Tom's Cabin Research Articles

Subjectivity in the American Protest Novel (review)

Reviewed by: Subjectivity in the American Protest Novel Stephen M. Park Kimberly S. Drake . Subjectivity in the American Protest Novel. New York: Palgrave, 2011. x + 253 pp. For readers of protest novels, there is a basic tension between admiring a sharp political critique and hoping to find within that critique some rich, complex characters that are more than simple embodiments of social problems. James Baldwin, in his disdain for the protest novel, famously attributed the genre's failure to its focus on insurmountable social categories at the expense of creating psychologically complicated characters. In order to move past the false choice between activism and craft, Kimberly S. Drake's Subjectivity in the American Protest Novel points out that many important works [End Page 403] of protest fiction employ psychologically complex characters whose efforts at self-definition constitute political acts. The authors whom she considers responded not only to social problems but also to the determinist ideas established by naturalist fiction, all of which tied characters to their circumstances and precluded the subjectivity that Drake locates in this generation of protest fiction. Her book rereads important protest novels from the twentieth century and makes the persuasive argument that the fictional characters themselves struggle against the categories into which society and some readers have placed them. Drake's book makes a significant contribution to the study of the protest novel by redirecting our attention to the psychological landscape on which her chosen authors have staged their social and political critiques. Her rationale for making the personal political comes from Du Bois's idea of double consciousness, which Drake positions as an important foundation of the American protest novel. This allows her to bridge the worlds of public activism and individual subjecthood, thereby making clear that the seemingly small concerns of the fictional characters she examines have much larger implications for American society. By demonstrating the way in which Richard Wright, Ann Petry, Tillie Olsen, Sarah E. Wright, and Chester Himes assert their characters' subjecthood against otherwise repressive environments, Drake presents a new definition of protest, one that is rooted in the internal struggles of characters. After surveying and reframing the history of the American protest novel, Drake's study moves on to examine the work of Richard Wright. In addition to dealing with Native Son, this chapter also considers Wright's early fiction, including the novels Rite of Passage and Lawd Today! Throughout her examination of these early works, Drake traces the psychological similarities among Wright's characters and argues that these works collectively represent Wright's theory of racial trauma. In particular, the analysis focuses on the metaphor of rape and the way in which Wright responds to the determinism of Jim Crow society, which has categorized black men as always already rapists and black women as inherently "unrapeable" (55). As Drake's careful textual analysis proves, the characters in Wright's fiction have internalized such external categories. Therefore the extent to which Bigger Thompson and others can assert their own interior definitions of themselves is itself the fundamental act of protest against the forces of social determinism. What is especially valuable about this chapter is its consistent focus on the reader's experience. While some protest novels, most notably Uncle Tom's Cabin, aim to inspire the reader's pity, "Wright's goal is to prevent this reaction by traumatizing the reader" (57). This point reinforces Drake's claim that in Native Son the metaphor of rape is both an act of protest [End Page 404] and a narrative strategy, but it also offers an important part of this book's critical achievement—a theory of how the protest novel works to change the reader's perception of social problems. Drake argues that whereas some of Wright's earlier fiction, such as Lawd Today!, occasionally disengaged from the protagonist's point of view, thereby providing "safety valves" for the reader (58), Wright removes these safety valves in Native Son, "forcing the reader to identify continuously with a character who is neither a victim to be pitied (by white readers) nor a hero to be admired (by black readers)" (58-59). It is this tactic—what Drake calls Wright's "act...

Visual Culture and Fictive Technique in Frederick Douglass's The Heroic Slave

The Heroic Slave (1853) was perhaps the most significant of Douglass's responses to Harriet Beecher Stowe's abolitionist blockbuster, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). Working against the sentimental abstractions inflecting white narrative and visual aesthetics in the period, Douglass's fictive technique invokes the visual realism of the daguerreotype. Written at a moment at which the very existence of African American freedom seemed to be under threat, the novella produces enabling fiction of self-emancipation directed not only at the slave South, but seeking to generate a futurist political vision, based on inclusive citizenship, for free black people in the North. In doing so, it marks a retreat from the celebratory transnationalism that had infused Douglass's earlier politics.

Uncle Tom and Ewythr Robert: Anti-Slavery and Ethnic Reconstruction in Victorian Wales

This article explores the relationship between anti-slavery and the ethnic reconstruction of Welshness which took place in the nineteenth century. Their alleged anti-slavery credentials allowed the Welsh to define themselves as more ethical and Christian than the other British nations, and the author claims that anti-slavery, along with disestablishment and temperance, was a key plank in the establishment of a hegemonic Nonconformist definition of ‘Welshness’ in the nineteenth century. This argument is developed by turning to the reception in Wales of Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), particularly the creative adaptation of Stowe's novel by Gwilym Hiraethog, Aelwyd F'Ewythr Robert (Uncle Robert's Hearth) (1953). Hiraethog's Aelwyd, an ambitious experiment in which the original American novel is placed in a charged relationship to the experiences and stories of a group of Welsh peasants, offers an interesting example of transnational and translinguistic literary influence made possible by the internationalist character of the anti-slavery movement.

