currently taken as the three dominant modes of social categorization-gender, race, and class. Contemporary social theory and cultural criticism are developing an everincreasing sense of the fundamental interrelation of these categories in the constitution of our society. Thus, to the extent that any given movement fails to recognize that interrelation, it then falls short of envisioning a really revolutionary social transformation- it is properly reformist. The movements characteristic of the late nineteenth century (like most of those current today) were constituted in precisely this way. Moreover, even when activists proposed social changes that would no doubt have brought about developments that most people would have experienced as radically new — the socialization of the economy, for instance, or the admission of women into all spheres of public life-the means by which they sought to incorporate these changes were by and large characterized by moderation, gradualism, and/or work through established social and political mechanisms, as opposed to sudden revolutionary transformation. Having posited this definition of reform culture during the latter half of the nineteenth century, we are now well prepared to be confronted with the many exceptions to it that any survey of the period will undoubtedly uncover. And yet, any modifications we must make in our understanding of the reform impulse should be seen not as invalidating this initial conception but rather as indicating the great difficulty of painting with broad strokes a national history whose import will lie largely in the fine, specific details of the individual experiences that constitute it.
Any history of the reform novel in the latter half of the nineteenth century would have to begin with a consideration of Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe. This novel-an abolitionist narrative that advocated the ultimate repatriation of African Americans from the United States to colonies in West Africa-crystallizes the effect of a major political development that occurred right at the midpoint of the nineteenth century. The year 1850 saw the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, which mandated the return of fugitive slaves even from the nonslaveholding Northern states into which they might have escaped. By legislating the North's complicity in slavery, -217- the law merely exposed the fact that the entire nation had been implicated in the horrors of the system from the beginning, and indicated that the ramifications of the institution were not peculiar to the South. The act was an element in the Compromise of 1850, the other major aspect of which allowed for the admission of Western territories into the Union as nonslave states. Its passage marked a moral watershed for many Northerners, who were finally brought face to face with the full significance of the slave system; and the fact that the law was signed in 1850 provides us with a means of neatly bifurcating the century so that we can consider the reform culture of the latter half as a relatively contained phenomenon. Stowe, like many other citizens who harbored antislavery sentiments, was indignant with President Millard Fillmore and, especially, with New Hampshire Senator Daniel Webster-the bulwark of New England liberalism-for supporting the bill. She turned that indignation to the writing of her abolitionist novel, which was published in 1852, and which launched her on a long public career. As Uncle Tom's Cabin provides us with a means by which to understand the strategies incorporated in all of the rest of the works we will consider, it will be necessary to give it substantial attention here.
As numerous commentators have suggested, Uncle Tom's Cabin stands not only as a testament to Stowe's strong antislavery sentiment but also as an indication of the degree to which abolitionist rhetoric was forged in the crucible of feminine-and feminist-sensibility. Organized American feminism itself had strong roots in the antislavery movement, emerging from the women's auxiliaries to maledominated abolitionist groups of the 1830s and 1840s. In fact, it was in response to the barring of women delegates from the floor of the 1840 World's Antislavery Convention in London that Elizabeth Cady Stanton began the organizing for the first women's rights convention, held at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. Thus the two movements-for women's rights, including, but not limited to, suffrage, and for equality between African Americans and whites, beginning with the abolition of slavery-have long been intertwined. They have also frequently been set at odds with each other in a political context that plays different disenfranchised groups against one another. Despite the historically vexed relationship between feminism and abolition-218- ism, however, Uncle Tom's Cabin, in its particular stylistic treatment of its peculiar subject matter, actually synthesizes the two social movements in one triumphant political work.
Since at least the mid- 1970s, scholars have been engaged in a reassessment of the function of the sentimental novel in the nineteenthcentury United States. This reassessment has led to an understanding of the form's potential for effecting progressive social change through its adaptation of narrative conventions that actually seem to reflect women's passivity and subservience to men. The stereotypically feminine traits that are associated with the Victorian-era 'cult of true womanhood'-piety, purity, submissiveness, domesticity-combine to make women the guardians of society's moral standards. This has provided for two primary types of plot in the sentimental novel: the plot of romantic seduction, whereby a woman's virtue is tested by the insistent overtures made to her by a relatively less scrupulous man; and the plot of moral improvement, whereby the superior virtue that is considered to characterize women actually empowers them to sway the actions of the men who come under their domestic care. It has been argued that Uncle Tom's Cabin suppresses the former sentimental structure and emphasizes the latter, depicting women as the primary agents of the antislavery activity in the novel. Stowe's work thus actually loosens the sentimental novel from its associations with the apparently profoundly private concerns of the domestic sphere and transforms it into a forum for public agitation for social reform. This mode of politicizing the domestic sphere by introducing into it the consideration of public events will be central to much reform fiction through the 1880s-and it will also provide the context within which we can understand the development of the reform novel in the final decade of the century-so it is worth emphasizing here the role Stowe's novel plays in originating the strategy.
To understand this strategy fully requires that we examine exactly how Uncle Tom's Cabin makes its argument. Obviously, there are any number of aspects of Stowe's presentation on which we might focus. It will be instructive, though, to take a cue from the author herself, whose novel, when originally published in two volumes in 1852, was subtitled 'The Man That Was a Thing.' For Stowe's purpose, evident in much of her rhetoric in the novel, was to impress -219- upon her readers the dehumanizing effects of slavery upon African Americans held in its thrall. This was not a new undertaking; abolitionist orators and writers had been broadcasting a very similar message throughout the 1830s and 1840s. To be sure, that most influential abolitionist tract, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself, which was published in 1845, based its polemical effect on precisely the fact that the institution of slavery rendered its victims (both African American slave and white master) less than human. The difference between Douglass's treatment and Stowe's, however, lies in the specific type of dehumanization that each sees at work in slavery. Douglass repeatedly emphasizes slavery's effect of imbuing human beings with an array of animalistic traits-'behold,' he says, as he describes his own downward trajectory, just before the climactic turn of the narrative, 'a man transformed into a brute!' Stowe, on the other hand, specifies again and again the intended effect of slavery to transform humans not into some lower order of animal but rather into inanimate objects, traded and held as property. In the very first chapter of her novel, Stowe, having presented the slaveowner, Arthur Shelby, reflecting on his need to sell his faithful hand, Tom, and the young son of his wife's maid, makes the following pronouncement:
So long as the law considers all these human beings, with beating hearts and living affections, only as so many things belonging to a master, — so long as the failure, or misfortune, or imprudence, or death of the kindest owner, may cause them any day to exchange a life of kind protection and indulgence for one of hopeless misery and toil, — so long it is impossible to make anything beautiful or desirable in the best regulated administration of slavery.
This statement is only a prelude to numerous other references to the status of slaves as things throughout the first eight chapters of the book.
We might well ask what is accomplished by Stowe's positing of the matter as she does. It is possible to argue that, by emphasizing a desired inanimate status for African American slaves, Stowe actually allows for the question of slavery itself to be brought within the compass of domestic, feminine concerns, and thus to be commented on through the mechanism of sentimental fiction. In order to under-220- stand how this works, we need first to recognize the complicated relation between the realms, mentioned earlier, of the public and the private. Let us remember that, even if Uncle Tom — and the other slaves, too, for that matter — is legally a thing, a piece of property, he is a particular kind of property:
