Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Archives of Racial Performance

In the summer of 1854, Francis H. Underwood, later a founder of The Atlantic Monthly, invited Harriet Beecher Stowe to see a traveling production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin at Boston’s National Theater. The production, which starred Cordelia Howard as Eva and her mother, Caroline, as Topsy, had just ended its ten-month run at New York’s National Theater, where its cast performed the play as many as three times a day.¹ Underwood noted that Stowe felt “some natural reluctance” about attending, “considering the position her father had taken against the theatre, and considering the position of her husband as a preacher.”² But the duties of daughter and wife were evidently no match for her “curiosity as a woman and as an author to see in flesh and blood the creations of her imagination.” Underwood “procured the manager’s box, and we entered privately, she being well muffled.” Stowe sat “in the shade of the curtains of our box, and watched the play attentively.” She was apparently as “delight[ed]” as he was by Mrs. Howard’s performance. In one scene, “Topsy came quite close to our box, with her full speaking eyes upon Mrs. Stowe’s. Mrs. Stowe’s face showed all her vivid and changing emotions.” Their box was located next to the stage: “There was but a slight wooden barrier between the novelist and the actress—but it was enough! I think it a matter of regret that they never met.” But they did meet—on the boards and in his eyes—when their “glances … met and crossed” (FTM, 122).

If, as Elizabeth Young argues, blackface acted as a “barrier” between Stowe and Howard and the version of blackness she delineated, it was a “slight” one.³ It proved to be as slight as “the barrier which” Stowe believed had kept “young people of Christian families from theatrical entertainments,” and which had kept Stowe from adapting Uncle Tom’s Cabin herself.⁴ Underwood seems to separate Howard from herself and Stowe when he reports that “Topsy,” not “Mrs. Howard,” “came quite close.” Howard is obscured, but so is Stowe, whose face is darkened by “the shade of the curtains in our box,” rather than by burnt cork. Underwood restores Howard when he refers to them both as professionals, “the novelist and the actress.” He dissociates the character from the actress he called “the best representative of the dark race I ever saw” and Stowe, the woman who “had conceived” her (FTM, 122).

Perhaps blackface was more of a “mirror,” to use Young’s other term, that reflected the “relations between” these women and their relationship to performance.⁵ Underwood only recounts Stowe asserting that she “had never been in a theatre in her life” (FTM, 122), which was, perhaps, true, though one of her neighbors in Andover recorded a rumor “passed solemnly from lip to lip” that “she visited the theatre in Boston when she felt like it.”⁶ Stowe may have “scarcely spoke,” her voice “muffled” in addition to her face, but her “expression[s]” of emotion were “eloquent.” Howard was silent, too, except for her “speaking eyes” (FTM, 122). And for all of the extra care taken—the muffler, the private box, the curtain—Stowe was still visible to the man who published her work, and to the woman along with whom she might be disparagingly called “public.” Underwood contributed his account to the first full-length (and unauthorized) biography of Stowe, a book whose title conflated her public and private lives: It was The Life-Work of the Author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” not her life and work.⁷ She could not have had a more prominent seat in the house.

Stowe, as Young argues, was both a spectator and an actor, but not just for “show[ing] all her vivid and changing emotions.”⁸ These were her “thoughts bodied” on the stage. She, like Howard, was “in flesh and blood” (FTM, 122). Stowe would supposedly walk out of a different production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Hartford, but she supported...