Strategies of Visual Intervention: Langston Hughes and Uncle Tom's Cabin

In 1952 publisher Dodd, Mead and Company invited African American writer and intellectual Langston Hughes to create an introduction, select illustrations, and prepare discursive captions for a new edition of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. The mid-twentieth century was a complex moment in the cultural reception of the novel, characterized both by public demand for new incarnations of the story and by protests against the book and the performances it inspired. Hughes, who had a long-standing relationship with the story, accepted the invitation and produced an unusual project that reflects the story's ambivalent cultural status, celebrating the novel even while unraveling its narrative threads. While Hughes's introduction to the 1952 edition is often cited by scholars, there has been little sustained consideration of the multiple layers of critical interpretation evident throughout the rest of the book. In fact, while Hughes takes Stowe's novel as a point of departure, the work done by his choice of images, their captions, and their placement in the text is the real story. This essay elucidates some of the deeply complex strategies Hughes employed in order to elicit multiple, sometimes contradictory, stories from Stowe's text and analyzes the effects they create for readers. The essay argues that Hughes used critical and creative tools in ways unique to this project to strategically disrupt readers' suspension of disbelief and thereby provoke a more critical, more culturally and historically inflected understanding of the story.

Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Reading Revolution: Race, Literacy, Childhood, and Fiction, 1851-1911

Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Reading Revolution: Race, Literacy, Childhood, and Fiction, 1851-1911

Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature (review)

Reviewed by: Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature Martyn Bone (bio) Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature. By Jennifer Rae Greeson. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010. Pp. 366. Cloth, $39.95.) Much "new southern studies" scholarship during the last decade has been informed by an emphasis on what Houston Baker and Dana Nelson have termed "the nuanced inseparability of North and South in any fruitful model of American cultural studies."1 As Jon Smith has observed, "Marginalization of the South has had disastrous consequences for American studies, unnecessarily prolonging ideas of American exceptionalism" (292 n. 13). Yet as the new southern studies has evolved, scholars have voiced concern about its nearly exclusive focus on the twentieth century. Moreover, because this scholarship has mostly been conducted from within literary and cultural studies, it may inadvertently have widened the disciplinary divide separating it from work by historians of the South.2 In many ways, then, Jennifer Greeson's Our South appears at exactly the right time. Primarily a literary and cultural study, it exhibits deep reading in the relevant historiography. The book's chronological focus on how from 1775 to 1900 "our South" was narrated as the nation's "internal other" complements Leigh Anne Duck's The Nation's Region (2006), which concentrates on the twentieth century (1). Our South's publication by a prominent national university press, trailed by blurbs from prominent Americanists, suggests that southern studies may yet be resituated at the center of a new American studies. Greeson's eleven chapters are structured across three sections devoted to "the plantation South," "the slave South," and "the Reconstruction South," respectively. The first section opens by suggesting that the plantation South was dominant during the early republican period, when an inchoate literary nationalism began to privilege the Northeast while quarantining slavery in the South. Greeson shows how J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer (1782) constructs South Carolina as "a tropical American foil against which Farmer James asserts his new republican virtue" (27). Greeson reveals how Crèvecoeur wrote against his own earlier painting Plantation of Pine-Hill, which depicts an English colonial planter and a black field-worker in the Hudson Valley. In shifting from planter to yeoman farmer, and from pastoral black plowman to "Letter IX"'s infamous caged slave, "the plantation [became] 'southern' rather than 'American'" (25). Indeed, Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) was anomalous in locating the plantation South at the center of the new nation's narrative geography. [End Page 289] In the second section, Greeson proposes that after 1831 the slave South came to the fore: U.S. writers worried that plantation slavery was not simply a regional residue of the colonial past but the harbinger of a dystopian national future. Greeson ingeniously unravels how the slave South also infiltrated urban, northern anxieties about the market revolution. William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator cannily stoked its northeastern audience's antipathy toward slavery by utilizing the exposé, a narrative form that was already widespread in the reformist literature of the antiprostitution and temperance movements. However, Garrison's strategic focus on sex and sin deflected attention from the economic dimensions of exploitation in both the South (slave labor) and the North ("free" labor). Thus proslavery southerners remained the most prominent critics of industrial capitalist wage slavery. Few readers nowadays will dispute that transcendentalists privileged New England when conceptualizing the nation; however, some might balk at Greeson's insistence that Ralph Waldo Emerson "embraces abolitionism as an imperial civilizing project": masculine, moral New Englanders would emancipate the slave South as "imperialists for liberty" (157-58). Yet the second section's most bracing claims come in the chapter on Harriet Beecher Stowe, in which Greeson declares that "though her subject was the Slave South . . . Uncle Tom's Cabin [was] perhaps the most innovative and important novel of metropolitan modernity published in the United States before the Civil War" (173). In the depiction of Simon Legree's Louisiana plantation as a mill town in the mode of Lowell, Massachusetts, "Stowe fully realizes the Slave South as the dark satanic field of...

