Transatlantic Stowe: Harriet Beecher Stowe and European Culture (review)

Transatlantic Stowe contributes to a growing body of work on Harriet Beecher Stowe that resists the focus on national literature confining many discussions of nineteenth-century authors. Following in the footsteps of Sarah Meer's Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy, and Transatlantic Culture (2005), a nuanced study of the dynamic cultural exchanges between Stowe's writings, British and American popular culture, and transatlantic political movements, the editors of this collection announce that their two-fold purpose is "not only to broaden our readings of Stowe's texts and of Stowe herself as a literary figure, but also to broaden the scope of transatlantic studies" (xii). Transatlantic Stowe better fulfills its first promise than its second: most of the essays in the volume contribute more to an understanding of Stowe's individual writings than to the material, historical, or theoretical understanding of transatlantic networks. That said, the well-crafted introductory essay provides a useful overview of Stowe's career as international writer and celebrity while highlighting the importance of women writers in transatlantic studies more generally. Transatlantic Stowe shares with the excellent Cambridge Companion to Harriet Beecher Stowe (2004), edited by Cindy Weinstein, an interest in broadening the critical conversation beyond Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). Paying special attention to the years following Uncle Tom's publication, Denise Kohn, Meer, and Emily Todd show how Stowe's texts and career took shape in dialogues with British, Irish, Italian, French, and Russian writers, political movements, texts, and images. The Stowe canon takes on a decidedly new appearance: the body of lesser-known works long overshadowed by Uncle Tom's Cabin reveals surprising connections and assumes unexpected coherence and import.

Some chapters meet the scope and ambition of this collection better than others. Caroline Franklin's "Stowe and the Byronic Heroine" teases out the complex moves in the nearly century-long "literary war of the sexes" (7) that involved Maria Edgeworth, Hannah More, Lord Byron, Lady Byron, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Anne Brontë, and Stowe, and ultimately led to Stowe's scandalous but unsuccessful attack on Byron in Lady Byron Vindicated (1870). While Franklin's essay is illuminating in its attentiveness to intertextual transatlantic conversations, some of the other essays are constructed around dialogues that seem comparatively strained. Clíona Ó Gallchoir's essay looks at Uncle Tom's Cabin through the lens of the Irish national tale and an enlightenment tradition of women's writing. Supported largely by a discussion of parallels between the narrative techniques of Edgeworth, Sydney Morgan, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, and Stowe, this argument lends a fresh perspective on a European tradition from which Stowe's sentimental writing diverged. Monika Elbert's discussion of "Nature, Magic, and History in Stowe and Scott," another study structured around narrative and structural parallels—in this instance between The Bride of Lammermoor (1819) and The Pearl of Orr's Island (1862)—considers Walter Scott's influence on Stowe's creation of national narratives that are grounded in women's connections with local natural and preternatural forces.

The second section, "Race, Class, and Labor in the Atlantic World," contains four loosely grouped chapters. In one of the best contributions to the volume, John MacKay examines how Uncle Tom's reception in Russia was filtered through national discussions of serfdom. Attuned to the press's "revealing silence" regarding the novel prior to the beginning of the abolition of serfdom in 1857 as well as to epistolary exchanges of writers and intellectuals who commented on the three translations of the novel that appeared the following year, MacKay broadens our understanding of the Atlantic world and reminds us how much a text's meaning is shaped by its political context. It is perhaps misleading that the next two essays fall into the same section, for their primary arguments devolve upon comparative analyses of novels by Stowe and Gaskell and by Stowe and Eliot. Whitney Womack Smith's argument that Uncle Tom's...