“This Promiscuous Housekeeping”: Death, Transgression, and Homoeroticism in Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Mary boykin chesnut’s quip, “Stowe did not hit the sorest spot. She made Legree a bachelor,” is to this day one of the most famous one- line responses to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Yet it may have been Chesnut who missed the spot, so to speak, for although Harriet Beecher Stowe reserves her discussion of explicit sexual abuse for the gothic plantation of Tom’s third master Legree, illicit relations are evident throughout the novel. The focus of this essay will be the fissures created by the coded and repressed moments of illicit sexuality in the household of a married couple, the Shelbys (Tom and his wife Chloe and thmulatta Eliza’s masters), and the homoerotics displayed at the estate of Tom’s second master, the father of little Eva, Augustine St. Clare.