Whitewashing Uncle Tom's Cabin: Nineteenth-Century Women Novelists Respond to Stowe

Chapter 1 “To Woman . . . I Say Depart!”: The Plantation Literary Tradition, the Emergent Anti–Uncle Tom Novel, and Gender

 Chapter 1 “To Woman . . . I Say Depart!” The Plantation Literary Tradition, the Emergent Anti–Uncle Tom Novel, and Gender I n writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe herself, whether consciously or not, was writing both within and against the plantationromance tradition—as were the writers who attempted to rebut her.1 Consequently, it is important to examine first the plantation literary tradition and its evolution into anti–Uncle Tom novels. Laid out by such popular Southern novelists as John Pendleton Kennedy, William Gilmore Simms, and Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, the plantation literary tradition’s inception, usually dated to the 1832 publication of Kennedy’s Swallow Barn, coincided with the white South’s political rigidification. Although before the 1830s the South’s antislavery groups actually outnumbered those in the North, in the years that followed slaveholding states increasingly silenced or forced out dissenting voices.2 In the wake of the Denmark Vesey plot, Nat Turner’s rebellion, the Virginia slavery debates, and mounting opposition from abolitionist forces, the white South became increasingly sectional, defensive, and conservative. Significantly, the process of romanticizing the plantation South began with political stockading, including an absolute insistence upon white society’s univocal support of slavery. The early roots of anti–Uncle Tom fiction reveal significant ambivalence regarding slavery. Though slightly pre-dating the generally accepted commencement of the plantation literary tradition, the life and writings of George Tucker exemplify the early nineteenth-century white South’s political oscillations. In 1800, when Tucker was twenty-six years old, he published a pamphlet that argued against the South’s “peculiar institution” (Yellin, Intri-  Whitewashing Uncle Tom’s Cabin cate Knot 19). Sixteen years later, the anonymously published Letters from Virginia, Translated from the French, now attributed to Tucker, includes not only trenchant criticism of the racism evident in Thomas Jefferson’s Notes, but also a strident attack on slavery itself (ibid.). Yet in 1824 Tucker published Valley of the Shenandoah, one of the earliest nineteenth-century novels to employ a plantation as romantic backdrop and to include a lengthy defense of slavery. Though the protagonist admits that slavery “is repugnant to its [the country’s] justice . . . and dangerous to its peace” (1:63), the narrative ultimately frames slavery as economically expedient in the short run, and colonization, unpromising. “We . . . find domestic slavery,” observes main character Edward Grayson, “established among us, and the evil, for I freely admit it to be an evil, both moral and political, admits of no remedy that is not worse than the disease” (1:61). According to the narrative, chattel slavery should be operated as beneficently as possible, with an eye toward its gradual demise. Tucker’s increasing tolerance of race-based slavery may be explained, at least in part, by economic self-interest, which, as Henry Louis Gates Jr. argues in his introduction to “Race,” Writing, and Difference, consistently serves as a powerful catalyst behind the arbitrarily applied trope of “race.” Financial scandal had forced Tucker to leave Richmond before the writing of his first novel. In serious debt, he moved to Woodbridge, Virginia, bought slaves, and attempted to remake himself as a Tidewater planter. Yet Tucker’s depiction of the planter-class patriarch, a role he had begun to play, exposes not entirely positive characteristics: a nice sense of honour; a hatred of all that was little or mean; more fond of hospitality than show; great epicures at table; great lovers of Madeira wine, of horses and dogs; free at a jest, particularly after dinner, with a goodly store of family pride, and a moderate portion of learning; never disputing a bill, and seldom paying a debt, until like their Madeira, it had acquired age; scrupulously neat in their persons, but affecting plainness and simplicity in their dress; kind and indulgent rather than faithful husbands, deeming some variety essential in all gratifications of appetite. . . . The luxurious and social habits in which they were educated, gave them all that polished and easy grace, which is possessed by the highest classes in Europe. (Valley of the Shenandoah 2:105–6) “To Woman . . . I Say Depart!”  Aristocratic though this depiction is, there is nothing here of the plantergod image, the stern, morally upright, all-powerful Southern white male who comes to dominate later novels bent on theopolitical aims. As Susan Tracy notes, such forthright confessions of planter profligacy and infidelity as Tucker’s would not be repeated after the late 1820s, as...