The best bad book of the age

Harriet Beecher Stowe
THE ANNOTATED UNCLE TOM’S CABIN
Edited by Henry Louis Gates Jnr and Hollis Robbins
480pp. Norton. £25 (US $39.95).
978 0 393 05946 5
 
When Harriet Beecher Stowe visited the White House in 1862 during the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln reportedly exclaimed, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!” Despite the painful condescension of that phrase “little woman” to modern ears, Lincoln’s comment testifies to the astonishing impact of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in its own time, when it rallied the North to the antislavery cause and infuriated the South. First published serially in Gamaliel Bailey’s antislavery weekly, the National Era, beginning in June of 1851, the novel transformed that journal from a small enterprise to a national force, as circulation soared. Book publication came the following March, before serialization was complete.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin went on to become the highest-selling book first in the United States, and then throughout the English-speaking world. Its very success made headlines. Eight presses running day and night were needed to fill demand, and with multiple editions in both America and England, the novel went on to outsell any other book than the Bible. Editions appeared annually throughout the century, many of them illustrated.

Stowe composed Uncle Tom’s Cabin in furious reaction to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Part of the Compromise of 1850, that Act not only allowed the recapture of fugitive slaves living in free Northern states but also put in criminal jeopardy anyone who helped them. Other provisions included requiring all citizens to assist in the recovery of fugitive slaves and denied the fugitives the right to a jury trial. Such measures appeased the South, but infuriated the North. For Stowe, anger at the Fugitive Slave Act merged with grief at the death of her beloved son Charley in a cholera epidemic the year before the legislation. “It was at his dying bed and at his grave that I learned what a poor slave mother may feel when her child is torn away from her”, Stowe later confided to the children’s books author Eliza Cabot Follen. “I have often felt that much that is in that book had its root in the awful scenes and bitter sorrow of that summer.”

Plenty of sundered families and fugitive slaves populate the double main plots of Stowe’s novel. The doubling begins in the first chapter, where the coarse slave-trader Haley uses his holding of ruinous bills of debt against Arthur Shelby’s Kentucky plantation to manoeuvre the genial but self-indulgent Shelby into selling two of his most valuable slaves, the young mulatto boy, Harry, and the darker and older Uncle Tom. Upon overhearing the bargaining, Harry’s light-skinned mother, Eliza, a house servant light enough to pass as white, is driven to despair and absconds with her child during the night. She flees north, first to the free state of Ohio, where she is reunited with her husband, George, and then to Canada and, eventually, Liberia. In perhaps the novel’s most famous scene, she desperately leaps from ice floe to ice floe in crossing the Ohio River to freedom while pursued by slave-catchers and dogs. The many later illustrations of that peril include one from the New York Sun, two years ago, reproduced in The Annotated Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and featuring Condoleezza Rice as Eliza skipping across an icy river to confirmation as American Secretary of State.

Meanwhile, the novel’s main character, Uncle Tom himself, travels downriver among the vulgar trader Haley’s “property”. When the delicate, pure child, Eva, falls overboard, Tom jumps into the river and rescues her, an act that leads to his being bought by Eva’s father, the lenient but weak Augustine St Clare of New Orleans. The attachment between Tom and little Eva deepens, even as her goodness grows but her health worsens. The famous scene of her death inspired more illustrations than any other except for Eliza crossing the icy river. After Eva’s death, St Clare intends to free Tom, but dies trying to stop a tavern brawl, upon which the egotistical widow sells Tom to the evil Simon Legree, Stowe’s personification of the wicked plantation owner. Tom becomes a latter-day Christian martyr as Legree beats him and works him to death just before the arrival of young George Shelby, Arthur’s son, who has come to buy back his freedom. If Stowe’s sudden reversals and heart-wringing sentiment remind readers of Dickens, they should. Stowe had read Dickens aloud to her children, and for his part Dickens wrote to Stowe that he had read her novel with the “deepest interest and sympathy”, admiring its “admirable power” and “generous feeling”. That did not prevent him from grumbling elsewhere that resemblances between the death of Little Eva and that of Little Nell caused him to find the author “a leetle unscrupulous in the appropriatin’ way”.

