Aunt Phillis's Cabin - Overview

Overview

Published in 1852, Aunt Phillis's Cabin contains contrasts and comparisons to the anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, which was published earlier that year. It serves as an antithesis; Eastman's novel deliberately referred to the situation in Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, where plantation owners abuse their repressed, disloyal slaves. Eastman portrays white plantation owners who behave benignly toward their slaves. Eastman also uses quotes from various sources – including Uncle Tom's Cabin itself – to explain that slavery is a natural institution, and essential to life. Like other novels of the genre, it contains much dialogue between masters and slaves, in which she portrays "the essential happiness of slaves in the South as compared to the inevitable sufferings of free blacks and the working classes in the North," as noted by the scholar Stephen Railton in the website Uncle Tom's Cabin & American Culture.