Heaven's Tense: Narration in The Gates Ajar

“Heaven's Tense” is about Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's best-selling nineteenth-century text, The Gates Ajar, which was published in the aftermath of the Civil War for the emotional benefit of the immense number of women who had lost their loved ones in the conflict. The overwhelming popularity of this book, like that of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, has produced critical accounts that tend to shy away from formal, textual analyses in the interests of developing more culturally oriented readings. My essay attends both to the cultural contexts that inform the novel and to its specific stylistic oddities. The narrative theories of Gerard Genette and Roland Barthes provide my reading with the vocabulary that allows me to establish and explicate the text's formal complexities—particularly its inconsistent use of tense—and interpret them in relation to the religious imperatives of the novel. The religious goal of the novel is to console women with the belief that the men they have lost are not dead, not absent, but present. The narrative implication of a belief in which death does not mark the difference between past and present is a story that does not know what tense to tell itself in. Phelps's text vacillates between tenses, seeking to make all people inhabit the present; however, narration depends on keeping these time frames discrete, and as the religious goal of the novel is achieved, its narrative cohesion is undermined.

Kara Walker, on The End of Uncle Tom

The End of Uncle Tom and the Grand Allegorical Tableau of Eva in Heaven, a silhouette installation created by contemporary artist Kara Walker, was inspired by and named after Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel. Walker's installation references characters and relationships drawn from the novel, yet positions them as illustrations with ambivalent, or even perverse relationships to the original text. Most scholars who focus on this work make brief reference to Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin in order to identify one or two of Walker's silhouetted characters, then leave the novel behind – choosing to interpret Walker's work as commentary on something larger than one novel. This critical tendency has, so far, prevented a thorough-going analysis of Walker's sustained engagement with Stowe's text, as well as with the creative industry it inspired. The main goal of this essay is to take Walker's references much more seriously – more literally, and literarily. The essay that follows proposes a close reading of The End of Uncle Tom alongside Uncle Tom's Cabin, with the goal of pointing out not only the depth of Walker's engagement with the novel, but also what her resistance to, and reiteration of, the narrative reveals about a one hundred fifty year tradition of retelling this epic work. At stake is a more complex understanding of both Walker's practice, and the ongoing influence of Stowe's novel on the ways in which racialized identity is imagined, constructed, consumed, and reproduced.

Uncle Tom's cabin, or, Life among the lowly

Uncle Tom's cabin, or, Life among the lowly

Mockingbird Passing: Closeted Traditions and Sexual Curiosities in Harper Lee's Novel (review)

Reviewed by: Mockingbird Passing: Closeted Traditions and Sexual Curiosities in Harper Lee's Novel Sarah L. Peters (bio) Holly Blackford , Mockingbird Passing: Closeted Traditions and Sexual Curiosities in Harper Lee's Novel. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2011. 349 pp. $56.00 (cloth). Ostensibly a single-book study, Holly Blackford's Mockingbird Passing engages the intellectual, social, political, and literary heritage of Harper Lee's novel, illuminating meaning in the texts that inform To Kill a Mockingbird (1960). Blackford enters a growing and active discussion of Lee's novel within queer studies, but its value is certainly not limited to that field or to understanding this important novel. Blackford's analysis offers useful insight into many different nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts and their cultural contexts and will be of interest to scholars of American studies, narrative theory, childhood and girlhood, masculinity and gender, identity and passing, and whiteness studies. Blackford begins her study at the end of the novel, with Atticus Finch reading The Gray Ghost, a gothic melodrama passed from the closeted "curiosity" Dill to Jem, a young imitation of his gentleman father, and finally to Atticus. Reading the book aloud to his sleepy daughter Scout opens him to the fluid, emotional, irrational, and often frightening, worldview of the children, full of gray areas for which his philosophy cannot account. Atticus, Blackford argues, represents Ralph Waldo Emerson's man thinking, one who studies nature and books, one who is active and has faith in the many in the one; the characters in Mockingbird comment on the transparency and oneness of Atticus, who is the same in private and public. But the "alternative canons" that Blackford highlights in this study [End Page 174] of intertextuality in Lee's novel demonstrate that it is only a privileged few who may be so consistent (86). Those more identified with their bodies—including women, African Americans, and homosexuals—must learn to speak different languages and wear different identities for different audiences. These acts of passing are the subject of Blackford's analysis, and she suggests, the primary subject of To Kill a Mockingbird, a book that has gained almost unanimous acceptance in public school curricula by itself passing as something much simpler than it is: racial melodrama. Blackford analyzes, as other critics have, how Mockingbird revises Harriet Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), providing an accessible and predictable script that relies on clear moral stances and the passionate sympathy of readers for the victims of tragic injustice. Adding another layer to this reading, Blackford draws connections to Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850) to emphasize a pattern of "feral daughters"—Pearl, Topsy, and Scout—who must develop the skills of passing as a way of contending with their fathers' legacies within the larger environments in which they were born (89). Two central chapters, as valuable to scholars of Mark Twain and Henry James as they are to those studying Mockingbird, trace the beginnings of developmental psychology from Charles Darwin through Sigmund Freud and then show how a growing understanding of childhood as a point of inquiry influences the narration of Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) and James's What Maisie Knew (1897). Blackford identifies frequent shifts in the narrative voice of Mockingbird, from Huck's deadpan comedy (when Scout describes her comfortable everyday life) to Maisie's stream-of-consciousness impressions (when Scout is overwhelmed by troubling aspects of the adult world). The child's story is punctuated by intrusions from the adult consciousness of an older Scout that takes an almost scholarly approach to recording, framing, and interpreting what young Scout cannot understand. As she develops these chapters on the multivocal narrator, able to shift language from high to low, serious to comic, mature to childlike, analytical to impressionistic, Blackford effectively supports her premise that Lee's novel is engaged in passing. Lee's command of social and intellectual discourses of the nineteenth century through the 1930s and into the 1950s allows her to shift language and narrative perspectives constantly to evoke the desired response of the reader and to appeal to a broad range of audiences, including children and adults. In her final two chapters...