Dickens’s reaction reminds us that Stowe’s book had at least as great a response in England and throughout Europe as it did in the United States. The first British edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin appeared in 1852, and, as in America, most early editions carried illustrations, including celebrated engravings by George Cruikshank. George Eliot praised the novel, but wondered if Stowe shouldn’t have devoted more space to “the negro character in its less amiable phases”, especially since she showed the degeneracy of white characters like Simon Legree or Tom Gordon. In Paris, three newspapers serialized the novel at the same time, while Heine in Germany and Tolstoy in Russia enlisted among its boosters. Indeed, Tolstoy used it as model, and in What Is Art? he cited it as an example of the highest type. Translations into thirty-seven languages appeared by the end of the century, including three into Welsh, into which neither Scott nor Dickens had been translated.

Along with outright hostility from pro-Southern and pro-slavery elements in the United States and Britain, Uncle Tom’s Cabin elicited ambivalence from many of its most prominent Victorian admirers, a condition that persists in our own age. Along with Dickens and Eliot in England, both the white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and his sometime protégé the emancipated Frederick Douglass qualified their praise. Garrison lauded Stowe’s descriptive powers, knowledge of slavery, and facility of expression, yet worried about her proposing “Christ-likeness” rather than militancy for Uncle Tom. Still, he judged the novel “eminently serviceable in the tremendous conflict now waged”. Douglass waxed even more positive, though he demurred at Stowe’s having the escaped slave George Harris advocate a “return” to a colonized Liberia rather than a more integrationist vision of the United States.

The novel’s popularity declined somewhat after the turn of the century, though not its proliferation into popular culture. It eventually went out of print in the US until picked up by the emergent Modern Library series, in 1948, to start its second vogue, though it remained more available and admired in Europe. Pro-slavery advocates produced their own hostile responses, with titles like Mary Henderson Eastman’s Aunt Phillis’s Cabin, or Southern Life As It Is. But nothing could stop the avalanche of adaptations in popular culture. Uncle Tom’s Cabin inspired endless minstrel-show adaptations, popular songs, and stage versions. Even Anna Sewell’s wildly popular novel, Black Beauty (1877), sometimes carried the subtitle The Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the Horse. The twentieth century produced multiple film versions, from 1903 onwards, including both a Little Rascals version in their 1927 film Spanky and the bizarre cartoon Uncle Tom’s Cabana in 1947, where a libidinized Little Eva helps Uncle Tom turn his cabin into a nightclub to prevent foreclosure by the evil big-city landlord Simon Legree.

With over 600 editions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin already published in English and translation, why have another today? The Annotated Uncle Tom’s Cabin offers multiple answers, including its extensive annotations, its fascinating illustrations, and the first of its two introductions. As with the notes, which alternate between “I” and “we”, the Norton edition offers no information about which of its two editors, Henry Louis Gates Jr and Hollis Robbins, contributed what. Nonetheless, its pronoun “I”, its overall tone, and its similarity to Gates’s essay “Cabin Fever” in the New York Times, last October 22, warrant assigning the first and more critically provocative introduction to Gates and, perhaps, the more workmanlike and factual second one to Robbins. Gates wrestles mightily with James Baldwin’s critique of Stowe’s novel in his influential 1949 essay, “Everybody’s Protest Novel”. Baldwin had indicted Uncle Tom’s Cabin as “a very bad novel” full of “self-righteous, virtuous sentimentality”. For him, the entire genre of American protest fiction was badly written, wildly improbable, and an accepted part of, rather than a disturbing challenge to the American scene. Surprisingly, Baldwin put Richard Wright’s Native Son in the same category, with Bigger Thomas as the obverse of Uncle Tom, yet his descendant. The essay destroyed the novel’s reputation among the literary elite and, equally importantly for Gates, helped to do so among African-Americans generally.

The animus grew with the Black Power movement of the 1960s, which featured the term “Uncle Tom” as an abusive epithet for a black person conforming to white norms, often in a desexualized way. Organizations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee hurled the epithet with glee, especially at more moderate black leaders like Roy Wilkins, Director of the NAACP. “Who is the real villain – Uncle Tom or Simon Legree?” asked their position paper on “The Basis of Black Power”. Such abuse had unfortunate consequences, sometimes including black-on-black disdain for academic accomplishment as “acting white”. It also led to the banishment of Stowe’s novel from many Black Studies courses. “The most obvious reason for Uncle Tom’s disappearance in the college classroom was not sex but the utter disdain of the Tom character by the black community”, writes Gates. Fear of being called an Uncle Tom led to ever more extreme positions, as when the Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver blasted Baldwin himself for showing “the most shameful, fanatical, fawning, sycophantic love of the whites that one can find in any black American writer of note”.

