In Our Own Image: Three New Approaches to Canonical American Literature

Three recent studies, Whitewashing Uncle Tom's Cabin: Nineteenth-century Women Novelists Respond to Stowe by Joy Jordan-Lake, White Liberal Identity, Literary Pedagogy, and Classic American Realism by Phillip Barrish, and Reinventing the South: Versions of a Literary Region by Mark Royden Winchell, offer new ways of understanding canonical works of American literature and the literary and social contexts in which they developed. Each offers some fresh, relevant, and insightful readings of American literature and culture of the nineteenth and/or twentieth centuries. These three authors approach their primary texts from varying political stances, and as with any interpretation, the authors' political and social views affect their readings of the texts they discuss. Though such influence is inevitable, it is a lack of awareness of it, a lack of openness about it, or an unwillingness to interrogate its effect that mars two of these new works.

Whitewashing Uncle Tom's Cabin: Nineteenth-century Women Novelists Respond to Stowe by Joy Jordan-Lake is a complex and thorough examination of the novels written by women in response to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and a less developed exploration of the society that produced the women novelists. In her introduction, the author points out that the slavery debate was not neatly divided into proslavery South and anti-slavery North, and throughout the study she acknowledges the complexity of antebellum racism, which was tied to understandings of not only race, but of class and gender as well. The majority of the novels discussed imitated the characters, themes, and plot elements of Stowe's novel in order to refute her abolitionist agenda, and some of them directly reference Stowe and Uncle Tom's Cabin. However, Jordan-Lake contends that "contrary to their intent . . . the proslavery texts, with their evasions, displacements, and contradictions, disrupt the surface narratives, ultimately exposing a profit-driven chattel slavery as savage as that on Simon Legree's plantation" (2005, 25).

To support her thesis, the author relies on close readings of the primary texts, feminist theory, and historical analysis. Drawing on her background in theology, Jordan-Lake coins the term "'theology of whiteness,' a framework that manipulates religious language and ideology to support the economic interests of a white patriarchal culture, including the creation of a deity in its own image" (2005, xvi). From this combination of close reading, feminism, historicism, and theology arises one of the study's major flaws, though it is not a fatal one. In her analyses, Jordan-Lake is sometimes guilty of what Phillip Barrish, author of one of the other studies discussed herein, calls "presentism," in which an author projects contemporary political or social concerns onto a literature of an earlier period. For example, Jordan-Lake discusses Mary Eastman's Aunt Phillis' Cabin, in which Phillis, a slave mammy, "In games of make-believe, consigned her own children to the roles of waiter and coachmen and instructed them to behave like white 'quality'" (67). The majority of Eastman's white readers, however, would not have seen this action as evidence of slavery's evils, but would view it as evidence of sincere emotional attachment and a positive reinforcement of the social hierarchy. Her readings do offer today's readers valuable insight into this literature and the minds that produced it, but, unfortunately, Jordan-Lake does not acknowledge or interrogate the anachronism of many of her interpretations.

The book's first chapter, "'To Woman . . . I Say Depart!': The Plantation Literary Tradition, the Emergent Anti-Uncle Tom Novel, and Gender," serves as a background discussion of the plantation romance tradition and an overview of antebellum anti-Uncle Tom novels written by men...