Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp

Introduction

INTRODUCTION As the great best seller of the 1850s, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) had a marked impact on debates on race and slavery in the United States during that decade and beyond. Its impact was and remains controversial. Abraham Lincoln may have admiringly told Stowe during the Civil War that she was "the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war," but approximately one hundred years after the initial publication of her best-known antislavery novel, Stowe was castigated by the African American novelist and essayist James Baldwin for portraying black as the color of evil and for promoting easy sentimental solutions to racial conflict.1 Praise and damnation have been the recurrent responses to Stowe's most influential and widely read novel, which has come to be regarded as her one statement on slavery and race, despite the fact that she wrote several antislavery sketches before publishing Uncle Tom's Cabin and went on to write a number of works after Uncle Tom Cabin —such as A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853) and The Minister's Wooing (1859)—that addressed slavery and race from considerably different perspectives. Most notably, four years after the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Stowe published a second antislavery novel, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp. This novel was hardly an obscure footnote to her masterwork. Dred quickly emerged as one of the most popular novels of the time, selling upwards of 200,000 copies during the nineteenth century and earning the praise of many reviewers, including the British novelist George Eliot, who proclaimed in the October 10, 1856, Westminster Review that the novel was "inspired by a rare genius—rare both in intensity and in range of power."2 The enthusiastic assessments of Eliot and other contemporary reviewers notwithstanding , by the twentieth century the novel had gone out of favor. Since many critics have judged it racist, overly long, and incoherent, the overwhelming response to the novel has been simply to ignore x I N T R O D U C T I O N it. There is considerable evidence, however, that Stowe remained not only highly responsive to debates on slavery and race after the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin, but also surprisingly willing to rethink, modify, and revise her views. Dred can be read as Stowe's thoughtful novelistic response to the changing political and cultural climate of the mid-1850s, and as her own highly mediated "response" to Uncle Tom's Cabin. It is time to restore Dred to a central place in Stowe's canon. Particularly attentive to what African American readers had to say about Uncle Tom's Cabin, Stowe in Dred revises her racialist representations , attempts new strategies of point of view that would allow for a fuller development of black revolutionary perspectives, and implicitly rejects African colonizationism—endorsed in Uncle Tom's Cabin —as a solution to the nation's racial problems. As interesting as Stowe's revised racial politics are in Dred, the novel, despite its length, is also a terrifically absorbing and compelling read, in part because the novel is not as neat and coherent as Uncle Tom's Cabin. Dred is a novel to be read next to Herman Melville's Pierre (1852) and Nathaniel Hawthorne 's The Marble Faun (1860), two other fascinating works of the period that, in their length and "incoherence," open a window onto the authors' obsessions and anxieties—the very passions that inspired and informed their writings. In Uncle Tom's Cabin, Stowe appears to have a relatively clear sense of how to address the problem of slavery , how to represent race, and how to structure a novel in relation to a scriptural typology that unambiguously depicts good and bad characters and good and bad geographical locations. In Dred, on the other hand, Stowe tries out a number of different ways of addressing the problem of slavery, offers conflicting views on race, and shifts between romance and realism as if she were struggling to find the proper novelistic form that could tell the story both of the slave plantation mistress, Nina Gordon, and the black revolutionary, Dred. In many respects, Dred is Stowe's most honest and vulnerable fiction, revealing an antebellum novelist who is willing to take risks in an effort to better understand racial difference, and in doing so is not afraid to reveal her own fallibility and dread. [3.145.191.214...