Uncle Tom’s Cabin as Visual Culture (review)

This book, the first to illuminate the perennial relationship among Uncle Tom’s Cabin and its iconography, deserves a relevant place among the recent scholarship on Harriet Beecher Stowe. Morgan looks at medals, woodcuts, etchings, trade cards, theatrical posters, and commercial lithographs, along with paintings by well-known artists, to ask why a novel that depicted its black characters so accurately finally generated an artwork that sometimes bore little resemblance to the original text. Her answer is clear: “Uncle Tom, as he has become known, was not created by Harriet Beecher Stowe alone but by legions of popular artists, hacking out images for commercial purposes” (22). The visual culture that helped to catapult Stowe’s book to fame paradoxically became the very instrument that white Northern businessmen employed to transform it into a text that not only supported their hegemonic position but also left a profound mark on the way African Americans came to be stereotyped.

The first chapter analyzes the “foundational imagery” created by Hammat Billings for the first two illustrated editions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin issued by John P. Jewett in 1852 and 1853. Using evidence from Billings’ earlier work, Morgan demonstrates that for some of the engravings he recycled iconography typically found in the antislavery press, and that once he had exhausted it he delved in the novel to illustrate other equally famous scenes like “Eliza crossing the Ohio River,” an episode clearly inspired on Christian iconography. While Morgan’s display of evidence to claim the connections between these early illustrations and their abolitionist or Christian background is indeed convincing, her subsequent discussion of the international aftermath of the first illustrations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin seems rather insufficient. Morgan explains that Billings’ drawings, like the novel itself, immediately became a transatlantic success and that many of them were reproduced in several European countries; she particularly focuses on the designs that George Cruikshank made for the British edition, but regrettably ignores how they reached other countries like France or Germany, where publishers also commissioned renowned local artists to copy or modify the original American drawings.

The discussion of this earliest iconography becomes particularly insightful in the analysis of “Little Eva reading the Bible to Uncle Tom in the arbor,” the most famous scene in Stowe’s novel judging by the scores of pictures, lithographs, and music sheets that reproduced it throughout decades. Featuring a close interracial meeting between an African-American man and a young white woman reading the Bible in a private space, Billings’ scene carried such a disruptive message to the white patriarchal system, Morgan contends, that it soon was toned down, especially during the decades following Emancipation. She studies the size, gestures, and position of both characters in several renditions of the scene to argue that in the end what the images privileged was the domination and control of the white girl over the black slave; as time passed, Eva would remain idealized, whereas Tom grew older and more submissive, becoming a stereotyped uncle unlike the young and decently dressed slave Stowe created. The iconic impact of Billings’ influential arbor scene lasted long, for Morgan even sees it pervading several films that explore the relationship between a white woman and a subordinate, older African-American male. Such circumstance makes Morgan conclude that Billings’ pictures, far from being unchanging “blueprints,” should be regarded as the seeds of a long-term strategy that sought to distort the hard-earned image of the emancipated African American in order to figuratively shackle it again under the hierarchical position of white mainstream culture.

To expand the interpretation of Billings’ pivotal role, Chapter 2 focuses on his artwork for the 1853 Bible-like edition of Stowe’s novel, which Morgan sees as a book that posed a threat to the patriarchal discourses of slavery, Calvinism, and masculinity. One goal of this edition was to spread an evangelical message through three Christian visual narratives that first represented Tom as a Bible-carrying “itinerant minister,” then as a pious...