Microsoft Word - Reaugh_Uncomfortably close 1   The Uncomfortably Close Narrator of Uncle Tom’s Cabin Stephen Reaugh English The narrator of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is not a quiet one. Stowe’s narrator intervenes—a verb scholars seem fond of using to describe how the narrator acts—in the narrative often, sometimes commenting on or speaking to characters and action within the story, and sometimes stepping outside of the narrative to speak directly at the audience. As Dawn Coleman writes, this voice is “remarkably supple,” able to play “the local colorist,” “the humorist,” “the ethnographer,” and also the preacher of “passionate intensity” all within the same text (271). This multi-voiced narrator has drawn a variety of criticism and scholarly attention, but most of that attention is focused on the narrator’s more obvious apostrophes to the reader or to characters and events of the narrative. A turn toward not only the variations of the narrator’s roles, but also the narrator’s tone, is therefore necessary to better understand the complexities of Stowe’s narrator. Defining Stowe’s narrator—especially since the narrator is so multi-voiced—seems a logical endeavor for one seeking to detect the narrator’s function and tone, but scholars do not agree on even this elemental step. Some call the narrator “Stowe” with full gendered implications, as Barbara Hochman does: “Moreover, while Stowe may have believed that a dying child was indeed going to ‘a better country,’ she knew from her own experience that there was no death without suffering (148-149). Christopher Diller, on the other hand, strictly establishes boundaries between author and narrator, calling the narrator always “Stowe’s narrator”: “Stowe’s narrator does not obscure the plain fact that Ophelia imprisons Topsy” (35). 2   However the narrator is called, scholarship appends to this narrator an identity—or to be more precise, a character with whom Stowe is inextricably linked. In a curious overlap, any teacher of this text must make similar decisions regarding something as seemingly simple as naming a narrator. Does the instructor teach the narrator as a narrator, as a character within the novel, as an aspect of Stowe herself, or all three? Or none? The instructor, who herself navigates a variety of voices/roles in order to both clarify her pedagogical objectives to her students and get them engaged with the novel, must, like the scholar, interpret the text in order to share that interpretation with her students. She must be prepared, after all, for her students to react to this narrator—perhaps as vehemently as some scholars do, made uncomfortable by the “passionate intensity” with which the narrator sometimes intervenes. Thus what this essay argues for is a reconceptualization of the narrator of the sentimental novel. Using Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a test case, this essay will demonstrate that the numerous roles of the narrator—and the narrator’s tone in each of those roles—creates a narrator that is so multi-voiced that they are themselves a character. Furthermore, this essay will investigate how the scholar and instructor treat this narrator-character, and what the critical consequences are of these choices they (the scholar and instructor) make in their readings. In so doing, this essay argues that the interpretive decisions the scholar and instructor make, when taken together, posit a new form of looking at texts that is less stable than the written word suggests—that instead of the text being absolutely one way, it has the potential to be any number of ways, perhaps even all at once. The Narrator: Function(s) and Role(s) What the variations of the roles of the narrator allow for is not only a multi-faceted view of the narration in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but also a collapse of the distance between narrator and 3   reader(s). What scholarship of Uncle Tom’s Cabin alludes to is that the audience’s experience with the narrator is one that relies on identification, whether that identification be with the narrator themselves or the characters and events of the novel. In so doing, scholars imply that a type of collective knowledge or understanding links the audience and the narrator together. One of the most evocative views of this narrative distance is Robyn R. Warhol’s idea of the “engaging” narrator. For Warhol, who is in turn reading Gerald Prince, the narrator is usually defined in terms of its narratee, addressee, and receiver (811). If this is done, then Warhol argues that, when addressed by the narrator, these various forms of audience—narratee, addressee, and receiver—take on the following three personages (respectively): “the ‘you’ that may be inscribed or encoded in a text, the implied reader suggested by that ‘you,’ and the actual reader who receives that ‘you’” (811). What this creates, Warhol argues, is a distance between the narrator and these “you”s—a distance that, when closed, could create a different kind of narrator, which Warhol terms an “engaging” narrator (811). The engaging narrator—“intended to evoke recognition and identification in the person who holds the book and reads, even if the ‘you’ in the text resembles that person only slightly or not at all”—is, for Warhol, the narrator who occasionally intervenes in Stowe’s text (811). For Warhol, this engaging narrator