3 - Uncle Tom’s Cabin Revived: Race, Gender, Religion, and Stowe’s Narrative Artistry

Summary

Among the more famous sayings of Stowe’s Hartford, Connecticut, neighbor Samuel Langhorne Clemens, in the persona of Mark Twain, is his wry, and often misquoted, observation that “the report of my death was an exaggeration” (qtd. Budd 7). Through much of the twentieth century, reports of the demise of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a literary classic might not have seemed at all an exaggeration. This chapter narrates Stowe’s recovery in the critical work of Charles H. Foster, Jane Tompkins, Joan Hedrick, and other scholars of women’s literature, religious literature, and reformist literature. In the time period covered in this chapter, Uncle Tom’s Cabin moved from being a peripheral text in the emerging American literary canon to a text very near the center of that canon, and the critics discussed in this chapter were crucial to this revaluation of Stowe’s work.

How did a text that had fallen so thoroughly out of favor with literary critics and scholars work its way back into the standard literary canon? The answer emerges through a complex set of changes that occurred in how literature was read and valued during the second half of the twentieth century. First, women’s writing, which often was dismissed out of hand in earlier decades on the basis of the gender of the author, started to become a subject for serious scholarly investigation, at first slowly, and then with increasing momentum from the 1970s on. Second, race and slavery, after being eclipsed by the post-Reconstruction consensus that such matters were not appropriate topics for literary scholarship, became a major part of scholarly discussions of American literature. As the examples of J. C. Furnas below and of James Baldwin in the previous chapter show, this might not have been a shift in favor of Uncle Tom’s Cabin had not the novel increasingly been detached from its racist appropriations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, leading critics who might have otherwise dismissed Stowe back to the treatment of race in her novel itself, as opposed to its treatment in the works of others who had put Stowe’s story to work for their own purposes.