Abstract
Published in 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was one of the first popular productions to utilize the black messianic figure. Conceived as serial fiction in the antislavery newspaper The National Era in 1851–52, the novel eventually sold more copies than the Bible upon publication as a complete text. Indeed, the popularity of the novel led Stowe to publish a follow-up piece called A Key to “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (1853) in which she attempts to provide evidence of the novel’s authenticity. So widely received and controversial was Stowe’s novel that Abraham Lincoln is rumored to have greeted Stowe with the following words when he met her a decade later: “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!” Whether or not this encounter took place, Uncle Tom’s Cabin remains entrenched within the lexicon and cultural imagination of America. For example, to call a black man an “Uncle Tom” is to insult him as a weak man who is submissively loyal or servile to white people. Richard Laurence and James Lowe, two black authors, wrote The American Directory of Certified Uncle Toms: Being a Review of the History, Antics, and Attitudes of Handkerchief Heads, Aunt Jemimas, Head Negroes in Charge, and House Negroes Against the Freedom Aims of the Black Race (2002), a work that characterizes Oprah Winfrey and Colin Powell as traitors to black communities and thus “Uncle Toms.”
He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.
—Isaiah 53:3 KJV
I’m tired of all the pain I feel and hear in the world every day. There’s too much of it. It’s like pieces of glass in my head all the time.
—John Coffey to Paul Edgecomb, The Green Mile
Ye may whip me, starve me, burn me,—it’ll only send me sooner where I want to go.
—Uncle Tom to Simon Legree, Uncle Tom’s Cabin
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Notes
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (New York: Bantam, 1981) 431. Future references will be to this edition and will be marked by parenthetical citations of the page numbers.
Charles Edward Stowe, ed., The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe Compiled from Her Letters and Journals (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1889) 148.
For a discussion on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century perceptions of race as essential to human differences and how these perceptions informed social scientific conceptions of race, see Michael P. Banton, Racial Theories (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987).
Stephen Gould offers a treatment of biological determinism in Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, rev. and expand ed. (New York: Norton, 1996).
For a discussion of romantic racialism, see George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (Scranton, PA: Wesleyan UP, 1987).
Richard Yarborough describes them as “bumptious, giggling, outsized adolescents.” For a fuller discussion, see Yarborough, “Strategies of Black Characterization in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Early Afro-American Novel,” New Essays on Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ed. Eric J. Sundquist (New York: Cambridge UP, 1986) 47.
W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Conservation of Races,” The Oxford W.E.B. Du Bois Reader, ed. Eric J. Sundquist (New York: Oxford UP, 1996) 41.
W. E. B. Du Bois, Henry Louis Gates, and Terri Hume Oliver, eds., The Souls of Black Folk: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism, 1st ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999) 155.
For a discussion of the ongoing tensions between biology and sociohistorical elements in Du Bois’s work, see Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford UP, 1992).
Dickson D. Bruce, “W. E. B. Du Bois and the Idea of Double Consciousness,” American Literature 64.2 (1992): 301.
The concept of double consciousness continues to be an important concept as it relates to identity formation. See Gerald Lyn Early, ed., Lure and Loathing: Essays on Race, Identity, and the Ambivalence of Assimilation (New York: A. Lane/Penguin Press, 1993). This anthology explores and debates Du Bois’s claims from many different perspectives.
Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Black Messiahs and Uncle Toms: Social and Literary Manipulations of a Religious Myth, rev. ed. (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, 1993) 4.
See Arthur Riss, “Racial Essentialism and Family Values in Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” American Quarterly 46.4 (1994). Riss traces Stowe’s use of racial essentialism to advance a progressive agenda. He argues that equating Stowe’s racialism with racism is shortsighted and reductive because such a claim does not take into consideration her advocacy of “liberal pluralism.”
Samuel Otter, “Stowe and Race,” The Cambridge Companion to Harriet Beecher Stowe, ed. Cindy Weinstein, Cambridge Companions to Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004) 19.
Michael Eric Dyson, “When You Divide Body and Soul, Problems Multiply: The Black Church and Sex,” Traps: African American Men on Gender and Sexuality, ed. Rudolph P. and Beverly Guy-Sheftal Byrd (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2001) 312.
Rudolph P. Byrd, “The Tradition of John: A Mode of Black Masculinity,” Traps: African American Men on Gender and Sexuality, eds. Rudolph P. Byrd and Beverly Guy-Scheftall (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001) 19.
Kristin Waters, ed., Women and Men Political Theorists: Enlightened Conversations (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000) 230.
Peter P. Hinks, ed., David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 2000) 45.
Richard Dyer, White (New York: Routledge, 1997) 17.
John J. Han, “Uncle Tom as Christ Figure,” Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ed. Mary R. Reichardt, The Ignatius Critical Editions (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2009).
See Thomas J. Steele, “Tom and Eva: Mrs. Stowe’s Two Dying Christs,” African American Review 6.3 (1972): 88.