<em>Uncle Tom's Cabin</em> in Our Time

A review considering the following works: Uncle Tom's Cabin in the National Era. Presented by the Harriet Beecher Center. http://nationalera.wordpress.comitable-of-contents/ The Norton Critical Edition of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Edited by Elizabeth Ammons. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 2010. XVIII 4- 616 pp. $15.75 paper. Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly. Edited by David S. Reynolds. Facsimile of the Splendid Edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. XXXiii 608 pp., 126 illus. $24.95 cloth. Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Reading Revolution: Race, Literacy, Childhood, and Fiction, 1851-1911. By Barbara Hochman. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. XV + 377 pp., 40 illus. $80.00 cloth/$28.95 paper. Mightier Than the Sword: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Battle for America. By David S. Reynolds. New York: Norton, 2011. xiv 351 pp., 43 illus. $27.95 cloth/$17.95 paper. Uncle Tom's Cabin. Prod. Vera Mattlin Jiji. 1983; 2010. DVD. $19.89. In June 2011, more than one hundred scholars gathered at Bowdoin College to celebrate the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of Harriet Beecher Stowe. They heard and discussed papers that covered a wide range of topics, including the author's later works, her relationships with Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, her transatlantic connections, and Japanese translations of Uncle Tom's Cabin. They attended roundtable discussions of topics such as access to the archives at the Harriet Beecher Center in Hartford, Connecticut. Participants (including two of Stowe's descendants) saw performances of Stowe's works and even enjoyed a walking tour of her neighborhood in Brunswick, Maine. Arranged by the Harriet Beecher Society in conjunction with the Maine Humanities Council, the Maine Women Writers Collection, and Bowdoin College, the conference was the centerpiece of the prolific scholarly activity on and her famous novel in recent years. The online publication of the National Era serialization of Uncle Tom's the two print editions, two monographs, and the DVD of the staging of George Aiken's dramatization of Uncle Tom's Cabin under review here have all appeared since 2009, the year of the publication of my in Her Own Time as well as the Broadview edition of Uncle Tom's edited by Christopher G. Diller. A quick search of this brief time period in the MLA Bibliography reveals the publication of some thirty-five new articles and book chapters on the author and her best-known work. Three of these print articles are in languages other than English, and one is a selection from a digital critical edition of the novel in the new, entirely online journal Scholarly Editing. Moreover, one collection of essays moves away from the main event: Beyond Uncle Tom's Cabin: Essays on the Writing of Harriet Beecher Stowe, edited by Sylvia Mayer and Monika Mueller, both scholars at German universities. Without doubt, new scholarship on and Uncle Tom's Cabin is both transatlantic/pacific in nature and technologically sophisticated. As Tillie Olsen noted in Silences, Stowe was thirty-nine before she got to Uncle Tom's Cabin--at last. She wrote it in magazine serial installments--in between--when weary with teaching the children and tending the baby and buying provisions and mending and darning; much of it on the kitchen table (206). The rest of the story is well known. The book was a runaway best-seller, read by people all over the world, including Queen Victoria. Late in his life, William Dean Howells wrote that as a teenager he broke [his] heart over Uncle Tom's Cabin, which he first read as it was published in installments in the antislavery newspaper the National Era (51). A young Henry James saw a dramatic version of the novel, staged by P. T. Barnum at his American Museum in New York in 1853. Although many African American readers, such as Frederick Douglass, saw the value of the novel in attracting attention to the antislavery cause, others objected, feeling that knew little of the actuality of slavery. …

The Racial Geopolitics of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Geography Textbooks

