“An atmosphere of sympathetic influence encircles every human being”: Stowe, Gaskell, and the Emotional Stakes of Nineteenth-Century Social Reform

As two social protest novels written by white female authors, Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe and North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell serve as fascinating case studies for analyzing the construction of sympathy and female activism through martyrdom in the mid-nineteenth century. By carefully recasting the victims of the vast and impersonal systems of enslavement and industrial capitalism into personages in moving personal melodramas, Stowe and Gaskell actively engage in relevant debates regarding white women’s suffering as grounds for social reform, shaping the way that nineteenth-century women could make themselves intersectional advocates against transatlantic conditions of inequality and subjugation. To invoke sympathetic feelings in her readers, several crucial episodes throughout Uncle Tom’s Cabin trace moments of shared connection through the exchange of gifts or tokens. These scenes of gift-giving signal the morality of a character, such as Little Eva St. Clare, while serving as a metaphorical acknowledgement of shared qualities, such as motherhood or piety. In contrast, as Gaskell uses intersectionality to illustrate class struggles, crucial scenes in her narrative depict protagonist Margaret Hale shedding the presumed passive nature of femininity in favor of physicality and action as depicted in moments of bodily contact, both through touching and being touched. These moments advocate for direct connection and a revised paternalistic approach to industry. As they both confronted the preeminent economic, political, and social issues of their time, Stowe and Gaskell expertly navigated the convoluted doctrine of separate spheres. The extraordinary results are persuasive and moving pieces centered on shared feeling, shared contact, and shared objects as they attempted to transform society for the greater good.