Writing to Right the Spirit of Adoption: The Adoptive Mother / Savior in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s "Uncle Tom’s Cabin", Harriet E. Wilson’s "Our Nig", and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s “Moses: A Story of the Nile”

Abstract

The trope of interracial adoption is complex but fairly common in American literature, particularly as it results in the racist and racialized hallmark of displacing and depicting Black women as bad Black mothers—the antithesis of White maternity. This essay posits the trope’s genesis at the center of abolitionist writer Harriet Beecher Stowe’s extraordinarily influential anti-slavery novel, "Uncle Tom’s Cabin". The novel has been heralded as the most significant literary accomplishment by an American writer, both nationally and internationally, during the nineteenth century. Notwithstanding, Stowe’s novel sets in motion the cultural ideology that Whiteness—in the form of adoption by a free, White, Christian mother / savior—is a direct route out of bondage for enslaved Black children. Necessarily and in direct response, Harriet E. Wilson’s autobiographical novel, "Our Nig," and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s poem, “Moses: A Story of the Nile,” bring the complicated anti-Black and White constructions of power, motherhood, consanguinity, and kinship into sharp relief. Taken together, their writings form an episodic and polyscopic perspective on belonging, bondage, freedom, and agency. Most importantly, Wilson’s and Harper’s texts amplify the historical remainder of and tension between ways of understanding racialized adoption and insist that the literary (human) being that is the Black mother be made legible.