- Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy, and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s
Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin sold far more copies than any preceding piece of American writing both in the United States and elsewhere. It marked the beginning of large-scale exportation of American culture. Sarah Meer examines writings that responded to and reworked the story in the United States and Britain during the 1850s in order to explore the range of messages and the effects on popular culture. Her thesis is that by innovatively developing existing literary tropes and by using popularly appealing ambiguities, Stowe gained high sales and great impact on mass thought about race.
Stowe used many conventions of the sentimental domestic novel, especially women's capability to uplift the morality of others, but she also satirized orderly housekeeping. She borrowed the plantation novel's emphasis on gracious living and fiscal mismanagement but reversed the proslavery message. The British genre of social problems fiction, especially the works of Charles Dickens, inspired her focus on laborers and children. Despite personally disliking the theater, she could not avoid the influence of the highly popular minstrel [End Page 207] show's racial stereotypes, for she had little personal experience of slavery. With blackface-style humor (especially through characters like Topsy), she expressed ambiguity about the nature of African Americans and dulled her antislavery edge. Yet, at the same time she changes the script by introducing whites and females into the comic dialogue, as well as encouraging readers to identify and sympathize with blacks.
Minstrel shows in return frequently mined Stowe's novel for material. Some transformed Tom into a contented slave and openly endorsed slavery, others introduced an antislavery tone into their shows, and the rest left matters ambiguous. Many shows accompanied these scenes with Stephen Foster's songs, which often hinted at a concern for black humanity underneath the stereotypes. Proslavery plantation novelists copied blackface and other elements of Stowe's book but perverted it to blame all slave discontent and escape attempts on abolitionist agitation of those with the shallowest minds. These formulas enabled a number of copycat works to sell moderately well.
Stowe created a play version of her novel solely for dramatic readings. She kept elements from the minstrel shows but severely reduced women's roles to avoid controversy. A number of unauthorized play scripts appeared and greatly expanded the story's audience. As commercial melodramas, they followed Stowe in borrowing from minstrelsy but revised the plot to provoke strong emotional reactions, to stress clear-cut moral judgments (ranging widely on the slavery issue), and to minimize female roles. The British plays, because of local conventions, stripped out religion, stressed uniquely American themes, and added more violence in addition to British nationalism. Some responding proslavery novels included barbs aimed at British abolitionism or class relations. They also asserted the equality of American culture and the American government's superiority to England's.
Stowe's Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin revealed that some newspaper reports (collected by abolitionists) about slaves and runaways had influenced her book. She subsequently read a number of the runaways' narratives, which largely shaped Dred, her response to attacks on Uncle Tom's Cabin in the proslavery plantation novels. This 1856 novel more strongly criticized slavery than her previous one. It advocated emancipation accompanied by education for blacks but remained uncertain about their capability for full equality. African Americans and abolitionists obviously had qualms about Stowe but could not escape from the mass influence of her writings. Both groups had to write somewhat within her frame of reference in order to take advantage of its antislavery impact and had to tread carefully when qualifying her since Stowe had created absolute truth in many readers' minds. [End Page 208]
Stowe's influence continued long after her death, as Uncle Tom's Cabin inspired or provoked plays (later movies), proslavery plantation novels, and African American literature at least into the 1960s. Meer's extensive research on the beginning...