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What we've made of Uncle Tom
In the 150 years since it burst onto the American scene, 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' has been credited with starting everything from the Civil War to the culture wars
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Through manuscripts, illustrations, portraits, newspaper cartoons, pamphlets, photos, sculptures, dolls, figurines, sheet music, posters, even games and playing cards, the New York show depicts the deep influence "Uncle Tom's Cabin" has had on American culture. Shirley Temple's dances with Bojangles in early Hollywood movies are widely seen as imitating the relationship between Little Eva and Uncle Tom. Some observers see Stowe's work as an influence on Margaret Mitchell's 1936 novel "Gone With the Wind." Even 1970s "blaxploitation" films such as "Shaft" and "Superfly" can be viewed as mirrored images of the stage version of Uncle Tom: These black men are strong, young, sexual, outspoken, uncompromising and not religious.
"Uncle Tom's Cabin" has also "inspired lots of black artists and authors," says Turner, a professor of African-American studies at the University of California at Davis, who teaches the book in his classes. "Ralph Ellison talks about finding a doll from one of these Tom shows, and that inspiring him to write 'The Invisible Man.' Ishmael Reed has a book called 'Mumbo Jumbo' where he flips the characters' names around. There's a Topsy-like character called 'Just Grew.' And there's play called 'I Ain't Yo' Uncle: the New Jack Revisionist Uncle Tom's Cabin,' by Robert Alexander."
On campuses today, "Uncle Tom's Cabin" appears to have won an enduring place in the canon, not in courses on African-American literature, since Stowe was white, but in the study of popular historical images of blacks. It remains controversial, however.
'It simply can never be ignored'
"If 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' is anything, it is and has always been a Rorschach test for a reader's feelings about slavery in general and black people in particular," writes Dr. Johnson in his introduction to the new edition. "It transcended the category of literature to become that rarest of products: a cultural artifact; a Rosetta stone for black images in American fiction, theater, and film not so much a novel, one might say, as an experience inseparable from the events that precipitated the Civil War."
Twenty-first-century readers find Stowe's depictions of blacks "ineluctably racist" and "condescending and unacceptable," reflecting a paternalistic view of African-Americans as "simple and childlike," Johnson says. He and many critics point out that it seems she couldn't imagine a life for freed slaves in America, so she suggests that repatriation to Africa is the only solution.
Yet for Johnson, the novel is also an "impressive, genre-blending amalgam of ahistorical romance, antislavery agitprop, adventure yarn, Dickensian humor, and Christian allegory," a work that "brims with vivid characters.... It simply can never be ignored."
This 150th anniversary examination is showing that the story of "Uncle Tom" and the book that introduced him to Americans is much more complex than a simple story of a racial insult. Despite its flaws, Hulser says, "Uncle Tom's Cabin" "presented the broadest, warmest, most fully developed cast of black people who had ever been in a novel in the United States. You don't want to forget that."
E-mail lambg@csps.com
