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  • Gendering the History of the Antislavery Narrative: Juxtaposing Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Benito Cereno, Beloved and Middle Passage
  • Sarah Robbins (bio)

Studies of the numerous contemporary African American novels about nineteenth-century slavery have sometimes argued for interpreting those texts as postcolonial efforts to revise race history through re-formation of traditional historiography. Toni Morrison’s Beloved has generated a good deal of such discussion, partly because of the author’s own repeated references to her novel as an attempt to rewrite and revitalize history. 1 Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage has evoked similar critical response. 2 A number of studies of twentieth-century slave narratives have effectively bolstered their arguments for generic links among the texts by pointing out recurring techniques for resisting the “master’s” versions of historical experience. 3 Understandably, through its focus on a race perspective to explore the revision process, this growing body of scholarship has deemphasized gender and other categories of analysis (social class, for example) when exploring what should itself by now be recognized as historicizable as well—the changing genre of the antislavery narrative. However, some voices have called for careful consideration of both race and gender—especially in the study of individual texts and hybrid genres based on African American women’s experiences. 4 Morrison herself has suggested the importance of attending to gender differences when interpreting African American literature. 5 Meanwhile, [End Page 531] especially given his recent lively criticism of Beloved and Toni Morrison, Charles Johnson’s questioning of the idea of “empowerment through literature” and his reluctance to embrace the concept of a “black aesthetic” may be better understood within the context of the gendered historical development of narratives of slavery rather than exclusively through a race-centered interpretation of the genre. 6

On one level, then, I am arguing here for the need to draw more fully upon gender as a category of analysis when studying the as yet rather loosely defined genre of “antislavery story.” But I am also beginning to study the antislavery narrative’s own cultural history by reviewing particular instances of its writing as occasions when multiple aspects of authorial subjectivity have come into play—along with considerations of publication venue, anticipated audience, and rhetorical purpose—to help shape textual production. 7 As feminist theorists like Nancy Fraser and Jana Sawicki have pointed out, in interpreting writing and other potential claims to individual agency, we should recognize that subjectivity is both “endowed with critical capacities and culturally constructed”; that the very fact that “discourses and institutions are ambiguous” leaves open the possibility for a “resistant subjectivity” exercising individual agency. 8 Therefore, when evaluating complex cultural practices like the writing of an antislavery narrative, we need to build on studies of American authorship like those by William Charvat and Cathy Davidson to see texts as shaped by such cultural factors as editorial interventions, but also by authorial choices responding to and perhaps resisting such influences. 9 Historicizing our view of writing and publication through case studies like this one will highlight the complicated ways that genres like the antislavery narrative develop and shift characteristics as part of cultural history themselves. 10

Along those lines, in this essay I will retrace the composition and initial publication histories of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Benito Cereno as gendered antislavery narratives from a common antebellum moment, then return very briefly to preliminary consideration of Beloved and Middle Passage as influenced by connections to the gendered history of the genre. In focusing first on these works by Stowe and Melville, I affirm Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s recent call to move beyond essentialist 1970s and 1980s divisions between “black” and “white” American literatures to more thoughtful examination of “the interplay of traditions and voices” in both. 11 Furthermore, in exploring what at first [End Page 532] glance might seem an identical compositional context for Stowe’s and Melville’s works—grounded in middle-class white Northerners’ 1850s experiences of slavery—I hope to show how attending to gendered differences in these two texts can help avoid the tendency to overgeneralize the “white” category now receiving increased attention in social histories and literary studies. Thus, I concur with arguments...

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