I do agree that the way women are portrayed in this novel is legend to the time period.