Harriet Beecher's first book, Primary Geography for Children, published in 1833, is barely known today, and neither is its thoroughly revised version, First Geography for Children, published in 1855. (1) These textbooks elucidate Stowe's stance on the civic futures of African Americans more explicitly than her novels do because they treat slavery and abolition as geopolitical concerns within a global context.' Thus, these neglected texts shed light on Stowe's abolitionist support for African colonization, one of the most vexed questions in Stowe scholarship. First raised in contemporaneous critiques of Uncle Tom's Cabin, this problem has been revisited often. For decades, scholars viewed Stowe's abolitionist support of as paradoxical. Rejecting this interpretation, Michelle Burnham redefines as central to the resolution of Uncle Tom's Cabin (121), and Amy Kaplan states that colonization underwrites the racial of the domestic imagination (48). Ezra Tawil similarly reconciles the racialism and politics of Uncle Tom's Cabin and explains their interrelation in terms of generic conventions (155). Like the tradition they revise, Burnham, Kaplan, and Tawil treat this issue as a literary question. I extend their readings of the coalescence of Stowe's abolitionist and colonizationist commitments beyond her novels. The geography textbooks show that this coalescence is integral to Stowe's understanding of the globe. Like Uncle Tom's Cabin and Dred, but far more elaborately, they counter African American claims for US citizenship. The textbooks not only extend this exclusion beyond the United States to cover the Americas but also undermine the possibility of free polities in Africa. Stowe's novels never dramatize Africa: Uncle Tom's Cabin portrays it briefly as a benighted continent in need of Christian and republican redemption, and Dred reduces it to the geographic origin of slaves. In the geography books, by contrast, Stowe depicts Africa as a region marked by harsh environmental and human conditions that must frustrate the promises of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Conversely, these books almost never mention free or fugitive African Americans (who figure prominently in the novels), but portray them implicitly as a pathological population trapped in geopolitical limbo, deprived of spatial belonging and identification. The books highlight this limbo by emphasizing the antithetical role of white US citizens as agents of national evangelical expansion. Throughout Primary Geography for Children and First Geography for Children, the joint development of Stowe's faith in expansionism and in abolition leads her to embrace what we may call antiracist reform and simultaneously to reject the enfranchisement of African Americans. For Stowe, I argue, antiracism is a moral commitment consistent with the geopolitical necessity of removing African Americans from the United States. Stowe's geopolitical view rests on the ideas that a natural geographic order separates distinct racial groups and that whites are the only appropriate subjects of US space, history, and destiny. In these two books, the white child embodies national geopolitics, and this exclusive embodiment makes African American bodies incompatible with the nation. Extending Karen Sanchez-Eppler's understanding of embodiment as cultural conceptions of the corporeality of identity (Touching Liberty 3), I attach it to territoriality to show how the affinity between the white child's body and national space renders the black body nationally unintelligible and prevents its being mapped onto national geography. Stowe's two geography textbooks illuminate the dependence of antislavery sentiment on racial exclusion because (unlike her novels) they allow us to compare the author's perspectives on geopolitics and race before and after her ideological conversion to Manifest Destiny and immediate abolition. Stowe's political commitments shifted around 1845, when Manifest Destiny became a staple of US policy and she published her first abolitionist work, a sketch titled Immediate Emancipation. …

The Word Made Exhibition: Protestant Reading Meets Catholic Worship in <em>Uncle Tom's Cabin</em> and <em>The Gates Ajar</em>

When Uncle Tom's Cabin was translated and published Italy 1852, it was read widely and enthusiastically, but some Catholic observers took exception to its theology, according to Joseph Rossi. One newspaper, La Civilta Cattolica, objected to Harriet Beecher Stowe's portrayal sentiments so noble and virtues so marvelous [being acquired] sole reading of sole Bible, which seems to be predominant fixation of author (qtd. Rossi 42223). This judgment is no mistake. The scene of Little Eva and Uncle Tom reading Bible next to Lake Pontchartrain, for instance, represents an ideal of reading for and feeling presence of God, and it consecrates advance their upcoming deaths. The Italian newspaper reminds its readers that Catholic Church has little faith this means of accessing God through printed page and warns them not to be impressed images of scriptural salvation Stowe's novel. But paper also faults for taking inspiration from the immense treasures of Catholic hagiography to feed fervid embodied in a sentimental (qtd. Rossi 423). My essay argues that religious hybrid identified review--Stowe's attempt to wed treasures of Catholicism with a Protestant faith reading--shapes her fiction. Along with Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Gates Ajar, another best-seller that puts outsize pressure on question of how to read and how to access sacred, Uncle Tom's Cabin shows how Christian doctrinal differences influenced imagination of reading sentimental novel and decisively shaped its style. It is balancing appeals of Catholic and Protestant faith that and Phelps develop a novelistic strategy I will call exhibitional style. Certainly both and Phelps are possessed of impeccable Protestant credentials. was daughter and sister, respectively, to prominent clergymen Lyman and Henry Ward Beecher; Phelps was raised a family of two generations of Andover seminarians. Stowe's Protestant influences have been persuasively and extensively tracked, as have Phelps's. (1) But developed a robust, if vexed, relationship with Catholicism. Jenny Franchot argues that writing Agnes of Sorrento ten years after Uncle Tom's Cabin, Catholicize[s] her narrative on rhetorical level by imitating liturgical practices celebrated plot (250). Anthony E. Szczesiul finds that her religious poetry Stowe openly expresses a desire for 'imagistic' tradition of Catholicism--the sights, smells, and sounds of Catholic ritual' and he argues that portrays Eva and Tom according to specifically Catholic conventions of sainthood (par. 13). Little Eva is an evangelist, certainly, but a Catholic one. Phelps's novel, characters openly voice appreciation for Catholicism. The hero of The Gates Ajar, Winifred Forceythe, worries, In our recoil from materialism of Romish Church, we have, it seems to me, nearly stranded ourselves on opposite shore (110). Winifred's daughter Faith kisses a portrait of her dead father nightly, as if it were an icon, an act of devotion that startles narrator Mary when she first sees it. Wanting to win their readers to abolitionist cause or to console them for losses of Civil War, and Phelps act as both novelists and practical theologians. They take it that reading can save soul, a foundational Protestant view that inspires their projects as authors. But reading they imagine goes against grain of Protestant injunctions to sit alone and pore over pages. Reading is instead a communal and emotional, a visual and almost tactile, experience. (2) this way, Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Gates Ajar attempt to find a middle ground between competing models of human contact with God: private reading that goes deep between lines, or a public sacrament that relies on sharable, visual, and material. …