functions in Stowe’s text in varying roles, but each of those roles still relies on the audience as part of the exchange, thereby creating a hoop of identification among the narrator, characters, and audience. The first role Warhol attributes to the engaging narrator is that they “will, Walt Whitman-like, specify narratees in a group (e.g., ‘mothers of America’) or include large numbers of more specifically defined groups in passages of direct address…[or] more frequently, [address] the narratee simply as ‘Reader’ or ‘you,’ designations that can signify any actual reader” (813). In so doing, the engaging narrator 4   ostensibly relieves some of the distance between itself and the audience by speaking at them and encouraging identification on part of the reader, especially when repeated. The engaging narrator, in further attempts to create identification, encourages rhetorical devices that “suggest that the characters are possibly as ‘real’ as the narrator and narratee, who are, in these cases, to be identified with the actual author and actual reader. Stowe’s narrator simply claims that her characters—or their counterparts—exist in the real world” (814). When this relationship is successfully established, the narrator then also functions as an obvious narrator—which, for Warhol, manifests in Uncle Tom’s Cabin as the role of a preacher seeking “to arouse the egocentric feelings of any actual readers who can identify…then to ask the reader to project those feelings into compassion for actual slaves” (815). Other scholars accentuate this identification being asked of the reader, and pin that identification to the narrator’s role in the text. Dawn Coleman, for example, finds common ground with Warhol on the idea that the narrator of Uncle Tom’s Cabin has the capacity for a narrator with a “sermonic voice…whose sermonic interventions move steadily from the culturally feminine to the culturally masculine—from sentimentality to theological vision” (266- 267). Coleman’s view of the sermonic mode shares Warhol’s concept that the distance between narrator and narratee closes in Stowe’s novel because of a desire for identification on part of the reader for the narrator who is, at least at first, “direct, personal, and emotional—sentimental, in the best sense of the word” (272). Even as the sermonic narrator, for Coleman, turns to “an anxious concern with defending God against charges of indifference,” the point of this narrator is ultimately still the same: to have the audience receive the narration and hopefully put it into some kind of moral action (274). 5   The distance between narrator and reader collapses even further in some readings. Coleman’s concept of the narrator wanting to stir the reader to action is one that Jane Tompkins and Barbara Hochman echo in their work. For Tompkins, the novel “not only offers an interpretive framework for understanding the culture, and, through the reinforcement of a particular code of values, recommends a strategy for dealing with cultural conflict, but it is itself an agent of that strategy, putting into practice the measures it prescribes” (278). Thus for Tompkins the “melodramatic” or “pathetic” attempts of the narrator to connect with the audience and close that narrative distance are “the only terms in which the book’s success can be explained” (278, emphasis original). Similarly, Hochman concerns herself with the success of Stowe’s novel, arguing that Stowe “was determined to break through what she saw as the defenses of readers who could hear about slavery every day and never ‘listen’” (144). As Hochman explains, Stowe could have been aware that “neither her facts nor her arguments would be new to readers…in a sense they were all too familiar” (143). Through a historical tour of similar texts of the period, Hochman argues that Stowe’s narrator uses this familiarity against itself—by introducing conventions like the slave mother and dying child, Stowe varied the tradition behind such types by mixing them with expectations of white characters. Eliza, instead of being completely deferent to men—and her owner, by extension—resists and runs away; despite this, she otherwise “altogether behaves like the perfect model of true womanhood…both fulfill[ing] and challeng[ing] the moral norms of [women’s] behavior” (155). Stowe’s adaptation of the dying child—Eva—by giving Eva a “social matrix” and having her be “tough-minded when it comes to the most difficult subjects,” even on her deathbed, both invoked the conventional character type as Stowe simultaneously riffed on it (149). The Audience and Uncomfortable Distance 6   What can be problematic about this collective knowledge that the narrator and audience share is that when the distance between narrator and narratee is so collapsed—and the vein of collective knowledge laid bare—some readers (and scholars, instructors, and students) grow uncomfortable with the narrator and, as a result, Stowe’s text. In other words, if the narrator gets too close to the reader, the reader may instinctively pull back, thus rejecting any engagement in the “sentiment” of the sentimental novel. For Thomas P. Joswick, this rejection originates from a collective negative experience, rather than the positive experience of identification that the narrator may assume of the audience; on Eva’s death scene, he writes, “Modern readers may agree that the scene’s luxury