building the american landscape - Univerza v Novi Gorici

Thus, we could define these lands today as memory landscapes, because they bear
traces of something from a world which cannot be recreated and which certainly
cannot be restricted to agricultural or horticultural and ornamental practices.
However, the plantations, so indissolubly linked to the country life, were places
which inspired a wide range of literature, which spread the political positions and
the cause of the anti‐slavery movement. Among these publications, the best known
is Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811‐1896), which had a
great success and wide diffusion as a “protest novel”. It distinguished itself among
the numerous novels printed at that time, both in favour and against slavery. The
novel speaks of stereotyped characters, the good owner, the ignorant, affectionate
slave (Uncle Tom) and the cruel slave‐driver. All the characters described by Stowe
portray strong feelings and display every type of extreme human behaviour. The
actions and manifestations from a wide sample of psyche occur in a melancholy
script, heightened by a vein of predestination which marks the various protagonists.
On the eve of the decline of the plantation system 51 , the pious loyalty of Uncle Tom
is an appeal to non‐violence in a world dominated by prejudices, even though the
intention of the authoress was not directed against the Southern states, but rather
against slavery itself. It is Uncle Tom who gives us a touching description of his
world as he sees it flow away from the pier of a Mississippi boat:
The slanting light of the setting sun quivers on the sea‐like expanse of
the river; the shivery canes, and the tall, dark cypress, hung with
wreaths of dark, funereal moss, glow in the golden ray, as the heavilyladen
steamboat marches onward. Piled with cotton‐bales, from many a
plantation, up over deck and sides, till she seems in the distance a
square massive block of gray, she moves heavily onward to the nearing
mart. [...] For a hundred or more miles above New Orleans, the river is
higher than the surrounding country, and rolls its tremendous volume
between massive levees twenty feet in height. The traveller from the
deck of the steamer, as from some floating castle top, overlooks the
whole country for miles and miles around. Tom, therefore, had spread
out full before him, in plantation after plantation, a map of the life to
which he was approaching. He saw the distant slaves at their toil; he saw
afar their villages of huts gleaming out in long rows on many a
plantation, distant from the stately mansions and pleasure‐grounds of
the master; and as the moving picture passed on, his poor, foolish heart
51 See PHILLIPS, B. Ulrich, “The decadence of the Plantation System”, Annals of the American
Academy of Political Social Science, Vol. 35, N. 1, The New South, 1910, pp. 37‐41
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