Emily Clemens Pearson, 1818–1900

Emily Clemens Pearson, 1818-1900 Catherine E. Saunders Were we content to be an humble imitator, we know of no one whom we should be prouder to follow than the noble author of that wonderful work, "Uncle Tom's Cabin." But we owe it to ourselves to say, that our little book was projected before the publication of the latter; and our Jamie Parker, we think, had only one predecessor—and that we had not seen—in this species of literature. Emily Clemens Pearson, Cousin Franck's Household, vii In the twenty-first century as in the nineteenth, Emily Clemens Pearson's work invites comparison with that of her better-known contemporary Harriet Beecher Stowe.1 Because Pearson's background is similar to Stowe's in key areas—race, gender, class, geography, religion, and education—the differences in their antislavery fictions offer an opportunity to reflect on how shared culture, individual experience, and authorial imagination undergirded their abolitionist arguments. Pearson's characterization of individual African Americans is less racially based than Stowe's, and her visions for the future of the United States more egalitarian. These attitudes, and her other characteristic themes—an insistence that slaves were at least as able as their masters to care for themselves, an ever-present awareness of the possibility of slave rebellion, and a fascination with the psychological consequences of slaveholding, especially as reflected in tensions between female slaveholders and female slaves— were undoubtedly shaped in part by the year Pearson spent living in a slaveholding household, a key difference between her experience and Stowe's.2 Pearson, however, is a compelling figure in her own right: a woman who balanced active engagement in key social and religious movements of her era, a long-standing ambition to be a writer, and the need to support herself and her family through her efforts. [End Page 300] Pearson had a long career as a published writer. Her first major group of writings was printed in 1844 in periodicals of the Millerite movement, whose members expected the second coming of Jesus in the fall of 1844; her last novel, Madonna Hall, The Story of Our Country's Peril, appeared in 1890. In the intervening years she published four abolitionist novels; two works subtitled "a temperance tale"; Gutenberg, and the Art of Printing (a combined biography and history); and numerous sketches, columns, poems, hymn texts, and other items for the periodical press. Emily Catherine Clemons was born in July 1818 in Granby, Connecticut, to Allen and Catherine Stillman Clemons. The family valued education; Catherine Stillman was descended from Abraham Pierson, the first president of Yale ("Mrs. Emily C. Pearson"). Her daughter probably alluded to this connection in the semi-pseudonym under which she published Jamie Parker, Emily Catharine Pierson. In 1812, according to the original constitution held by the Salmon Brook Historical Society, Allen Clemons helped found the Granby Social Literary Society and lending library. Emily Clemons Pearson wrote in 1869, in a probably autobiographical reference, of "a young lady having a thirst for knowledge," who, "years ago, in a village academy in Connecticut . . . commenced the study of Latin,—an unheard of departure from the course for girls made and provided. Her young lady friends did not care to conceal their wonder and dislike," but the student persisted, and "since then that institution has sent out many scores of classically educated young ladies" ("For and to the Sex"). In 1837, Emily Clemons entered Mount Holyoke College. Like most members of the inaugural class, she did not graduate, but maintained a connection with other alumnae ("Alumnae Notes"). By January 1842, Clemons was working as a governess at Mount Airy, a plantation near Warsaw, Virginia. In a letter written that month, she commiserated with her brother Stillman about their mutual sorrow at a separation necessitated by the need to help pay off family debts, and described her literary ambitions, telling him, "En passant I am a going to astound you and the literary world some of these days if nothing happens—you don't believe it I perceive, but I'll try to convince, and astonish you notwithstanding." She notes that her job allows ample time for writing and study...

Hochman, Barbara. Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Reading Revolution: Race, Literacy, Childhood, and Fiction, 1851-1911. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2011.

Hochman, Barbara. Uncle Tom's Cabin <i>and the Reading Revolution: Race, Literacy, Childhood, and Fiction, 1851-1911</i>. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2011.