characterizes the most familiar and least desirable feature of nineteenth-century sentimental fiction, the excess of conventional props (funereal and linguistic) to stimulate an excess of feelings” (253). Clearly, Joswick—and his “modern readers”—are not buying into the sentiment in this scene. Thus an understanding the narrator of Stowe’s text to be multi-voiced must necessarily then invite the investigation of an audience capable of receiving this narration—and include, perhaps to what surely would have been Stowe’s chagrin, readers and receivers of her work who are less comfortable with the narrator’s correspondence with the “you.” Faye Halpern addresses this concern directly in her 2011 essay, “Unmasking Criticism: The Problem with Being a Good Reader of Sentimental Rhetoric,” wherein she shares her resistant reader responses to Stowe’s sentimental attributes. But as Halpern notes, some of this resistance originates from her multi-layered identity—she is not only receiver and reader of the text, but also a scholar, a critic. Thus, reading June Howard, she finds that sentimentality “‘is condemned so vehemently in part because its critics feel implicated in it’” (qtd. in Halpern 52). In other words, if the distance between narrator and narratee is so collapsed—or “engaging,” as 7   Warhol puts it—then the proximity of that narrator may unnerve some readers. As Jessica Lang notes, “[t]he community that is linked through the network of collective memory…is comprised of slaves, slave owners, and abolitionists; it is a community of Southerners and Northerners, of the wealthy, the working class, and the destitute” (41). Being implicated to be directly alongside a perceived “enemy” or the opposite may, naturally, create feelings of mistrust on part of the reader—and not just one type of reader, but many. That mistrusting feeling may lead to the condemnation Howard and Halpern notice in readings of Stowe’s work; assuming one wants to be included when they do not want to be can often, after all, breed discontentment on part of the one dragged into the event. Halpern’s breakdown of audience into three categories—actual, authorial, and narrative—not only delineate the various voices of the audience, but also differentiate readers who are “on board” with the narrator from those who are not. Through Peter J. Rabinowitz, Halpern argues for these three kinds of audience because they helpfully demonstrate a key facet of her own response to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The actual audience is unavoidable, for Halpern— “we have no choice but to be a member” of it because we are actually reading the text (52). For authorial and narrative audiences, however, Halpern argues that “every fictional text invites a given reader to become a member” of these audiences, and while one could presumably occupy a seat in both at the same time, Halpern finds this to be difficult due to their opposite natures. An authorial audience is one who “must be able to read as the author imagined her audience would read, even if we eventually go on in our articles to read against the grain” (56). On the other hand, the narrative audience will “get swept up in the world of the novel,” especially if that audience is attempting to reanimate a text for another or group of others—say, a classroom of students (qtd. in Halpern 56). In so doing, identification most often happens with the narrative 8   audience—the distance collapses and the reader engages with the narrative; conversely, a reader stuck in authorial mode, like Halpern, will “look right away for signs of craft” and soon feel “manipulated by Stowe to respond in certain carefully scripted ways. So I resist her rhetoric” (59). Similarly, a reader mired in the actual mode will fail to identify—as Halpern writes on Eva’s death scene, “I do not cry but remain stone-cold. In this case I’m not able to enter the narrative audience effortlessly—or effortfully—because my habits of reading make me so attuned to Stowe’s efforts to make me cry, and as soon as I become aware of them I resist her rhetoric” (58). These varied views of the audience, as Halpern puts them, seem unable to coexist with one another. The actual audience looks at the text without suspending disbelief, too aware that the experience of being a receiver of the novel is a constructed one. The authorial audience, obsessed with the tools of writing and the craft of fiction, has no time to create bonds with narrators or characters. The narrative audience, sucked into the story, cannot easily see beyond the world created in the text. But as Halpern (briefly) mentions, there is one place where these three audiences easily coalesce: in the classroom. Implications for Pedagogy and Criticism In a brief aside on her teaching, Halpern—not a narrative audience member for Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by her own admission—offers for framing some hypothetical narrative readers’ experiences of Eva’s death scene, the same scene which Halpern “resists” identifying with because of her identity as critic/authorial-actual audience member. Halpern’s investigation of the narrative audience results in two statements she could imagine that audience articulating: “1) Stowe describes just what it feels like when a close relative dies. 2) Religion can offer solace when someone is dying; it did for me” (59). As Halpern expects, these