Gendered Readings of Uncle

The virtually unprecedented popularity of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) in the United States and England was no less marked in France, as evidenced among other things by the commercial success of the eleven French translations that were produced within the period of ten months after its original publication. This and other indications of the significance of Stowe's novel for the mid-nineteenth-century French reading public have been extensively documented, most notably in Edith Lucas's illuminating La Littérature anti-esclavagiste au dixneuvième siècle. Literary historians have failed to make sufficiently explicit, however, the crucial role of gender in readers' responses to Stowe's novel and other similar writings by women of the time. Notable examples of contrasting feminine and masculine readings of Stowe's novel in nineteenth-century France are George Sand's exuberantly positive response and Gustave Flaubert's dismissively negative reaction. (1) As a woman writer and reader, Sand responded positively to a work that belonged to a current of sentimental, socially-oriented, moral and religious literature which was produced largely by and for women and which in the hands of male authors such as Eugène Sue often seem to glorify "non seulement les infortunés de la terre mais aussi leurs vices" (Lucas 111). In contrast with Sand's appreciation of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Flaubert dismissed that work by applying the apparently gender neutral universalist aesthetic of "art for art's sake," a criterion of writing that was produced largely by (if not also for) men. In rejecting such features of Stowe's work as its sentimentalism, I would urge, Flaubert was in fact doing more than just attacking an aesthetic theory. He was also responding to literature in a predictably gendered way. After examining Sand's and Flaubert's remarks about Uncle Tom's Cabin, I shall attempt to support my contention that gender plays a role in readers' responses to that novel by adducing other examples of male and female writers who echo the opposing positions that Sand and Flaubert adopted at the time of that novel's publication in France. As I shall observe in closing, even today's most illuminating attempts by Francophone theorists to address the questions of slavery and race that are at the heart of Uncle Tom's Cabin echo certain of Sand's and Flaubert's aesthetic and ideological attitudes. Those echoes suggest that there is still much to be learned by ferreting out the gender issues that have arisen in the debate about Stowe's novel.