“In My Father’s House Are Many Mansions”

This chapter aims to reassert the anti-slavery purposes of Uncle Tom’s Cabin by demonstrating how Harriet Beecher Stowe used homelessness as a rhetorical strategy to that end. Stowe uses the form of homelessness to create sympathy in her readers in a way that is analogous to the widely accepted strategy of maternal empathy. The homelessness of slaves complements maternal love as a means of creating empathy in readers and a corresponding distaste for slavery. As a writer who sought an end to slavery, Stowe used homelessness as a rhetorical strategy to create empathy and achieve that goal. The chapter argues that Stowe used homelessness to hasten the end of slavery because she considered it a sin against human beings: Her success demonstrates the potential for texts to do “cultural work” at a time when women were chastised for speaking out on such subjects and blacks were not seen as fully human.