![]() ![]() The story, Baldwin asserts, “achieves a bright, almost lurid significance, like the light from a fire which consumes a witch.” This metaphor shows that, while the book might be against racism, it causes a kind of violence.Īnother problem with protest novels like Uncle Tom’s Cabin is that they are overly sentimental. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for example, makes its point far too obvious. The goal of this morality is to make people feel shame. ![]() Protest novels are guilty of using a “medieval morality” that clearly separates good characters and bad ones, right and wrong, black and white. He argues that protest novels oversimplify the complexity of human beings for the sake of putting forward a message.īaldwin is against what he calls “moralism” in fiction. In this chapter, Baldwin discusses two novels, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Richard Wright’s Native Son, in order to develop his ideas about protest novels. ![]()
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