The Master Narrative: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Subversive Story of Master and Slave in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Dred by Theodore R. Hovet (review)

Fryer’s discussion ofhysterical behavior and of incest-relatedsickness, as applied to Nicole’s complicated characterization, is intriguing and convincing. Her discussion (in a separate chapter) of Zelda’s Alabama Beggs Knight (Save Me the Waltz, 1932) is less successful, primarily because the chapter seems tangential and also predictable, given Fryer’s overriding feminist thesis. Since Zelda incorporated into her novel similar autobiographical material to what Scott used in his Tender (much to Fitzgerald’s anger), Fryer believes that a comparison of the two heroines can effectively emphasize “a pair ofperspectives on American womanhood in a decade of momentous change” (p. 57), by which Fryer implicitly means to compare the male to the female view. Fryer outlines the similarities between Nicole and Alabama, who both are beautiful and wealthy; had close father-daughter relationships and felt abandoned by their fathers; marry successful men and experience early marital disillusionment; are sen­ sitive and accomplished and feel their husband’s lack of respect for them; look outward for self-affirmation as each longs for her own work. Although Alabama finds a degree of automony and self-fulfillment apart from marriage (she dedicates herself to ballet), Nicole continues to define herself according to her relationships with men. The point of this comparison finally is that Fitzgerald saw Nicole within more traditional standards, even though neither heroine “achieves any real degree of independence” and “both remain subservient to men” (p. 63). Although short, Fryer’s book is precise and well-argued, although it might well have included a section on the women in the short stories. Fryer occasionally makes a perhaps ill-founded charge (Fitzgerald was a womanizer) and advances some overly-simplistic asser­ tions (in Daisy’s eyes, Tom Buchanan represents stability and Gatsby represents love). Fryer’s feminist thesis limits this book as well. Her assertion that men, even in the supposedly liberating 1920s, still dominated women determines her character analysis throughout and offers few unexpected insights into Fitzgerald’s women. To Fryer’s credit, she does not engage in male bashing for its own ends, nor does she write in order to show that Fitzgerald hated women. Instead, she incorporates historical, sociological, and psychological research to underscore Fitzgerald’s debt to the social history and psychoses of his day. Pennsylvania State University Linda Miller Hovet, Theodore R. The Master Narrative: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Subver­ sive Story ofMaster and Slave in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Dred. Lanham: Univ. Press of America, 1989. 121 pp. Cloth: $19.50. Theodore R. Hovet’s discussion of Uncle Tom's Cabin and Dred develops from very sound premises. Hovet takes Stowe’s Christianity seriously, and he insists that Stowe was an artist. His study approaches the Christianity of Stowe’s antislavery novels as a scholar might approach the Christianity of a medieval text, in the assumption that the belief system and imagery associated with it, far from being sentimental or easily accessible, articulate complex spiritual and psychological perceptions reflecting a long tradition of sophisticated thought and learn­ ing. For Hovet, Stowe’s skillful manipulation of allegorical and typological material argues, beyond question, that she was a remarkable artist. Hovet finds at the core of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Dred “complex plots and image patterns that relate American slavery to a *master narrative,’ the story of humanity’s fall and redemp­ tion” (p. ix), which he traces in its theological elaboration back to Plotinus in the third century. He finds this “master narrative” meaningfully illuminated in the work of a number ofmodem thinkers, such as Peter Homans, Gad Horowitz, Georges Poulet, M. H. Abrams, and Harold Bloom, and reiterated in the writings of Thomas C. Upham, whose Principles ofthe Interior or Hidden Life Stowe reviewed in 1845. Hovefs contention is that “the seemingly transparent story of American slavery in Uncle Tom's Cabin [and Dred] was constructed out of a com­ plex repertory of texts and *recondite figurations,’ to use Kermode’s term, bound together by a *master narrative’ of fall and redemption. This intricate artistic structure has largely gone unnoticed in American literary studies because it rested upon a concept of story telling which virtually disappeared during the realistic movement which followed the...