Uncle Tom’s Cabin On the American Stage and Screen by John W. Frick (review)
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John Frick’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin on the American Stage and Screen provides an impressive chronicle of one of the most famous stories in American literary history. Immediately identifying Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel as “a phenomenon that . . . shaped, at least partially, a racial dialogue” (xi), Frick traces the evolution of Stowe’s characters through the primary stage adaptation of George Aiken, into the various offshoot Tom shows of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and onto the screen. Frick’s book demonstrates the ways in which stage and screen presentations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin both advocated social change and resisted it, while also providing the most thorough scholarly exhumation of the details of production available. Frick synthesizes the extensive existing literature on Uncle Tom’s Cabin with his own archival work in order to present previously unstudied information about the performers, stagecraft, and production practices of every major Tom production for seventy years, making this a landmark study of both the play and the period.
Frick uses chapter 1 to foreground the political issues surrounding the play. He lays the groundwork for later exploration of how Uncle Tom’s Cabin was used by progressive and conservative forces to advance their respective ideological agendas. By identifying Stowe’s ambivalent portrayal of African Americans, Frick locates in the source text ambiguities that were later used in service of a wide range of ideological ends. Frick, as others have, attributes this textual malleability to the contrast between Stowe’s noble abolitionist intentions and her ignorance of actual plantation life, which forced her to rely heavily upon minstrel stereotypes in her book.
Perhaps the most effective portion of chapter 2, which primarily focuses on Aiken’s famous and faithful stage adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, deals with the production’s role in transforming the reputation of Purdy’s National Theatre in New York. Staged at the preferred theatre of the notorious Bowery B’hoys near the Five Points slum, this production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin allowed the theatre to “shed its tainted reputation” (46). Frick notes that Uncle Tom’s Cabin helped both to convert many of the previously anti-abolitionist Bowery B’hoys and re-gender the theatre audience by bringing respectable women to Purdy’s. He demonstrates how Purdy specifically programmed Uncle Tom’s Cabin in order to draw more women to his theatre, capitalizing on mid-century women’s interest in moralreform dramas, because the presence of women in the audience lent a greater degree of respectability to the theatre. Despite this moral-reform appeal to women, however, Aiken dialed down Stowe’s message, excising much of the play’s abolitionist and Christian sentiments.
Chapter 3 focuses on the ideology of H. J. Conway’s so-called compromise Uncle Tom, the production that most threatened the primacy of Aiken’s version. Given his own and his collaborators’ ambivalent feelings toward slavery and the dangers of alienating audience members by presenting an abolitionist drama, Conway softened Stowe’s story and “watered down abolitionist arguments to such a degree as to render them ostensibly harmless and inoffensive to theatre patrons” (89). Once this compromise Uncle Tom moved to New York and gained popularity, it opened the door for further anti-abolition Tom plays.
In chapter 4, Frick illustrates how, regardless of geography or ideology, producers of Tom shows relied upon a consistent bag of tricks to generate audience interest. The inclusion of dogs and other animals, jubilee singers, twin Topsys, Toms, and other characters, cakewalks, and greater spectacle in the scenes featuring Eliza’s chase, Tom’s whipping, and the Grand Apotheosis enhanced the play’s appeal. Frick argues that a greater reliance upon spectacle, rather than any particular stance on the play’s social content, led to the expansion of Uncle Tom’s Cabin during the period following the Civil War.
In chapter 5, Frick establishes that Tom shows were...
