ABSTRACT
Towards the beginning of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Mr Shelby addresses the slave trader Haley in conciliatory terms. Eliza had learned of Mr Shelby’s plot to sell her young son and escaped with him in the night. Afraid that he will be asked to return the money from the sale, Mr Shelby attempts to act the benevolent patron by inviting the trader to the family breakfast table. This act is intended to momentarily lower social boundaries and give Haley a sense of belonging. Recognizing this ploy and objecting to her husband’s double transgression – the sale of Tom and young Harry as well as the incursion of the slave trader at her family breakfast table – Mrs Shelby “now rose, and said her engagements would prevent her being at the breakfast-table that morning” (Stowe [1852] 1889, 52). Haley, conscious of the social tensions that prompt Mrs Shelby’s boycott, remarks, “Old lady don’t like your humble servant, over and above” (ibid.). Mrs Shelby and other female characters in nineteenth-century American novels fully exercise their social and emotional power at the breakfast table.
