Gender and Race in Antebellum Popular Culture by Sarah N. Roth (review)

This book is the most recent contribution to an important field of interdisciplinary scholarship about the imaginative world of the Civil War era, particularly its literature. Sarah N. Roth probes the vast antebellum literature about slavery, especially fiction authored by white women, and demonstrates that popular culture played an important discursive role in shaping popular attitudes about black men and white women. By examining “how white women and black men appeared together” in major (and sometimes quite obscure) literature, she argues that white women who took up their pens to write fiction about slavery “elevate[d] their own cultural status” and “helped deal a devastating blow to black masculinity in popular white racial thought” (3, 7).

In eight chronologically organized chapters, Roth traces a change in depictions of black men from dangerous “rebels” to emasculated heroic “martyrs” between 1820 and 1861. Before 1820, literature about slavery rendered black men as either savage “brutes” or self-made men such as Olaudah Equiano (18). Several cultural and social factors caused a shift away from this early antislavery paradigm. Roth first explains that the rise of juvenile literature in the 1820s shifted the narrative, depicting male slaves not as true men, whose claim to manhood rested on patriarchal authority and economic independence, but as boys. This literary tactic changed as the antebellum period rolled along, especially on account of the popularization of domestic fiction and the parallel rise in white female authorship. Antislavery and proslavery authors increasingly relied on the “savage slave” prototype, whose murderous potential derived from the evils of the institution itself, in their arguments about slavery in the abstract (32). Not all antebellum authors, of course, expounded these attitudes. Black male authors, especially former slaves such as Frederick Douglass, Moses Grandy, and others, used their published slave narratives to articulate a vision of self-made masculinity. In the process, they demonstrated the evils of slavery and depicted both white men and white women as base tyrants.

The 1852 publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin most dramatically shifted depictions of black men and white women, representing a culmination of decades of racialist thought. A particularly strong chapter dealing with racial ideologies in this novel shows that Stowe “emphasized a racial rather than a gendered basis for traits that were often connected with femininity and masculinity, respectively. In doing so, she provided an opening for her light-skinned female characters to act in bold, even aggressive ways” (130–31). The courageous interracial heroine, not surprisingly, became an important trope in the “octoroon fiction” of the 1850s, and the Uncle Tom prototype resurfaced in the wartime literature, depicting slaves as dying for the end of slavery.

Roth’s study excels in showing that anti- and proslavery works developed dialogically. This relationship is clear in the rise of anti-Tom novels. Roth argues, “A large number of the men and women who crafted such [anti–Uncle Tom] novels had strong personal ties to the North.” She cites three Philadelphians, and others from Massachusetts and New England. Thus, she demonstrates that “the writing of anti-Tom fiction in the 1850s was a national and not merely a regional phenomenon,” despite the fact that these books were “not a hit with northern white readers” (142). In proving this point, Roth draws from book reviews, giving the reader a sense of social history absent nearly everywhere else in the book.

Roth’s point about northern readers raises important questions about how we should understand the book’s argument. Who exactly read the books Roth describes? And did they read them in the same way that Roth does? Unfortunately, Roth evades questions such as these, relying instead on implied readers, or instances in which she conjectures how an author imagined his or her audience. For instance, she alludes to “the imagined audience” for texts like Henry Box Brown’s “Mothers of the North” and “Sons of the North,” as well as Leonard...