remarks “remove the 9   distance” between the reader and narrator, but what they seem to surprise her with is that she has “read remarks similar to these in [her] students’ papers—papers to which [she] gave low grades” (59). Aside from Joanne Dobson, Halpern finds that in her experience, no critic makes claims like these—nobody engages in the narrative audience, save for the (presumably) poorer writers in Halpern’s classes (59). What Halpern questions briefly here deserves more attention: what happens when the discomfort of the narrative distance between narrator and reader becomes so apparent that it suffuses even one’s teaching philosophy? In other words, why not accept the narrative audience-student’s responses as equally legitimate and insightful as an authorial or actual audience-student’s response? Halpern pins this primarily to the way she was taught (and in turn, teaches), when she says that the authorial viewpoint “allows contemporary critics to feel superior and puts [them] in the position of unmaskers. It also confirms [their] status as professional critics. This is what literary critics do after all: [they] break texts apart to see how they work” (60). In order to remain legitimate (in whose eyes, it is unclear), Halpern implies a pressure to prioritize and reward readings that are authorial or actual in nature—ones that attune to craft, to analysis, to “breaking texts apart.” Tompkins takes this pressure a step further, arguing that in the scene where Eva insists that she loves Topsy (and Topsy experiences some kind of moral breakthrough), the rhetoric and imagery present in the passage could bring forth “[w]ords like ‘kitsch,’ ‘camp’, and ‘corny’” in the responses of some readers (274). Although Tompkins goes on to alleviate this scene from these preconceived notions about what that rhetoric/those images signal, the responses are still relevant ones for the modern classroom. In fact, they might sound a lot like responses students may have to texts as old as Stowe’s, no matter its contemporaneous success. As Tompkins herself admits, critics “have taught generations of students to equate popularity 10   with debasement, emotionality with ineffectiveness, religiosity with fakery, domesticity with triviality, and all of these, implicitly, with womanly inferiority” (268). Explicit in Tompkins’s allegations is that the academy—the way of studying literature— enforces and then reinforces readings that, on the surface, seem to be about these issues of “craft” that Halpern says are merely those of the authorial audience’s focus. But underneath that guise—or to use Halpern’s term slyly, to “unmask” this—there sits a devaluing of engagement and, yes, emotional response. And it is this that Tompkins believes (and Halpern, if begrudgingly) students inherit from their instructors. If this is true, then how can it be rectified? Clearly, the academy cannot be overwritten in one essay. But perhaps pedagogy can. Sarcastic “Stowe” To return to where the discussion of scholarship on the narrator in this essay began, one of the roles left out of Robyn R. Warhol’s view of the engaging narrator (and, indeed, all of the scholarship uncovered in the writing of this essay) is that of the utterly un-ironic narrator. This results because, Warhol suggests, that the engaging narrator—Stowe’s narrator—“usually assume[s] that their narratees are in perfect sympathy with them…unlike the sarcasm of distancing narrators, [who] ironically embarrasses readers” (814-815). While Warhol is clear in that Stowe’s narrator often exists to encourage identification with the reader and wring from that reader some kind of sympathy, the narrator does not always do this. There are far subtler—and sometimes even incredibly ironic, sarcastic—tones to the narrator of Uncle Tom’s Cabin that Warhol and others overlook when thinking about the narrator’s role(s) and function(s). Investigating these tones in the text would, then, seem an appropriate way to demonstrate to students not only how to “closely read” the text for literary devices like tone and narrative voice, but also demonstrate in this essay how to use a conventional approach—entering a scholarly 11   conversation with “something new to say” about the topic—to allow for more potential in scholarship than the unilateral relationship that Halpern and Tompkins suggest that criticism cultivates. What will perhaps explain what I mean by my latter statement is a brief discussion of my approach to this very essay. For example, I have been avoiding the pronoun “I” in this essay mostly because it is how I speak in front of my students—casually—but also because of the anxiety that students develop regarding the presence of the author of the paper within the text itself. (How many times have I been asked, “Is it okay to use ‘I’ in this paper?”) Though I am aware that there are rulebooks that say, “No using the ‘I’ in papers,” I am also equally aware of a multitude of scholarly essays that break said rule. (Halpern’s is one.) Similarly, I am not ever operating with one tactic, in one mode in my classroom; I find it impossible. Rather, I—and, I assume, many instructors—take on many roles: the lecturer, the actor, the joker, the encourager…the list could spin on. In the classroom, the instructor is often so urgently multiple because keeping students’ attention and imparting information to them requires, sometimes, a