ABSTRACT
Mentioning Elizabeth Gaskell and Harriet Beecher Stowe in the same breath may seem like an arbitrary juxtaposition. Despite the well-documented, if unexplored, personal and literary relationship of these two women no one seems to have noted the remarkable similarity in narrative structure of Stowe's 1852 anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Gaskell's 1848 factory novel, Mary Barton. Faulkner ironically underlines that it is the black and female side of the Sutpen dynasty, and of the McCaslins in Go Down, Moses, that survives. The rebuilding of the extended family, separated in the one instance by the Industrial Revolution and in the other by slavery, is a central theme in both novels. The Canadian presence is felt in Uncle Tom's Cabin in another way: the St. Clare family is originally of Acadian stock and has been itself expatriated from Nova Scotia to Louisiana's "Cajun" country.
