SOURCE: "Sentimental Power: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Politics of Literary History," in Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860, Oxford University Press, Inc., 1985, pp. 122-46.

In the following excerpt, Tompkins defends the value of Uncle Tom's Cabin as a work of sentimental fiction, discussing Stowe's attention to nineteenth-century women's culture and her vision of social reform.

[The] popular domestic novel of the nineteenth century represents a monumental effort to reorganize culture from the woman's point of view; that this body of work is remarkable for its intellectual complexity, ambition, and resourcefulness; and that, in certain cases, it offers a critique of American society far more devastating than any delivered by better-known critics such as Hawthorne and Melville. Finally, it suggests that the enormous popularity of these novels, which has been cause for suspicion bordering on disgust, is a reason for paying close attention to them...