Uncle Tom’s Cabin on the American Stage and Screen by John W. Frick (review)

Abstract

FRICK, JOHN W. Uncle Toni's Cabin American Stage and Screen. New York: Palgrave/MacMillan, 2012. 308 pp. $100.00. Unlike Sarah Meer's Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy, and Transatlantic Culture in 1850s (2006), John W. Frick's recent study focuses squarely dramatic adaptations of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom s Cabin produced in United States from novel's publication as a book in 1852 to roughly 1932. The first and more compelling half of his study analyzes two most influential adaptations of Stowe's (the 1852 George Aiken and H. J. Conway productions) and offers a wealth of historical and biographical detail regarding many theatre venues, entrepreneurs (including P. T. Barnum), managers, playwrights, and actors who brought Stowe's to life for antebellum audiences. For literary scholars, primary benefit of this section is how clearly it contextualizes intersection between Uncle Tom's Cabin and an ascendant theatre genre: moral reform drama. Drawing upon David S. Reynolds's notion of a mixed text (one that articulates contradictory messages and ideological tendencies), Frick shows how success of Uncle Tom s Cabin on both page and stage (18) derived from its investment in such popular entertainments as minstrelsy (the legendary T. D. Rice performed role of Uncle Tom more than one occasion) even as it helped to re-gender and recreate theatre as a bourgeois social space. (Oddly, in this regard, Frick doesn't incorporate Lawrence Levine's important discussion of theatrical sacralization of culture in Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America [1990]). Within this cultural context, though, Frick persuasively argues that even Aiken script--the one that hewed most closely to Stowe's antislavery message--significantly undercut her Christian and sentimental rhetoric by excising abolitionist characters that appeared in novel and simplifying those remaining characters most closely associated with indictment of slavery and by treating clinically scenes of great emotion (59). Furthermore, Aiken and subsequently many other playwrights foregrounded male characters of and minimalized stories of Eliza, Tom, Eva, Ophelia, Topsy, and Cassy (reducing Ophelia, for example, to cliched old maid and Topsy to the butt of ridicule in play [60]). The cumulative result, Frick concludes, is that Stowe's was masculinized antebellum even as moral reform drama movement made it respectable for genteel women to attend theatre. …