Beyond Uncle Tom's cabin: essays on the writing of Harriet Beecher Stowe

Chapter 1 Introduction Chapter 2 Chapter One: The American Woman Movement Meets the Disingenuous Orator: Harriet Beecher Stowe's Pink and White Tyranny Chapter 3 Chapter Two: Pink and White Tyranny and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Ambivalent Views on Authorship Chapter 4 Chapter Three: The Wild and Distracted Call for Proof: Harriet Beecher Stowe's Lady Byron Vindicated and the Rise of Professional Realism Chapter 5 Chapter Four: Gendering Gilded Age Periodical Professionalism: Reading Harriet Beecher Stowe's Hearth and Home Prescriptions for Women's Writing Chapter 6 Chapter Five: The Least Drop of Oil: Locating Narrative Authority in Harriet Beecher Stowe's The Minister's Wooing Chapter 7 Chapter Six: Kitchen Hierarchies: Negotiations of American Nationhood in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Oldtown Folks Chapter 8 Chapter Seven: New England Tempests? Harriet Beecher Stowe's The Minister's Wooing and The Pearl of Orr's Island Chapter 9 Chapter Eight: Ecstasy in Excess: Mysticism, Hysteria, and Masculinity in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Dred Chapter 10 Chapter Nine: Harriet Beecher Stowe's Marianettes: Reconstruction of Womanhood in The Minister's Wooing and Agnes of Sorrento Chapter 11 Chapter Ten: Mapping the Environmental Ethical Dimension in Harriett Beecher Stowe's New England Novels Chapter 12 Chapter Eleven: To Market! Consuming Women in Harriett Beecher Stowe's My Wife and I and We and Our Neighbors Chapter 13 Notes on Contributors Chapter 14 Index

A More Aggressive Plantation Play: Henrietta Vinton Davis and John Edward Bruce Collaborate on Our Old Kentucky Home

A More Aggressive Plantation Play:Henrietta Vinton Davis and John Edward Bruce Collaborate on Our Old Kentucky Home Thomas Robson (bio) When discussing the earliest African-American woman playwrights, conversation in theatre history classes tends to focus on the 1920s and 1930s. The Harlem Renaissance brought writers like Angelina Weld Grimke, Zora Neale Hurston, and Georgia Douglas Johnson to the stage, and any history of the black woman playwright naturally must mention them. Contrary to this prevailing narrative, however, black woman playwrights existed in the United States prior to the Harlem Renaissance. In 1898 the celebrated African-American actress and public elocutionist Henrietta Vinton Davis added "author" to her list of titles with her plantation play Our Old Kentucky Home. Davis did this through one of the most lauded—if not always practiced—traditions of theatre: collaboration. Davis composed Our Old Kentucky Home with the noted black journalist John Edward Bruce, aka "Bruce Grit."1 In the period prior to the explosion of African-American literary and cultural output in the 1920s, black woman writers faced significantly more challenging working conditions. Without the benefit of belonging to a larger movement—and without the benefit of white-dominated organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People—woman writers of the preceding generation needed to find alternate paths in order to bring their voices to the public.2 A black woman playwright faced two particular obstacles en route to the stage: her gender and her race. As Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar explain in The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, nineteenth-century culture viewed woman writers as an [End Page 120] oddity. Writing was considered the purview of men—the ability to compose words and sentences a uniquely male attribute—thus discouraging women from attempting the craft. Gilbert and Gubar pose the question, "What does it mean to be a woman writer in a culture whose fundamental definitions of literary authority are, as we have seen, both overtly and covertly patriarchal?"3 The racial obstacle stood as an even greater societal hindrance. In Staging Whiteness, Mary F. Brewer writes, "To be White is to be culturally denominated as possessing and instantiating a set of moral and 'civilized' traits and habits."4 Conversely, blackness connoted the antitheses of these "civilized" traits and values. "White" represented more than a mere skin color; it represented a way of behaving—of existing—thought to be desirable, while "Black" stood for everything that "White" was not. The culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries thus defined "Black" as immoral and uncivilized, and "Woman" as silent. How, then, was a woman writer of color to express herself? Collaboration proved the key for Davis to break through this racist, patriarchal logjam. By forming a creative partnership with her friend Bruce, Davis overcame the cultural quieting of woman writers. This partnership then allowed her to speak her opposition to the second obstacle. Through the writing and production of Our Old Kentucky Home, Davis skillfully addressed racial issues in America. In her hands the play served as a vehicle to deliver skillfully crafted commentary on both racial and gender issues in the United States. Davis and Bruce used the form of the plantation play, familiar to American theatre audiences from such popular works as Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Octoroon, and twisted it to new, more aggressive ends. Henrietta Vinton Davis Between 1883, when Frederick Douglass first introduced her to Washington, D.C., as a public elocutionist, and 1919, when she began a long association with the radical black leader Marcus Garvey and his Universal Negro Improvement Association, Henrietta Vinton Davis was considered the foremost dramatic actress of her race.5 Davis eschewed the popular minstrel-show stereotypes of her time, never "blacking up" in performance, and focused her energy instead on recitations from and performances of the plays of Shakespeare as well as numerous popular literary melodramas of the late nineteenth century. Audiences and critics lavished praise on the talented performer. Shortly after her 1883 debut, one audience member exclaimed, "Our race never before reached so high a point in histrionic art. This is indeed...

