Aunt Phillis's Cabin

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Aunt Phillis's Cabin: or, Southern Life As It Is
Title page of the 1852 edition
Author	Mary Henderson Eastman
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre(s)	Plantation literature
Publisher	Lippincott, Grambo & Co
Publication date	1852
Media type	Print (Hardcover & Paperback) & E-book
Pages	c.300 pp (May change depending on the publisher and the size of the text)
ISBN	N/A

Aunt Phillis's Cabin: or, Southern Life As It Is by Mary Henderson Eastman is an 1852 plantation fiction novel, and is perhaps the most read anti-Tom novel in American literature.

Contents 1 Overview 2 Plot introduction 3 Characters 4 Reception 5 Publication history 6 In other works 7 References 8 External links

[edit] Overview

Published in 1852, Aunt Phillis's Cabin contains contrasts and comparisons with Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, to which the book serves as an antithesis.

Eastman's novel acts in sharp contrast to the situation in Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, where abusive plantation-owners abuse their repressed, disloyal slaves. Eastman reverses this situation, portraying white plantation owners who behave benignly towards their slaves.

Eastman also uses quotes from various sources - including Uncle Tom's Cabin itself - to attempt to explain in her novel that slavery is a natural institution, and essential to life itself.^[1]

[edit] Plot introduction

The story takes place in an unnamed rural town in Virginia, which is frequented by several plantation owners living around it.

The town relies on trade from the cotton plantations to keep itself alive, and understanding this, the plantation owners, in contrast to their neighbours in surrounding towns, have adopted a benign approach towards their slaves to keep them docile, thus keeping the slaves peaceful and the safety of the town assured.

Several characters in and around the town are introduced throughout the story, demonstrating how this process works and the delicate balance of such a process in action.

[edit] Characters

• Aunt Phillis - A 50-year-old slave living on a Virginia cotton plantation. She is pious, temperant and proud, being likened to a Nubian queen by Eastman. Curiously, Phillis does not appear in the novel until Chapter IX.^[2]

• Uncle Bacchus - The socialite husband of Phillis. He is a kindly slave, who is named after the Roman god Bacchus due to his excessive alcoholism. He and Phillis have three children: one son, William, and two daughters, Lydia and Esther.

• Mr. Weston - A kindly English American plantation owner living in Virginia, and the owner of Phillis, Bacchus and several other slaves, all of whom he treats with respect and kindness. It is revealed in the novel that he is a widower, and is descended from a long line of English feudal lords. He lives on the plantation with his daughter-in-law, Anna Weston, and several other members of his family.

• Alice Weston - Niece of Mr. Weston, who is betrothed to his son, Arthur, thus making them a cousin couple. She is one of the main protagonists of the novel, in which she is the object of affections between her fiance and a rival slaveowner.

• Arthur Weston - The fiance of Alice, who is studying at Yale College in New England during events in the novel. Arthur, because of his Southern roots, is targeted by several overzealous abolitionists throughout his time at Yale, and is used as a mouthpiece in the novel for criticisms of Abolitionism in general.

• Miss Janet / Cousin Janet - An elderly friend of Mr. Weston, who resides with him on the plantation. She acts as an instructor to the female slaves in the arts of sewing, embroidery and other domestic tasks. She also acts as an aunt figure to Alice in times of need.

• Aunt Peggy - A senile, 90-year-old slave from Guinea, who lives on the plantation without doing any work because of her old age. She is seen throughout the novel as an irritant to Bacchus and Phillis, mocking the other slaves from the comfort of her own cabin. She dies in Chapter XII, after mocking Alice's sudden chill and claiming that Alice would die.^[3]

• Abel Johnson - A friend of Arthur studying at Yale College. Abel acts as the middleman in the argument over slavery, preferring to remain neutral in most cases in a manner similar to Benjamin the Donkey in Animal Farm. He is, however, shown to be something of a philanthropist, showing some sympathy for slaves without attacking slavery outright.

• Captain William Moore - An army captain living in New England with his wife, Emmy Moore. Captain Moore is a military officer, who has recently been assigned to calm trouble in New England that has been brought about by abusive abolitionists "rescuing" runaway slaves, only to enslave them once again for their own ends. One such slave, Susan, eventually becomes a maid to the Moores after being rescued from her overbearing abolitionist masters.

Other characters in the novel include several plantation owners - Mr. Barbour (the first character to appear in the novel), Mr. Kent (an abolitionist-turned-slaveowner, similar to the situation of The Planter's Northern Bride), Walter Lee (the rival for Alice's affections), Mr. Chapman (a critic of the fugitive slave laws) - and several slaves, including Mark, John, Nancy (of the Weston plantation) and Aunt Polly (an ex-slave and servant of the Moores).

[edit] Reception

The novel, although obscure today, remains one of the most-read examples of the anti-Tom genre, with between 20,000 and 30,000 copies of Aunt Phillis's Cabin being sold upon its initial release in 1852.^[4] This made Aunt Phillis's Cabin the most crticially-successful anti-Tom novel until the publication of The Lofty and the Lowly, or Good in All and None All Good in 1853, which sold 8,000 copies within the first weeks of publication.^[5]

[edit] Publication history

Aunt Phillis's Cabin was released in 1852 - the same year that Uncle Tom's Cabin appeared in book form.

Eastman's novel was published by Lippincott, Grambo & Co, who would go on to publish other anti-Tom novels, including Antifanaticism: A Tale of the South by Martha Haines Butt (1853)^[6], and Mr. Frank, the Underground Mail-Agent by Vidi (1853).^[7]

The novel has since fallen into the public domain, and has been reprinted in the modern day by several publishers, including The Echo Library^[8], Kessinger Publishing^[9], and Tutis Digital Publishing^[10].

[edit] In other works

• Another 1852 anti-Tom novel, Life at the South; or, "Uncle Tom's Cabin" As It Is by W.L.G. Smith, features a title similar to the full title of Eastman's novel. Both novels likely based their titles on American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses, an 1839 volume co-authored by abolitionists Theodore Dwight Weld and the Grimké sisters, which was a source for some of the content in Uncle Tom's Cabin.^[11]

• In the preface of Aunt Phillis's Cabin, Eastman quoted a variety of sources from the Bible that Eastman claimed supported slavery as an institution.^[12] These same quotes would later appear in another anti-Tom novel, The Black Gauntlet: A Tale of Plantation Life in South Carolina by Mary Howard Schoolcraft, which would be published four years later in 1856.^[13]

• The death of Aunt Phillis as a Christianized slave in Chapter XXVI of Eastman's novel has since become a frequent cliche among the later anti-Tom novels. Other novels that feature slaves passing away as reformed Christians include: Frank Freeman's Barber Shop by the Reverend Baynard Rush Hall (1852)^[14], and Uncle Robin, in His Cabin in Virginia, and Tom Without One in Boston by J.W. Page (1853).^[15]. Whether this cliche is solely derived from Eastman's novel or the pious death of Uncle Tom in Uncle Tom's Cabin is open to debate.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Aunt Phillis's Cabin at Project Gutenberg
• Aunt Phillis's Cabin at the University of Virginia