"Uncle Tom's Cabin" and the Reading Revolution: Race, Literacy, Childhood, and Fiction, 1851-1911

3. Legitimizing Fiction: Protocols of Reading in Uncle Tom’s Cabin

78 K 3 legitimizing Fiction Protocols of Reading in uncle tom’s Cabin all through my duties this morning it haunts me. —Georgiana May to Harriet Beecher Stowe this chapter argues that throughout Uncle Tom’s Cabin Stowe employed scenes of reading not only to make a case for black literacy but also to disarm a resistance to fiction that was still widespread in literary culture of the period. although fiction-reading had become an extremely popular activity by midcentury , it was still regarded as problematic by many people. on the one hand, as an inferior literary form, fiction was deemed appropriate mainly for women and children, roughly equivalent to a taste for soap opera a hundred years later; on the other hand, it was considered especially dangerous for the dependent and vulnerable.1 We have seen that Stowe was intimately familiar with the logic of the anti-fiction position, well versed in strictures against novelreading from childhood. during the 1840s, while her brother henry Ward Beecher addressed the subject of fiction-reading both from the pulpit and in print, Stowe herself warned against the dangers of “light reading.” genre was “the principal way books were marketed and consumed” in the antebellum period, as david Stewart points out.2 Stowe was acutely aware that she was employing an “insignificant,” much-maligned literary form to address the most contentious political and moral issues of the period. For a sentimental novel to serve such ends, some segments of the reading public had to modify their assumptions about the moral and literary meaning of fiction itself. emergent modes of middle-class domesticity in the 1850s gave fiction an importantplacewithinthefamilycircle,asRichardBrodhead,SarahRobbins, and others have emphasized. But readers in a variety of textual communities still saw the novel as an upstart in literary culture. Moral, religious, and aes- L 79 Legitimizing Fiction thetic arguments were freely employed by commentators who sought to delimit the influence and attractions of fiction. Southerners saw Stowe’s use of fiction as “unscrupulous” precisely because of its power to captivate readers.3 Men of letters regarded fiction as aesthetically inferior to such literary forms as poetry, history, and classical texts. (indeed, the low position of the novel in the hierarchy of generic forms lasted well into the twentieth century.4 ) Ministers, educators, and librarians were concerned with the ethical dangers posed by fiction, especially its impact on the young. the issue was not “immoral” fiction per se, but rather the habits of mind inculcated by texts that offered easy emotional satisfactions and diversion rather than encouraging self-scrutiny or developing the critical faculties. attacks on fiction, circulating widely in sermons, advice books, and periodicals , did not prevent novels from being avidly read by men, women, and children of the 1840s, and certainly the 1850s. Fiction flourished, not only in bound volumes but also in literary annuals, chapbooks, and the weekly press.5 Yet the growing popularity of fiction in some quarters only heightened anxiety in others. although literacy was widely celebrated as the bedrock of religious practice and civic education in the antebellum united States, the proliferation of reading matter—increasingly inexpensive and widely available—intensified concerns about selection, authority, and control . Commentators (both religious and secular) used highly charged language to dramatize the dangers associated with the irresistible flood of printed matter.6 distinctions between useful, beneficial works of the imagination and foolish, frivolous (even pernicious) ones appear not only in the evangelical press, but throughout antebellum print culture. in the 1870s, ’80s, and ’90s, advice manuals continue to stress the difference between frivolous passive reading and active, serious, useful attention to books. guides to “home-reading” offer elaborate instructions about how to choose books, how to read them, and where to put them in the home.7 educators and men of letters regularly celebrate elevated, moral, or purposive reading, while denouncing books that encourage idleness and fantasy. Well into the twentieth century an unregulated taste for certain kinds of fiction was held responsible for everything from lagging cultural standards to increased selfindulgence , unbridled fantasy, and bad eyesight. debates about the evil effects of television and the internet are more recent expressions of related anxieties. 80 K Chapter 3 Uncle Tom’s Cabin offered some persuasive reassurance about the function of the novel, and it did so in a register that spoke directly to some of fiction ’s firmest opponents. the protocol of reading that Stowe...