The stakes carry over into American racial relations today, not just forty or 140 years ago. It is not only that Gates sees Uncle Tom’s Cabin as the book that has had the most impact on shaping African-American literature, but that African-Americans rarely read it. “I’m trying to get a new generation of black people to read it, and it’s an uphill battle”, he confessed in an interview in the Boston Globe. More importantly, Gates disclosed in the same interview the political motive of “resurrecting Martin Luther King” in today’s climate. “Working on Uncle Tom’s Cabin, I realized Stokely and the others weren’t thinking about James Baldwin or Harriet Beecher Stowe or even Roy Wilkins”, he said. “They meant Uncle Tom to be a metaphor for Martin Luther King. King, they thought, was the long suffering, too Christian person leading the movement astray.” That metaphoric struggle between King and the militants, between non-violence and violence, between love and “any means necessary”, persists in America today and makes the new edition of the book timely.

That opposition also gives the edition a peculiar place in the American academy. Since Baldwin’s essay, a host of critics, many of them white, have retrieved the novel for classroom use and even made it part of the new canon. Gates says little about them, citing but also belittling Jane Tompkins’s positive revaluing of the novel’s sentimentality, and ignoring illumination of the legal and philosophic context by scholars like Gregg Crane among others. The novel itself appears more regularly in the syllabi of inclusive courses in American Literature than more particular ones in African-American Literature, as Gates protests. His own recuperative strategy emphasizes marriage and sexuality, arguing that (often) suppressed sexual urges provide the driving energy of the plot. That works well enough for George and Eliza Harris, but runs into problems when the editors apply it to the relation between Tom and the child Little Eva, two characters whose status approaches the saintly.

Like much of elite American academia, neither Baldwin nor Gates copes well with the religious basis of Stowe’s indictment of slavery. Baldwin opted for reduction, seeing Stowe’s religious motivation as merely “a panic of being hurled into the flames, of being caught in traffic with the devil” and a “kind of theological terror”. Gates largely ignores it. The daughter, sister and wife of Congregationalist ministers, Stowe held a far subtler religious vision, based as much on love as on fear. Besides invoking a fear of posthumous punishment, the religious scope of the novel includes the morality of Miss Ophelia, the brotherly and sisterly love displayed by the Quaker families, the “love and kindness” of Little Eva, and the heroic forbearance of Uncle Tom among others. Stowe’s religious stance comes closer to that of the many black church ministers like Martin Luther King, and rehabilitating or at least understanding the complexity of the vision would help our valorization of the many non-violent Civil Rights leaders who arose out of the black churches in the first place. Uncle Tom is not an Uncle Tom partly because he is a Christ-figure.

Like parts of the Civil Rights movement itself, Uncle Tom’s Cabin vacillates between integrationist and separatist agendas. On the one hand, Stowe laced the story with references to other groups, particularly Jews and Irish. The Jewish connections often spring from the Bible, and particularly from the Exodus from Egypt and from the Babylonian exile after the fall of Jerusalem. References to “Jordan’s banks”, “Canaan’s fields” and the “New Jerusalem” run right through the novel, starting with Chapter Four’s description of the prayer meeting in Uncle Tom’s cabin. When Stowe depicts the sorrow of the slaves on the steamboat headed south, she invokes the language of Psalm 137’s lament by the rivers of Babylon, in her words, “they that wasted them required of them mirth”. Uncle Tom in St Clare’s house identifies himself with Joseph in Egypt. The Irish connections also work largely through literary allusions that invoke writers like the poet Thomas Moore or the orator and jurist John Philpot Curran, both of whom opposed slavery and supported Irish independence. But on the other hand, Stowe shows us little of integrated society in the USA. George and Eliza Harris can only set up their establishment in Canada, and they intend to emigrate back to Africa.

