Retelling the Retold: Race and Orality in Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin

I.

Stories, according to Walter Benjamin, can be distinguished from novels by two essential features: first, "the storyteller takes what he tells from experience—his own or that reported by others" and "makes it the experience of those who are listening to his tale." Second, "every real story . . . contains, openly or covertly, something useful" (87, 86). Understanding Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) as a story, rather than a novel, and listening to it as Benjamin charges that stories must be listened to, that is, as an act inspired by the "communicability of experience," one that bears "a universal accountability of meaning," changes the listener/reader's encounter with the text and transforms the story's message (83, 84, 86).¹ While the narrative is constructed around differences in race, geography, political ideologies and religious convictions—differences that at times seem to defy any sense of cohesion—ultimately, the usefulness of Uncle Tom's Cabin is its illustration of how stories generate a sense of shared experience.

At its most useful, and its most powerful, Uncle Tom's Cabin democratizes the experience of narrating and listening to stories. Democratize, here, means that the story itself becomes the great equalizer: it is adapted widely, bears meaning for all, and inspires listeners to become storytellers. This is seen most clearly when Eliza and her son Harry escape across the Ohio River, a scene that endures as one of the most memorable and emotionally turbulent moments in the narrative in large part because it is told and re-told—in various narrative forms—more than two dozen times. Narrators in Uncle Tom's Cabin, those who repeat and pass on Eliza's story, include the text's omniscient speaker, slaves, former slaves, slaveowners, slavecatchers, Quakers and abolitionists. They include friends of Eliza, those who sell her, those who chase her, those who save her and those who give no apparent sign of ever having heard of her. Benjamin writes, "the storyteller . . . has counsel for his readers." "Counsel," he continues, "is less an answer to a question than a proposal concerning the continuation of a story which is just unfolding" (86). Repetition, certainly a means of carrying on a story, both enlivens Eliza's tale, ensuring its longevity, and signifies its widespread meaning and usefulness. Those who witness Eliza's story, either because they see her cross the river or because they hear about it afterward, not only retell it to other audiences, but also tend to use it as a means of expressing their own experiences. Her actions become a strikingly concrete and practical metaphor for survival, one that others super-impose on themselves. So, for example, her former owner Mr. Shelby uses the image of jumping from floe to floe to describe his attempt to escape debt. Even little Eva's accidental fall into the Mississippi River, and Tom's quick response in saving her, can be understood as an inversion of Eliza's original tale of escape and salvation.

My analysis in this article relies on understanding Eliza's story as gradually detached from the hand that constructed it, as the many voices who tell this story, and claim it for themselves, suggest. Benjamin, in thinking about the life of a story continuing beyond what the original words read, intimates that stories can be understood more collectively, that they take on a life of their own, as they are adapted and adopted. We see that happening with Stowe retelling the story of the Israelites crossing the Red Sea and modifying it to suit the purpose of her novel; we see that happening within the novel as various characters re-tell Eliza's story to suit their needs; we see meaning made of these internal retellings once they become externalized with the novel's publication.²

First published serially in the National Era from June 5, 1851, to April 1, 1852, installments of Uncle Tom's Cabin were often read orally in households.³ Joan Hedrick's insightful essay, "Parlor Literature," makes the point that, "as suggested by the derivation...