Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Lisa Whitney

Critical Essay by Lisa Whitney

SOURCE: Whitney, Lisa. “In the Shadow of Uncle Tom's Cabin: Stowe's Vision of Slavery from the Great Dismal Swamp.” New England Quarterly 66, no. 4 (December 1993): 552-69.

In the following essay, Whitney claims that in Dred, Stowe abandons the sentimentality of her earlier novel in favor of a realistic treatment of the legal issues surrounding the slave system.

Dred, A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856) inevitably has been read in the shadow of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). “An unavoidable literary obligation,” according to one scholar, “a second antislavery novel was obviously Stowe's duty to her public and her publishers.” As if Stowe had set out to do much the same thing in Dred that she had in Uncle Tom's Cabin, the “failure” of the second novel is explained as the exhaustion of whatever force lay behind the successful artistry of the first.¹ The evidence suggests, however, that...
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