“An authentic ghost story”: manipulating the gothic in Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Abstract

Perhaps the most memorable—and almost certainly the most harrowing—portions of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin occur during Tom’s time at the Legree plantation: a narrative plunge into the horrors of slavery in the Deep South, and a stylistic plunge into the realm of the Gothic. This study seeks to engage this section of Uncle Tom’s Cabin within the context of the Gothic genre, and, in so doing, reveal Stowe’s Gothic turn to be not, as some scholars have suggested, merely superficial appropriation, but rather a sophisticated manipulation of genre that culminates in a Christianization of the Gothic. By exploring Stowe’s use of Gothic figures and devices—the setting of the crumbling Louisiana plantation, the threefold Gothic female represented by Cassy, and the “haunting” of Legree—in the light of both European and American Gothic fiction, this study demonstrates how the trappings of the Gothic genre can be used to refresh and further Stowe’s progressive Christian narrative, one which ultimately refutes the Gothic by seeding it in a universe where peace, freedom, and Christian redemption are possible. This article is published as part of a collection on Gothic and horror.