"I've only to say the word!": Uncle Tom's Cabin and Performative Speech Theory

This essay proposes a new reading of an important but neglected scene in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin: the scene in volume 2, chapter 33, in which Cassy defiantly challenges Sambo as he threatens to whip her for assisting Tom. I read this scene through the lens of performative speech theory in order to raise questions about the mutually constitutive nature of language and action that inheres in Stowe's strategy of sympathetic identification through domestic sentimentality. When viewed in light of performative speech theory, Cassy's insubordinate retort to Sambo both signals Stowe's understanding of the capacity of the upraised whip to elicit readers' sympathy and simultaneously challenges the firmament on which such sympathy can lie. Cassy's words, and Sambo's understanding of them, rupture Stowe's carefully constructed argument that champions ameliorative, reformatory language over force. I suggest that understanding Cassy's speech as performative revises and extends our understanding of Stowe's use of feminine sociomoral conversational pedagogy and that it raises questions about where for Stowe (and other antebellum women writers) linguistic authority lies: in the suasive potential of sentiment, in the assaultive nature of words, or in the ways sentiment and assault mutually authorize each other.

The scene of concern to this essay occurs as Cassy is picking cotton on Simon Legree's plantation. She observes newcomer Tom empathetically place some cotton he has picked into the basket of an ailing slave. Realizing Tom does not know he endangers himself by helping a fellow slave, Cassy transfers to Tom's basket some of her own cotton, explaining, "You know nothing about this place … or you wouldn't have done that. When you've been a month, you'll be done helping anybody." Sambo, the acting slave driver, approaches Cassy, who resumes the backbreaking work. He brandishes his whip at her and sneers, "Go along! yer under me now,—mind yourself, or yer'll cotch it!" (306). This is an iconographic moment: the crouching, hunched over, cotton-picking, subservient slave threatened by a ready lash. Highly suggestive, this passage references repeated images that readers would regard as "untrammeled visualizations"—that is, truthful, mimetic images that convey reality unmediated by fictive technique (Morgan 1).¹

An astute reader of literature and culture, Stowe borrowed and reworked numerous popular images and types. For example, Uncle Tom's Cabin incorporates popularly repeated figures such as the innocent dying child, the tragic mulatta, the fugitive mother with youngster, the minstrel performer, the evil slave owner, and the righteous matriarch. Yet another stock image Stowe employs is that of the slave about to be whipped. Marion Wilson Starling notes, "The figure of the fugitive slave, panting in a swamp, with the slave holder brandishing a whip and surrounded by bloodhounds … became so popular as a symbol that dinner plates were made with the scene for a center motif; the handles of silverware were embossed with the story … and the fad even extended to the embellishment of transparent window blinds" (29). If this image had been codified for consumption by 1835, as Starling notes, then by mid-century Stowe's depiction of this scene would appear familiar and formulaic. Antebellum readers would no doubt recognize at once the power dynamics that inhere in the image of a slave woman being threatened by an overseer lifting his rawhide, especially since readers would likely have seen similar imagery on china plates, silverware, and window treatments.² The scene under discussion here elicits sympathy for poor Cassy's suffering and calls upon whites to feel outrage and indignation at her imminent abuse. Stowe wanted readers to feel for Cassy through sympathetic identification and thus be moved toward the abolitionist cause.³

Yet Cassy's response to Sambo challenges the way readers receive Stowe's sympathetic strategies. Cassy rages at the driver, "[T]ouch me, if you dare! I've power enough, yet, to have you torn by the dogs, burnt alive, cut to inches! I've only to say the word!" This threat to "say the word" makes Sambo...