Mightier than the sword: Uncle Tom's cabin and the battle for America

Uncle Tom's Cabin is likely the most influential novel ever written by an American. In a fitting tribute to the two hundredth anniversary of Harriet Beecher Stowe's birth, Bancroft Prize-winning historian David S. Reynolds reveals her book's impact not only on the abolitionist movement and the American Civil War but also on worldwide events, including the end of serfdom in Russia, down to its influence in the twentieth century. He explores how both Stowe's background as the daughter in a famously intellectual family of preachers and her religious visions were fundamental to the novel. And he demonstrates why the book was beloved by millions-and won over even some southerners-while fueling lasting conflicts over the meaning of America. Although vilified over the years as often as praised, it has remained a cultural landmark, proliferating in the form of plays, songs, films, and merchandise-a rich legacy that has both fed and contested American racial stereotypes.

Uncle Tom's cabin and the reading revolution: race, literacy, childhood, and fiction, 1851-1911

Uncle Tom's cabin and the reading revolution: race, literacy, childhood, and fiction, 1851-1911

Baseball's Lost Chalice

Whatever happened to the Dauvray Cup? The game's first World Series trophy, it was commissioned and funded in June 1887 by actress Helen Dauvray-before it was known that she cared for baseball or for New York Giants shortstop John M. Ward, whom she would go on to marry.The cup has been lost for so long that no one alive has seen it; no one can say when or how it was lost, or what fate may have befallen it-until now. Picking up an old, cold trail, I can report what the cup actually looked like-contemporary newspaper woodcuts were wildly off-how much it cost to make, and what may have happened to it between the baseball campaigns of 1893 and 1894. Even more interestingly, however, in the quest for baseball's lost chalice I stumbled upon the true story of Helen Dauvray's romantic, fabulously embroidered, self-invented life. The Dauvray Cup was, then and now, all about her.Let's start at the beginning. Helen Dauvray was born Ida Louisa Gibson on St. Valentine's Day-in, according to various published sources, 1856, 1857, 1858, 1859, 1860, 1861, or, as engraved on her tombstone in a final blaze of vanity, 1862. Her parents were Charles H. and Sarah Louisa Gibson, nee De Young. Miss Dauvray's birthplace has been supplied as Cincinnati, Ohio; Virginia City, Nevada; and San Francisco, California. Census documents and passport applications offer intriguing but not definitive variants on every bit of her biography to 1887, when she first enters the baseball world. What follows is this writer's best synthesis of swirling data discrepancies.In the 1850 census both of Ida's future parents are listed with Maryland births, but Sarah Louisa (she dropped her first name after this), was probably born in Louisiana on December 8, 1833, as she declared in her passport application of 1877.1 Charles, too, may have been born in Louisiana rather than in Maryland, for in 1840, at age 25, he resided in Natchitoches Parish. M.H. De Young, father of the future founder (bearing the same name) of the San Francisco Chronicle and Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, also lived there.2By 1850 Charles and Louisa Gibson had married and relocated to Louisiana's Union Parish, the birthplace for daughters Amelia and Laura. However, this residence represented a return to the state after a sojourn in Missouri, where a son-listed as Andrew in the 1850 census but surely the same boy subsequently known as Adolphus or Adolph- had been born two years earlier, when his mother had been 15.Charles H. Gibson was identified by turns as a farmer, a baker, and a miner, but truly he was always a struggling itinerant laborer, ready to pack up his family in the pursuit of gainful employ. By 1855 the family resided in Ohio-Cincinnati by several accounts-and it was there that Ida and sister Clara were born. Two years later the peripatetic Gibsons picked up again, this time for Virginia City, Nevada, and then San Francisco. Louisa's De Young relatives had, in tandem, moved to Cincinnati and then San Francisco. But when the golden sluice gates did not open for the luckless couple, they relocated yet again, to Portland, Oregon.3In 1861-1862 Charles found work in the Salmon River mines and sent his family back to San Francisco. Presumably he supported them with nuggets now and then, as Mossman's Express was providing armed escort for messengers from the mines.4 While some biographical notices of Helen Dauvray mark her acting debut as Little Eva in a production of Uncle Tom's Cabin in Virginia City in 1862, in fact she was still at that time Ida Louisa Gibson, a girl of six with no idea of taking the stage. How she actually became an actress-Little Nell, the California Diamond, an infant prodigy frankly modeled on the popular Lotta Crabtree-is a story she successfully hid for all the remaining years of her life.On February 10, 1863, a classified ad appeared in San Francisco's Daily Alta:ANY PERSON KNOWING THE WHEREABOUTS of CHARLES H. …