Articulating Uncle Tom's Cabin

Abstract

One of the most famous reactions to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) was Henry James’s childhood reminiscence in A Small Boy and Others. In his response, James described Stowe’s novel as “much less a book than a state of vision, of feeling and of consciousness, in which [the audience] didn’t sit and read and appraise and pass the time, but walked and talked and laughed and cried . . . in a manner of which Mrs. Stowe was the irresistible cause.” The experience James detailed was one in which the novel became part of a larger cultural formation. While most books swam like “fishes in water,” James described Uncle Tom’s Cabin as “a wonderful ‘leaping’ fish” that suddenly appeared and was able to “fly anywhere” through different media. 1 Intriguingly, James’s comments on Stowe appeared in a chapter centered not on the novel but on theatrical adaptations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. James, not one to shy away from making aesthetic distinctions, seemed not to find any significant ones between the novel and the plays, but rather positioned them as acting in concert. 2 The young James was entranced by the almost indescribable feelings and practices brought about by the book together with dramatic adaptations. “We lived and moved at that time [the early 1850s], with great intensity, in Mrs. Stowe’s novel”(SB 158–59, emphasis added). By taking seriously James’s claim that Americans lived and moved in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, this article aims to foreground how Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as a popular text, played a crucial role in configuring American social and political life in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Americans could live in Uncle Tom’s Cabin because it became a way of structuring experience, or, to use Raymond Williams’s term, part of structures of feeling. As a popular text existing in a variety of media, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was part of a social experience “in solution,” bringing together and relating a range of ideological and cultural elements. 3 As James’s “leaping fish” comment suggests, the complex and sometimes contradictory series of reactions, restagings, and parodies hold the key to the significance of the popularity of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. For if Uncle Tom’s Cabin had operated simply as an illustration of a particular ideology, its popularity quickly would have waned with shifts in the