variety of approaches. Not everyone learns the same way—and not every student receives a text in the same way. As a result, and in order to reach as many students as possible, I teach as many ways as I know how. Will I inevitably leave something out? Of course. But I could use it next class—or next week—or at midterm—or maybe years from now. What is important that a variety of possibilities, rather than a limited “correct view,” is made actual to students, so that, as readers/receivers, they can process a number of approaches to texts. This will, perhaps, encourage the conversation that scholarship invites. Take, for example, the approaches to the narrator and audience discussed in this essay, which are, by nature of their inclusion in previous scholarship, “correct” views of Uncle Tom’s 12   Cabin, even if some will fervently disagree with one another. Warhol’s view of the “engaging” narrator is perhaps the most “multiple” of the approaches, but even her view comes down to defining precisely what her term means and how it is demonstrable in the novels she chooses to analyze. What is more interesting about her view is when it comes under fire from Lilian R. Furst in a 1987 PMLA forum. Furst claims that Warhol “unnecessarily limits the scope of her concept of the engaging narrator by envisaging the issue in the final paragraph as a technique that may prove vital in differentiating women from men writers” (Furst and Warhol 351). Warhol’s response does not get back to this opening claim until (ironically) the end of her argument, where she says, “Since I am working with terms and definitions I have coined myself, I suppose all this might look like some shell game, in which I manipulate the piece until only women novelists turn up under the shell marked ‘engaging.’ When I began this project, though, I had no thought of discriminating among novelists according to gender” (352). Here in front of us is the very kind of conversation that is so difficult to get students into in the first place! Students can find even in these two brief excerpts some suspicious language worth investigating—Furst’s overly lengthy way of saying “Men do this too”; Warhol’s use of the word “manipulate” tied with a shell game, which suggest a kind of con game at work; Furst’s need to use a word like “envisaging” when something simpler could suffice. While these would still be rather traditional tactics (close reading, namely), the frame is the difference, because it encourages identification. Maybe students will see this conversation as a fight, or a riff-off, or a peacocking, or merely a chat between good friends—however the audience engages, the distance between the student and the scholar collapses, which is, I think, what most instructors would want for students to develop. 13   If we turn to Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s narrator and a potential for irony and sarcasm rather than a purely sentimental approach, we can find within a similar potential for student engagement despite a rather “traditional” way in to the subject matter. In Chapter 22, the narrator describes a scene between Eva and Marie wherein Eva says she would sell the jewels she would receive for her coming out so that the slaves (former, for Eva would free them) could learn to read and write (241-242). When Marie scoffs, Eva insists that Tom and Mammy want to learn to at least read the Bible, and that they feel Eva feels “it’s wrong” that they cannot (242). Marie immediately tells her to stop because Eva’s talking is giving her a headache. To a reader of the text, this is no surprise—Marie does not much care for Eva’s view of the slaves. But it is the narrator’s next line that is a surprise: “Marie always had a head-ache on hand for any conversation that did not exactly suit her” (242). Here, the narrator takes a swipe at Marie’s character by implying that Marie’s headaches are contrivances that she has “on hand,” that she invents to make uncomfortable topics of conversation go away. In short, the narrator says that Marie is fake. Where, oh where, is the sentimental preacher-narrator here? Where is the invocation to the audience to cue them to listen? They are not visible, and yet, the remark is clearly pointed at them. It is perhaps an aside from the narrator—a sarcastic quip, an inside joke between the reader and narrator. It still maintains the identification that Warhol argues is necessary in the engaging narrator, except the “perfect sympathy” is more a perfect antipathy, and the embarrassment that should be gone is instead converted to point at a character. An earlier scene from a chapter with a similarly cheeky chapter title—chapter sixteen, “Tom’s Mistress and Her Opinions,” which I cannot help but read with ‘opinions’ in air quotes— demonstrates this sly sarcasm in greater relief. The narrator, first describing how Africa must be put through God’s refining fire to come out nobly, turns to Marie and says: 14   Was this what Marie St. Clare was thinking of, as she stood, gorgeously dressed, on the verandah, on Sunday morning, clasping a diamond bracelet on her slender wrist? Most likely it was. Or, if it wasn’t that, it was something else; for Marie patronized good things, and she was going now, in full force,—diamonds, silk, and lace, and jewels, and all,—to a fashionable church, to be very religious. Marie always made a point to be very pious on