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

Chapter 4 The Background that Belies the Myth: The Historical Record that Helps Explain the Preponderance of Nonslaveholding Proslavery Women Authors

97 Chapter 4 The Background that Belies the Myth The Historical Record that Helps Explain the Preponderance of Nonslaveholding Proslavery Women Authors Embedded in the proslavery argument are assumptions about the nature of women. —Susan Tracy, In the Master’s Eye H arriet Beecher Stowe envisions powerful, prophetic white and black women—mothers, community leaders, preachers—as holding hope for the nation’s societal healing and moral redemption. In replicating her techniques and ideology, proslavery women writers also script white and occasionally black female characters as angels and Christ figures unwavering in their mission, role, and faith in the South’s slave-based economy. Yet in comparing these novels with the journals and letters of antebellum Southern white women, I find no indication that these diarists and correspondents viewed themselves as in any way like the characters meant to represent them.1 Rather, white women’s voices in the historical record resound with fears of slave insurrection and husbands’ infidelities; resentment over arduous physical labor, overwhelming administrative duties, and their own limited opportunities; and profound uncertainties regarding the ethics of slavery itself. Often, their personal writings position them accurately as both oppressor and oppressed, a stance in no way reflected in anti–Uncle Tom novels either by men, which ignore and patronize white female characters, or by women, which sacralize them.2 Still farther from the fictional land of flowers and fancy-dress balls through which maternal angels flit reassuringly, antebellum Southern black women’s testimonials depict a world fraught with terror, abuse, and systematic dehumanization. This chapter’s focus upon the 98 Whitewashing Uncle Tom’s Cabin demythologized, often grim depiction in the historical record left by antebellum women, both white and black, offers helpful interpretive perspectives on the ideology that upheld and finally imploded the women-authored anti–Uncle Tom novels. Given the South’s general rejection of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, one might imagine that white Southern women of privilege, the vast preponderance of whom at least publicly acquiesced in their culture’s socioeconomic system, lined up to refute Stowe, the enemy, the slanderer. However, though the antebellum South may have boasted a substantial population of female literati, as Elizabeth Fox-Genovese has suggested, only a handful responded directly to Stowe’s book.3 Diaries, memoirs, and letters of the time suggest explanations for the silence, as they reveal that some of these Southern women found, as did Mary Boykin Chestnut, that certain of the atrocities critiqued by Uncle Tom’s Cabin, such as sexual abuse of slave women, too closely reflected their own condition. Though she read the book at least twice, Chestnut found Uncle Tom’s Cabin distasteful, unfair, and misguided: “How delightfully Pharisaic a feeling it must be, to rise superior and fancy we are so degraded as to defend and like to live with such degraded creatures around us. Such men as Legare [Legree] and his women” (Mary Chestnut’s Civil War 307). Part of an elite circle of Southern planter-politicians that included Jefferson Davis and his family, Chestnut recognized the insult—and the political threat—which Uncle Tom’s Cabin hurled at members of her social class and their way of life. Yet in her diary she repeatedly confesses outrage over the rampant miscegenation that accompanied slavery, and she admits that she can find as many faults with slavery as can the most ardent abolitionist.4 Participating as beneficiaries of a slave-based society, white slaveholding women thereby also participated in their own oppression. Evidence of their complete ignorance or utter helplessness or, perhaps, indications of their evolving opposition to slavery that grew along with their years of experience might help explain their complicity in race-based human bondage—but this is not the case. They were neither wholly ignorant nor utterly helpless—nor were they at complete liberty to express their thoughts without personal cost. Granted, white Southern women stood to lose their economic security, their social standing, and even their right to their own children if they too-vehemently opposed their husbands or fathers regarding slavery. Certainly, the average antebellum American woman, North and South, was schooled not The Historical Record of Women and Slavery 99 to make her political thoughts public, and clearly, the social, economic, and familial dangers for white Southern women who openly opposed slavery were terrifyingly real. Nevertheless, throughout history other groups of women have confronted social injustice at the risk of tremendous...