May 24, 2005
Uncle Tom's Cabin: Masterpiece or Racist Fluff?
Over at Slate, Stephen Metcalf deconstructs reactions to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, starting with how it affected 19th century readers to how it is loathed (or rehabilitated by more modern readers, including African-Americans and women.
James Baldwin, in a famous essay for The Partisan Review in 1949, saw the priority of Tom over Harris as anything but innocent and pious. Harris, Baldwin argued, is a "race apart" from the novel's blackest characters—the little girl Topsy, and Tom himself. Harris' dignity is therefore tied, as Baldwin puts it, to his being "sufficiently un-Negroid to pass through town, a fugitive from his master, disguised as a Spanish gentleman, attracting no attention beyond admiration." It is tied, in other words, to his whiteness. Tom is therefore Stowe's "only black man," whom she has "robbed of his humanity and divested of his sex." Baldwin loathed the novel, which he felt yoked a terror of blackness to a "terror of damnation," then "saved" Tom by rendering him an intellectual and sexual eunuch who gives himself over entirely to martyrdom. Baldwin finally sets his thermometer on roast: "Uncle Tom's Cabin then, is activated by what might be called a theological terror, the terror of damnation; and the spirit that breathes in this book, hot, self-righteous, fearful, is not different from that terror that activates a lynch mob."Metcalf also cites Jane Smiley's reactions to the work (she considers it passionate and insightful). I tend to agree more with Baldwin than Smiley on this one. Metcalf concludes by saying that "maybe we can delineate the understandable limits of its heroism and admit its manifest crudity as a work of literary art."
posted by Laila Lalami at 12:00 AM
About
bio articles news contact rssMy Events
04.26: LA Times Festival of Books04.30: Claremont, California
09.23-10.04: International Literature Festival Berlin
Search
My book
In hardcover
In Morocco
In Italian
In Portuguese
In french
In dutch
In spanish
Monthly Archives
April 2008March 2008
February 2008
January 2008
December 2007
November 2007
October 2007
September 2007
August 2007
July 2007
June 2007
May 2007
April 2007
March 2007
February 2007
January 2007
December 2006
November 2006
October 2006
September 2006
August 2006
July 2006
June 2006
May 2006
April 2006
March 2006
February 2006
January 2006
December 2005
November 2005
October 2005
September 2005
August 2005
July 2005
June 2005
May 2005
April 2005
March 2005
February 2005
January 2005
December 2004
November 2004
October 2004
September 2004
August 2004
July 2004
June 2004
May 2004
April 2004
March 2004
February 2004
January 2004
December 2003
November 2003
October 2003
September 2003
August 2003
July 2003
June 2003
May 2003
April 2003
March 2003
February 2003
January 2003
December 2002
November 2002
October 2002
September 2002
August 2002
July 2002
June 2002
May 2002
April 2002
March 2002
February 2002
January 2002
December 2001
November 2001
October 2001