The apparatus of the new edition does a mixed job of supporting its polemical intent. Surprisingly for an annotated edition, it lacks even a rudimentary “Note on the Text”, so that readers must remain unsure of what text they are offered. Important differences separate the National Era magazine text from the first book edition, and others exist among various book versions. Nor do we learn if the editors have introduced any emendations. The obscurity carries over into one of the book’s most obvious and valuable features, its numerous illustrations, some of them in superb colour and some in a disappointing black-and-white. The illustrations come both from various book versions of the text and also from the vast materials from popular culture sometimes known as “Tomitudes”. Those by the first American illustrator, Hammatt Billings, and the first English one, Cruikshank, carry special interest, while later renderings enable one to trace changing social attitudes towards Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Again, though, this edition offers no principle of selection, nor any rationale for its decisions of what to reproduce. Readers who want to explore visual representations further might consult Stephen Raillton’s evolving website at the University of Virginia (http://www.iath.virginia.edu/utc/), which the editors cite.

The notes are even more bimodal. Some helpfully gloss allusions or provide background material on the historical references of the novel. The editors explain well the background of the Fugitive Slave Act, for example, or the international political context of independence movements at the time of the novel’s gestation. They helpfully clarify the literal meaning of “calaboose”, as a local lockup in the South where slaves were sent to be whipped, and they indicate its derivation from the Spanish word for dungeon. Other notes seem more intrusive, either providing obvious interpretations of the text or repetitively prodding us to notice, say, sexual undercurrents, or the propensity of Arthur Shelby to put things in his mouth. And some are simply wrong, particularly those having to do with religion. In Christian allegory, for example, the Dove is not “a symbol of Christ” but rather of the Holy Spirit. The editors gloss St Clare’s quotation “doing evil that good may come” as derived from Shakespeare’s Henry V (“There is some soul of goodness in things evil, / Would men observingly distill it out”), whereas it is directly from Romans 3: 8, where St Paul describes Christians as falsely reputed to “do evil, that good may come”. Other quotations go unglossed altogether, such as “We have no continuing city, but we seek one to come”, from Hebrews 13, which also exhorts us to “remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them”.

Neither Baldwin’s attack nor Gates’s recuperation deals with a final aspect of Stowe’s novel, the congruence with modern social psychology of its explanation of human evil and domination. Baldwin falsely claimed that “Mrs Stowe is motivated by nothing so temporal as a concern for the relationship of men to one another”, when that is precisely one strand of her motivation. She puts her cry for justice into the mouth of the slave-owning but slavery-hating Augustine St Clare, who uses the same slave name “Quashy”, or “Quashee”, as Thomas Carlyle had in a 1849 essay, but where Carlyle defends exploitation of black people, Stowe’s sympathetic slave-holder attacks it. She has St Clare witheringly rail:

This cursed business, accursed of God and man, what is it? . . . because my brother Quashy is ignorant and weak, and I am intelligent and strong – because I know how, and can do it, – therefore I may steal all he has, keep it, and give him only such and so much as suits my fancy . . . . Quashy shall do my will, and not his, all the days of his mortal life . . . . This I take to be about what slavery is. I defy anybody on earth to read our slave-code, as it stands in our law-books, and make anything else of it.

Stowe’s insight into the inevitable corruption of one person holding absolute power over another has been amply supported not just by observation throughout history but by post-war psychological research. The famous Yale experiments by Stanley Milgram, for example, showed that ordinary college students could inflict unspeakable pain, through electric shocks, on those in their power. Milgram described the horrific results in his controversial book Obedience to Authority. Similarly, the leaders of the Stanford University prison experiments in 1971 had to call off their own venture after only six days because of the equally alarming sadism inflicted on student “inmates” by student “guards”. Such results agree with testimony about horrors of all kinds, from slavery to concentration camps to the killing fields of Rwanda and Darfur. The current website of the Stanford experiment cites “parallels with the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib” in Iraq (www.prisonexp.org). Stowe’s courageous telling of the inevitable truth about such institutions helps to redeem for our time what seems like the pervasive sentimentality of an earlier era. It is one more justification of George Orwell’s description of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as “the supreme example of the ‘good bad’ book . . . unintentionally ludicrous . . . [but] also deeply moving and essentially true”.

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George Bornstein is Professor of Literature at the University of Michigan. His books include Material Modernism: The politics of the page, 2001, and Palimpsest: Editorial theory in the humanities, 1993.