Notes of a Native Son: Everybody’s Protest Novel Summary & Analysis

In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the white master St. Clare tells his cousin, Miss Ophelia, that black people have been put in the service of white people in this world, and that this injustice may perhaps be corrected in the afterlife. Miss Ophelia, presumably voicing the opinion of the author, Harriet Beecher Stowe, is horrified. Baldwin argues that the characters in the novel never question the simplistic terms within which they frame morality. This corresponds to contemporary morals about racial oppression, which rarely go beyond shallow, righteous indignation. Baldwin concludes that Uncle Tom’s Cabin is “a very bad novel” because of its “virtuous sentimentality.” Sentimentality is dishonest and cowardly, and thus slyly cruel. Stowe fails to interrogate peoples’ reasons for acting the way they do, and for this reason Uncle Tom’s Cabin is more of a “pamphlet” than a novel.

Baldwin argues that in order for the novel to be more truthful, Stowe would have had to be committed to representing humanity, rather than a “Cause.” He claims that oversimplifying people’s complexity and ambiguity diminishes humanity. Baldwin points out that there are actually fairly few black characters in the book, and that they are either rendered in a stereotypical fashion or are given attributes of whiteness. The controversial character of Uncle Tom, meanwhile, is only redeemed from his blackness through his total humility. Ultimately, Stowe maintains the association of blackness with evil and whiteness with purity. The novel is written out of a fear of damnation and gives the reader a false sense of assurance that they are virtuous simply for reading it. In reality, protest novels like Uncle Tom’s Cabin are nothing more than sentimental fantasies that reflect fear, confusion, and denial of truth.

Baldwin compares the goal of the protest novel to that of white missionaries in Africa. He laments the fact that society is able to convince oppressed people that they are inferior to their oppressors. People often forget that both the oppressed and the oppressor are “bound together” by the same beliefs. This is why many black people themselves continue to associate whiteness with virtue. Baldwin discusses Richard Wright’s novel Native Son, and argues that its central character, Bigger Thomas, is in fact a “descendant” of Stowe’s Uncle Tom. The tragedy of Bigger’s life is that he has accepted the terms of America’s racist ideology, and thus must “battle for his humanity according to those brutal criteria.” Protest novels fail because they do not engage the full reality of human existence, instead reducing people to simplistic categories.