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

When discussing Harriet Beecher Stowe these days, scholars often begin by marveling how much the field of Stowe studies has expanded in past decades. Indeed, it takes only a look at Jane Tompkins's Sensational Designs to remember Stowe's marginal status in the American literature canon just twenty years ago, for Tompkins devotes part of her introduction and conclusion to justifying the mere inclusion of authors such as Stowe in a serious literary critical study. In the years since, Uncle Tom's Cabin has become a mainstay in American literature surveys, and the many compelling critical analyses of Stowe's work have helped to reconfigure theories of sentimentality, sympathy, race, and reform in American culture. In The Cambridge Companion to Harriet Beecher Stowe, editor Cindy Weinstein has written of the need to enlarge these critical perspectives beyond Uncle Tom's Cabin. Transatlantic Stowe: Harriet Beecher Stowe and European Culture, edited by Denise Kohn, Sarah Meer, and Emily B. Todd, certainly answers this call. More important, though, as Kohn, Meer, and Todd argue in their volume's introduction, Stowe herself should be considered more broadly—as a transatlantic and international writer.

In reconceiving Stowe in this fashion, the book seeks to correct the tendency of transatlantic scholarship to neglect American women writers, as well as "to restore Stowe" as "the exemplary nineteenth-century American woman writer—to her preeminent position in transatlantic culture" (xiii). Stowe deserves such a place, the introduction contends, not only because of the meteoric global success of Uncle Tom's Cabin, but also because of her own status as a "transatlantic citizen" who voraciously read the works of Scott, Byron, and Dickens as a child, traveled widely in Europe as an adult, and cultivated friendships and correspondences with several British authors. These literary connections, the book reveals, were major influences on Stowe's style and subject matter (see in particular Monika Elbert's essay on Stowe and Walter Scott and Clíona Ó Gallchoir's on Stowe and Irish novelists Maria Edgeworth and Sydney Owenson). Moreover, the influence was often mutual: Stowe's correspondence with Elizabeth Gaskell (described in Whitney Womack Smith's essay) and George Eliot (described in Clare Cotugno's essay) led each author to reconsider how best to approach the fiction of reform.

Given the phenomenal appeal throughout Europe of Uncle Tom's Cabin in the 1850s, any book on Stowe's internationalism must make that novel its centerpiece. Indeed, this collection's introduction offers a helpful historical sketch of the complex ways Uncle Tom's Cabin influenced European society as well as how the novel "in its travels became a different text" (xviii). As for the latter, British and French editions of Stowe's book often labeled it with alternate subtitles to distinguish the slavery Stowe described from the forms of oppression on European soil: "[T]he subtitle of the 'people's illustrated edition' of Clarke and Company was Negro Life in the Slave States of America; that of Ingram, Cooke and Company was A Tale of Life among the Lowly, or Pictures of Slavery in the United States of America; and Nathaniel Cooke's was subtitled A Tale of Slave Life in America" (xix). Thus, in its European contexts, Uncle Tom's Cabin for some became an emblem of the failings of American ideals. Others, though, found in its pages a reflection of the oppression and reform closer to home. Several of the essays collected here continue this line of thought: John MacKay tracks how Stowe's novel influenced debates over feudalism in Russia; Clíona Ó Gallchoir argues that Uncle Tom's Cabin shares—but also strategically departs from—the narrative structures of the Irish national tale.

If Kohn, Meer, and Todd argue that the transatlanticism of Uncle Tom's Cabin made it a different text, I would say, analogously, that this collection of essays makes Stowe herself into a different author than the one...