SOURCE: "Heroines in Uncle Tom's Cabin," in American Literature, Vol. XLIX, No. 2, May, 1977, pp. 161-79.

In the following excerpt, Ammons discusses various feminist themes in Uncle Tom's Cabin, suggesting that Stowe replaces masculine values with feminine and maternal ones.

Late in me nineteenth century Harriet Beecher Stowe announced mat God wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). The novel by then seemed too monumental even to its author to have been imagined by one woman. Earlier in her life, in contrast, Stowe had no doubt mat she wrote the subversive book or mat she was inspired to write it, despite marital and household irritations, precisely because she was a woman.

In a letter to her husband ten years before the publication of the novel, and almost ninety years before Virginia Woolf s famous declaration of independence on behalf of all women writers in A Room of One's Own (1929), Harriet Beecher Stowe...