Sunday. There she stood, so slender, so elegant, so airy and undulating in all her motions, her lace scarf enveloping her like a mist. She looked a graceful creature, and she felt very good and very elegant indeed. (164) The narrator’s attention to Marie reads as suspicious. Taken at face value, Marie certainly looks like quite the upstanding citizen here—one who thinks deeply about the plight of Africa, who worships so piously on Sundays, who is so very beautiful and elegant and good and perfect in every way, surely! Perhaps my sarcasm gives this away—or perhaps we are all smart enough to notice that the narrator is being sarcastic themselves. To juxtapose the plight of Africa with a repeated focus on Marie’s “diamonds, silk, and lace, and jewels” shows us a character who, frankly, could not care less about Africa—but could not care more about her own appearance. Marie here makes it “a point” to be religious on Sundays, the narrator says—but of course what is meant is that Marie makes it a point to look pious. She may or may not be religious just as she may or may not be interested in the plight of Africa—the narrator flippantly excuses Marie’s thoughts as “most likely” she was thinking about Africa or “something else,” with the unsaid “Who cares?” following. This examination of Marie’s outside reads plainly as precisely that: what Marie looks like. There is no intensive postulation about her inner thoughts here, like there is in other places, with characters like Eliza, Tom, St. Clare, or Eva. What we get is precisely what the narrator sees: a woman looking very elegant on a Sunday morning. The irony, for those 15   of us in on the joke, is that we know that this is what the narrator thinks Marie is: shallow, overly concerned with the outsides of things. But the narrator does not have to say that. The identification the audience has with the narrator allows for this to happen in a kind of code, which the instructor can helpfully explicate through close reading here and in other moments in the text. Conclusion What this essay seeks to achieve, at the end of all of this, is a vision of the new kind of scholarship Halpern calls on us to strive toward at the end of her essay: First, we might stop seeing our students’ growing distance from sentimental rhetoric— something I used to think of as proof of a job well-done—as an unmixed blessing. We should not let them forget or forget to value the kinds of reading practices they give up when they emulate currently dominant critical habits. In fact, we can use these sentimental texts to begin a discussion about some things that have often gone unremarked, at least in my classroom: the distance there can be between how a text wants to be read and how undergraduates and especially graduate students are trained to read it, as well as the benefits and costs of being (or at least pretending to be) a single kind of reader. (65-66, emphasis mine) What Halpern advises here is not a full tilt toward a narrative audience member’s perspective; as she notes, “I am highly attuned to the dangers of such a desire and understand that fulfilling it may turn our criticism not so much utopian as uncritical” (65). But what she does advocate is the allowance for possibility, for the liminal, for a foot in two audiences that seem like they would not go together. Especially relevant are the four words I have emphasized: “wants to be read.” Halpern there suggests that the text has a desire of its own: that it wants things, craves being read 16   a certain way. And she suggests we should let students do as such in our classrooms. I agree, but I add a caveat: let us let the conversation be alive not only in our classrooms, but in our students’ papers, and in the work we ourselves submit, so that we may no longer be these uncomfortable scholars sneering away what we do not initially understand. 17   Works Cited Coleman, Dawn. “The Unsentimental Woman Preacher of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” American Literature, vol. 80, no. 2, 2008, pp. 265-292. Diller, Christopher. “Sentimental Types and Social Reform in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Studies in American Fiction, vol. 32, no. 1, 2004, pp. 21-48. Furst, Lilian R. and Robyn R. Warhol. “The Engaging Narrator.” PMLA, vol. 102, no. 3, 1987, pp. 351-352. Halpern, Faye. “Unmasking Criticism: The Problem with Being a Good Reader of Sentimental Rhetoric.” Narrative, vol. 19, no. 1, 2011, pp. 51-71. Hochman, Barbara. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the “National Era”: An Essay in Generic Norms and the Contexts of Reading.” Book History, vol. 7, 2004, pp. 143-169. Joswick, Thomas P. “‘The Crown without the Conflict’: Religious Values and Moral Reasoning in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, vol. 39, no. 3, 1984, pp. 253-274. Lang, Jessica. “Retelling the Retold: Race and Orality in Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory, vol. 66, no. 2, 2010, pp. 35-58. Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 2nd ed. Edited by Elizabeth Ammons, W.W. Norton & Co., 2010. Tompkins, Jane. “Sentimental Power: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Politics of Literary History.” Glyph, vol. 2, 1978, pp. 267-291. Warhol, Robyn R. “Toward a Theory of the Engaging Narrator: Earnest Interventions in Gaskell, 18   Stowe, and Eliot.” PMLA, vol. 101, no. 5, 1986, pp. 811-818.