He has no humanity or sexuality he is simplified into an argument. Then there is Uncle Tom himself, a “jet-black, wooly-haired illiterate” who is more of a saint than a fully-fleshed out character. In the novel, there are three black characters, but two of them are described as acting like white people and the reader only knows they are black because Stowe tells us so. Characters like field hands and servants are there only to be lovable and charming.

While literature should reveal the complexity of human beings, Stowe relies on stock characters who are only there to prove a certain point. Good intentions are not enough to redeem bad writing. Yet a novel ought to be more than that, Baldwin argues.

She wrote the novel to make one simple point: slavery is wrong.

Stowe was a writer of pamphlets rather than a novelist. These weaknesses in Uncle Tom’s Cabin are partially understandable, Baldwin says. It stays on the surface, letting readers think they have understood an issue which makes them complacent and prevents further investigation. They reproduce the same violence that exists in the world without any significant insight into the causes and effects of this violence. There is so much over-exaggerated emotion in the novel that it reveals an “inability to feel.” Sentimentality is actually an escape from emotion for Baldwin: “The wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart.” Similarly, in trying to give a complete picture of society, these novels end up incomplete. The story, Baldwin asserts, “achieves a bright, almost lurid significance, like the light from a fire which consumes a witch.” This metaphor shows that, while the book might be against racism, it causes a kind of violence.Īnother problem with protest novels like Uncle Tom’s Cabin is that they are overly sentimental. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for example, makes its point far too obvious.

The goal of this morality is to make people feel shame. Protest novels are guilty of using a “medieval morality” that clearly separates good characters and bad ones, right and wrong, black and white. He argues that protest novels oversimplify the complexity of human beings for the sake of putting forward a message.īaldwin is against what he calls “moralism” in fiction. In this chapter, Baldwin discusses two novels, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Richard Wright’s Native Son, in order to develop his ideas about protest novels.

Notes of a native son audio