SOURCE: "Failed Mothers and Fallen Houses: The Crisis of Domesticity in Uncle Tom's Cabin, " in ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, Vol. 38, No. 2, Second Quarter, 1992, pp. 161-87.

In the following excerpt, Jenkins examines race, sexuality, and motherhood in Uncle Tom's Cabin, tracing what she contends is the collapse of Stowe's domestic plot.

So this is the little lady who made this big war.

—Abraham Lincoln

Harriet Beecher Stowe viewed slavery primarily as a domestic issue. From her childbed she thought of it, at her kitchen table she wrote of it, and her novel of slavery reflects this domestic atmosphere. For Stowe, slavery threatened the integrity of the family, and with a domestic tale she might best illustrate this danger. Thus, in her fiction mothers represent the domestic realm and guard the home against worldly contaminations. In Uncle Tom's Cabin, however, that reforming maternal force fails. As the...