Whitewashing Uncle Tom's Cabin: Nineteenth-Century Women Novelists Respond to Stowe

Cover

Whitewashing Uncle Tom’s Cabin Nineteenth-Century Women Novelists Respond to Stowe Joy Jordan-Lake U.S. Literature / African American Studies How women novelists preached a “theology of whiteness” to counter Harriet Beecher Stowe’s literary indictment of slavery . . . “An extremely valuable book. Trained as both a literary critic and a theologian, Jordan-Lake exposes the racist ‘theology of whiteness’ embedded in the white Southern plantation myth embraced by women writers countering Uncle Tom’s Cabin from Stowe’s day to our own. She shows how their novels self-destruct intellectually— how the writers participate, unwittingly, in their own disempowerment. This is an excellent, clear, jargon-free book, with important things to say about both the past and the future.” — Elizabeth Ammons, Tufts University Front cover illustration: “A Spring Scene Near Richmond , Virginia,” drawn by W. L. Sheppard, Harper’s Weekly, May 21, 1870. Image courtesy of Vanderbilt University Special Collections and University Archives. Designed by Dariel Mayer. Vanderbilt University Press Nashville, Tennessee 37235 www.VanderbiltUniversityPress.com Few books have had greater impact on U.S. history than Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The first American novel to sell more than a million copies, it provoked an entire reading public to extol it, debate it, weep over it, excoriate it. Fighting fire with fire, slavery apologists from North and South responded with their own fiction, producing over three dozen novels in direct response to Stowe’s work. Interestingly , a key portion of that fiction was written by women. In Whitewashing Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Joy Jordan-Lake examines those women-authored novels to produce compelling insights into both antebellum American culture and a proslavery ideology rife with internal tensions. Including a discussion of twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels that revisit plantation mythology, Whitewashing Uncle Tom’s Cabin casts new light on the ethical and moral disaster of securing one group’s economic strength at the expense of other groups’ access to dignity, compassion, and justice. Joy Jordan-Lake formerly taught English at Baylor University and is currently writing and teaching part-time at Belmont University in Nashville. She holds graduate degrees in theology and literature. ISBN 0-8265-1476-6 ™xHSKIMGy514769z Jordan-Lake W hitewashin g U ncle T om ’ s C abin vanderbilt Whitewashing Uncle Tom’s Cabin Nineteenth-Century Women Novelists Respond to Stowe Whitewashing Uncle Tom’s Cabin Nineteenth-Century Women Novelists Respond to Stowe Joy Jordan-Lake Vanderbilt University Press Nashville © 2005 Vanderbilt University Press All rights reserved First Edition 2005 09 08 07 06 05   1 2 3 4 5 This book is printed on acid-free paper. Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jordan-Lake, Joy, 1963– Whitewashing Uncle Tom’s cabin: nineteenth-century women novelists respond to Stowe / Joy Jordan-Lake.— 1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8265-1475-8 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 0-8265-1476-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. American fiction—Women authors—History and criticism. 2. Slavery in literature. 3. Women and literature—United States—History—19th century. 4. Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 1811–1896. Uncle Tom’s cabin. 5. American fiction—White authors—History and criticism. 6. American fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 7. Women, White—United States— Intellectual life. 8. Southern States—In literature. 9. African Americans in literature. 10. Plantation life in literature. 11. Slaves in literature. I. Title. PS374.S58J67 2005 813’.3093552—dc22 2004021923 For my family, who asked questions as if they were genuinely interested, who cheered me on through many a midnight march, and who pulled together to make this possible. And especially for my son, Justin, who was born in the midst of this book’s creation and who napped many an hour in my lap at the computer. ...