Creole Family Politics in "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl"

Abstract

Domestic ideology in American fiction is a slippery thing, possibly because it is so closely linked to the debates over American slavery. Take, for example, Uncle Tom's Cabin, a novel that George Sand proclaimed to be admirably and of the (Review 4).1 In recent years, scholars have (re)discovered that Stowe's brand of sentimentalism was a radical revision of family ideology of the patriarchal sort, and they have praised it for subverting the of American slavery.2 Yet Sand's review ought to remind us that Uncle Tom's Cabin was no work of avant-garde subversion, but rather, a successful bid for national (and even international) prominence. Uncle Tom's Cabin represents a crucial moment in the United States, when debates over slavery in the expanding territories came to redefine the American family and the American nation. In order to repudiate slavery and render it foreign to the sentimental core of her imagined community, Stowe worked hard to disassociate it from another domestic institution that the break-away colonists had inherited from their colonial forefathers: that of the colonial family. In the process, as I will argue, Uncle Tom's Cabin fundamentally restructured the American family by separating settlers from slaves in American households, assimilating French colonial others, and effacing the colonial family's origins as a settler-and-slave formation. To understand just how Stowe restructures the American national home in Uncle Tom's Cabin, it is crucial to decipher her use of Louisiana Creole characters and settings. This is a challenge that even our most celebrated thinkers have failed to meet. In his survey of the black characters in the novel, for example, James Baldwin simply discards those blacks who pass as French or Spanish, since we have only the author's word that they are Negro and they are, in all