SOURCE: "Romance and Real Estate," in The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century, University of California Press, 1987, pp. 85-112.

In the following excerpt from an essay originally published in 1983, Michaels examines the economic themes of Uncle Tom's Cabin, focusing on the role of slavery in the marketplace.

. . . . The conjunction of death and secure property has its place in [Uncle Tom's Cabin, a text] intended not as a romance but, in its author's words [in A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, 1853], as a "representation . . . of real incidents, of actions really performed, of words and expressions really uttered." Riding by his slave quarters late at night, Simon Legree hears the singing of a "musical tenor voice": "'When I can read my title clear / To mansions in the skies,'" Uncle Tom sings," 'I'll bid farewell to every fear / And wipe my...