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By Jim Cullen
Pop culture blockbusters are nothing new. Before The Simpsons, before Star
Wars, before Gone with the Wind, there was Uncle
Tom's Cabin.
Although now almost forgotten, it was one of the most significant cultural
phenomena in American history. Uncle
Tom's Cabin was
more popular in its day than any other book except the Bible, and it maintained
that popularity in various incarnations for over 50 years.
The daughter, sister, and wife of church ministers, Harriet Beecher Stowe was
an unknown writer in 1851, when her story of a good-hearted African American man
named Tom began appearing monthly installments in The National Era,
one of a number of anitslavery newspapers published in the northern United
States. Stowe shared with many of these newspapers a deep hatred of slavery?what
some called "the peculiar institution." She wrote Uncle Tom's
Cabin in response to the Fugitive Slave Act, an 1850 law requiring
Northerners to return escaped slaves to their owners. "The catching
business, we beg to remind [readers], is rising to the dignity of a lawful and
patriotic profession," Stowe wrote sarcastically after depicting a scene of
slavecatchers negotiating a deal. "If all the broad land between the
Mississippi and the Pacific becomes on great market for bodies and souls...the
trader and catcher may yet be among our aristocracy."
Uncle Tom's Cabin may have been
written as a political statement, but it also captured the nation's
imagination through its vivid characters, many of whom became household names
for the next 100 years: Little Eva, the angelic child whose death scene was the
ultimate tearjerker in American fiction; St. Clare, the Southern intellectual
who recognizes that slavery is wrong but fails to oppose it; Simon Legree, the
Northern-born slave trader, whose very name became a synonym for heartless evil;
and above all, the patient, benevolent
Uncle Tom, whose life stands as an indictment of the slave system.
Like many stories told in installments in the 19th century, Uncle
Tom's Cabin was
episodic, with a series of subplots. Basically, however, there are two
overarching tales. One tells the story of the Harrises, a Kentucky slave family,
who narrowly escape being "sold down the river" into the deep South,
where conditions were harsher and escape nearly impossible. They eventually flee
to safety in Canada. The other is the story of Uncle Tom, a kindly slave who is
sold down the river but is fortunate enough to be bought by St. Clare at the
urging of his daughter, Eva. Eventually, however, Tom finds himself in the hands
of the evil Legree, who seeks to take from him the only things he has left: his
decency and his faith.
When published in book form in 1852, the novel was an instant success. It
sold 3000 copies on the first day it was released, over 300,000 within a year,
and 500,000 copies by 1857?not including illegal editions that were commonly
issued in the days before strong copyright laws were passed. Even by
contemporary standards the book's sales are remarkable, especially considering
that the population of the United States was only about one-tenth of what it is
now. By the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, Uncle Tom's Cabin has
become the most popular novel ever written by an American and a tremendous
international success....}
In a sense, however, the success of Stowe's book tells only half the story
of Uncle Tom's Cabin.
The other half concerns its continued proliferation in other versions. Offended
Southerners responded to Stowe with a series of novels, including Aunt
Phyllis's Cabin
(1852) and The Planter's Northern
Bride (1854).
Stowe, in turn, replied with The Key to
Uncle Tom's Cabin
(1853), in which she used documents to support her portrayal of the South. So
called "Tom" literature, pro and con, became a virtual genre of its
own in the years before the Civil War, although no other work in print managed
to have the appeal of the original.
On stage, Uncle Tom's Cabin
had a somewhat different history. The first dramatic version, which opened in
1853, retained the antislavery character of the book. But it was soon
challenged, and ultimately supplanted, by a pro-Southern version that ended
happily and turned Tom into a caricature of Stowe's original character.
Satiric minstrel portrayals, with songs such as "Happy Uncle Tom,"
became part of the staged version. By the late 19th century, many people viewed
the story's politics as less important than dramatic scenes like
the escape of Eliza Harris and her child across the icy Ohio River. Such scenes
were especially attractive to early filmmakers, who produced a series of
variations on Tom at the beginning of the 20th century; on notable work
is that of acclaimed directory Edwin S. Porter, whose 12-minute version was
released in 1903.
By this time, however, Tom's
reputation was beginning to suffer, particularly among black Americans. There is
no question that Stowe and her largely white readership understood Tom to be a
heroic character. But the very qualities she and the others cherished about
him?his dogged sense of optimism in the face of crushing defeats; his ready
obedience to virtually any command given to him; and above all, his
unquestioning loyalty to white people who do not deserve it?made him more a
fantasy of what white people wanted
black people to be than what black people themselves wanted to be. More
and more, the term "Uncle Tom" was used not as a compliment, but as a
way of describing a black person who was too willing to accommodate the wishes
of whites.
Moreover, not all Tom characters
depicted on stage and in film could even be said to have been created with
Stowe's good intentions. Because of the segregation and discrimination that
were central to American life after the Civil War, black actors were often not
permitted to perform on stage. Instead, white men "blacked up" their
faces with burnt cork to play black characters in minstrel, vaudeville, and
other forms of entertainment. Many of these performances were deeply satirical,
with the explicit intention of mocking, not
celebrating, the lives and works of black Americans.
For these and other reasons, Uncle
Tom's Cabin began
to seem increasingly dated. The last major movie version was released in 1927
(featuring a black actor in the lead role), and not long after that the book
went out of print. Other works, including the 1915 film Birth of a Nation
and the book and film versions of Gone with the Wind
(1936; 1939), replaced Stowe's attack on slavery with complaints about
Northern arrogance in dealing with the South. Scarlett O'Hara, not Little Eva,
became a household name.
In the 1970s feminist literary critics rediscovered Uncle
Tom's Cabin. While neither these nor
other readers typically regard the book's racial politics as viable or
attractive, many are struck by the book's moral energy, the power of Stowe's
storytelling, and her ability to make a female perspective on society both
practical and compelling. No longer a fixture in mainstream popular culture, Uncle
Tom's Cabin
nevertheless has secured a lasting place in American history, setting a standard
of influence from which subsequent works of entertainment can be measured.
About the author:
Jim Cullen is the author of The Art of Democracy: A
Concise History of Popular Culture in the United States (1996), published by
Monthly Review Press.
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