Artistic Liberties: American Literary Realism and Graphic Illustration, 1880-1905

2. Kemble and Stowe: Taking Liberties with Slave Imagery

2 Kemble and Stowe taking liberties with slave imagery When scholars of american literature discuss Kemble’s illustrations, their conversations have a curious way of beginning and ending with twain. These conversations, which i explore in the previous chapter, recount how the author in his late forties contacted an artist in his early twenties and invited him to illustrate Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The author originally found the artist’s images “generally ugly,” “forbidding and repulsive,” then decided a latter group of them was “most rattling good,” but eventually wrote that, if he had the choice to make over again, he would note the “tiresome . . . sameness ” of the artist’s images and “would promptly put them into the fire” (Webster 255, 260).1 These conversations, as we have seen, often turn to Kemble and note how the artist had a white model, cort morris, pose for Huck, Jim, and every other character in twain’s novel; how Kemble earned a reputation for rendering african americans as his “specialty”; and how he won acclaim for depicting twain’s southwestern humor, though Kemble himself claimed he had not been farther south than sandy Hook, new Jersey, right across the lower Bay from staten island and new york city (Kemble).2 critical conversations first praised Kemble as a “master of his craft,” then criticized him for rendering reactionary, stereotypical illustrations and seeming to compromise the progressive politics of Huckleberry Finn, and eventually cast doubt on twain’s own intentions in light of his decision to feature Kemble’s work.3 as extensively as these conversations have ranged, their fixation on twain has tended to obscure the rest of Kemble’s career from critical view. Kemble’s work crosses surprising nineteenth-century demographic and ideological lines. Though cartoons from Kemble often amounted to cruel caricature of african americans, he also offered painstaking, almost sociological studies of black culture for George Washington cable’s Century article on bamboula dancing in new Orleans’s congo square (figure 2.1). Though he added a visual Kemble and stowe 59 dimension to the southern plantation fiction of such writers as Joel chandler Harris and Thomas nelson Page, he also adorned the pages of reissued classics with decidedly northern or new england perspectives, such as an 1891 edition of Harriet Beecher stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and an 1894 edition of Washington irving’s Knickerbocker’s History of New York (1809). Though he authored such virulently racist books as Coontown’s 400 (1899) and Kemble’s Pickaninnies (1901), he also supplied illustrations for short stories by Harris , the folklorist, and dunbar, the african american fiction writer and poet. Though the fictions that Kemble illustrates that are set in the american south delight in racist caricatures, when he “is depicting slavery somewhere else,” in which “american whites need feel no responsibility for it,” stephen railton writes, “he draws slaves with human faces instead of blackface minstrel masks, and depicts their human suffering realistically” (“mark twain in His times”).4 limiting inquiry to Kemble’s association with twain oversimplifies the artist’s career of intricately, inconsistently constructing and representing varied american racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic groups. concentrating too exclusively on Kemble’s interactions with twain obscures the details of his subsequent, much more interesting interactions with Harris and stowe.5 Kemble in the 1890s, like stowe in the 1850s—at least, according to their detractors—tended to represent southern blacks from a northern white observer ’s distant perspective. Kemble went out of his way to identify himself as a new yorker. He claimed he could represent african americans from rural dixie while he was actually working with a model from suburban new ro2 .1. Kemble’s image of african americans bamboula dancing in new Orleans’s Jackson square. Century Magazine, courtesy of cleveland state university libraries, cleveland, Ohio. 60 chapter 2 chelle. He obscured his actual origins, not in new york state but in sacramento , california. “Through visits to different sections of the south [Kemble] has equipped himself as an authority on the negro type, making studies of the negro in his characteristic environment,” regina armstrong reported in a profile of the illustrator, “although he contends that the pickaninny type, as well as the older type of negro, can be found anywhere. in his own neighbourhood in new rochelle he says there are negro families who have lived on plantations and who retain all the characteristics of...