Karen Halttunen, “Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo- American Culture,” The American Historical Review 100.2 (1995): 326.
James Baldwin, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism, ed. Elizabeth Ammons, 1st ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994) 497.
Anne McClintock argues that race and gender function as “articulated categories” that “are not distinct realms of experience, existing in splendid isolation from each other, nor can they simply be yoked together retrospectively. Rather they come into existence in and through relation to each other, if in contradictory and conflictual ways.” Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995) 5.
Earl Riggins, Dark Symbols, Obscure Signs: God, Self, and Community in the Slave Mind, The Bishop Henry Mcneal Turner Studies in North American Black Religion, vol. 7 (New York: Orbis Books, 1993) 22.
Dianne Stewart, “Christian Doctrines of Humanity and the African Experience of Evil and Suffering: Toward a Black Theological Anthropology,” The Ties That Bind: African American and Hispanic American/Latino/a Theology in Dialogue, eds. Anthony B. Pinn and Benjamin Valentin (New York: Continuum, 2001) 171.
bell hooks, “Feminism Inside: Toward a Black Body Politic,” Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, eds. Thelma Golden and Whitney Museum of American Art. (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994) 129.
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford UP, 1985) 3.
Carol E. Henderson, Scarring the Black Body: Race and Representation in African American Literature (Columbia, MO: U of Missouri P, 2002).
See Jan Nederveen Pieterse, White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). Pieterse traces the development and deployment of images used in the process of racial subordination of blacks. He argues that “race-thinking arose, not so much as a justification of slavery, but as a reaction to it, having rather prospered after the movement for the abolition of slavery took hold” (13). Representations, then, serve the needs of the powerful and “serve as cultural devices in settling social conflict” (13).
See Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1998).
Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995).
and David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991).
See Abby L. Ferber, White Man Falling: Race, Gender, and White Supremacy (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998).
Dorothy E. Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty, 1st ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997).
Cornell West, “Black Sexuality: The Taboo Subject,” Traps: African American Men on Gender and Sexuality, eds. Rudolph P. Byrd and Beverly Guy-Sheftall (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2001) 301–02.
Beatrice A. Anderson, “Uncle Tom: A Hero at Last,” The American Transcendental Quarterly 5.2 (1991): 112.
Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, 4th ed. (New York: Continuum, 2001) 4–5.
Ed Guerrero, Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film, Culture and the Moving Image (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1993) 128.
Cynthia J Fuchs, “The Buddy Politic,” Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema, eds. Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark (New York: Routledge, 1993) 195.
Hazel V. Carby, Race Men (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1998) 183.
Jacquie Jones, “The Construction of Black Sexuality: Towards Normalizing the Black Cinematic Experience,” Black American Cinema, ed. Manthia Diawara (New York: Routledge, 1993) 256.
See Anthony Appiah, “‘No Bad Nigger’: Blacks as the Ethical Principle in the Movies,” Media Spectacles, eds. Marjorie B. Garber, Jann Matlock, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (New York: Routledge, 1993) 81.
Rita Kempley, “Too Too Divine: Movies’ ‘Magic Negro’ Saves the Day, but at the Cost of His Soul,” Washington Post June 7, 2003.
Lucy Howard, Bret Begun, and Susannah Meadows, “Guess Who’s Coming to the Rescue,” Newsweek November 13, 2000: 14.
and Christopher John Farley, “That Old Black Magic: Hollywood Is Still Bamboozled When It Comes to Race,” Time November 27, 2000.
Kim D. Hester-Williams, “Neoslaves: Slavery, Freedom, and the African American Apotheosis in Candyman, the Matrix, and the Green Mile,” Genders (2004), February 14, 2006 <http://genders.org/g40/g40_williams.html>.
Linda Williams argues that “an emotionally charged ‘moral legibility’ [is] so crucial to the mode of melodrama” and is “intrinsically linked to a ‘racial legibility’ that habitually sees a Manichean good or evil in the supposed visual ‘fact’ of race itself.” The visual image of blackness derives meaning because of our prior understanding of the relationship with good and evil. While we may intellectually understand the intent of melodramas and can critically engage their contrived meanings, “we will never grasp why we are compelled to feel for the raced and gendered sufferings of some and to hate the raced and gendered villainy of others” until we understand the historical dynamic of the melodramatic stereotypes we embrace. See Linda Williams, “Melodrama in Black and White: Uncle Tom and the Green Mile,” Film Quarterly 55.2 (2001).
Heather Hicks, “Hoodoo Economics: White Men’s Work and Black Men’s Magic in Contemporary American Film,” Camera Obscura 18.2 (2003): 40.
For a discussion of the guard’s attempt to humanize the experience of killing, see chapter eight in Austin Sarat, When the State Kills: Capital Punishment and the American Condition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2001) 209–45.
Robyn Wiegman, “Negotiating America: Gender, Race, and the Ideology of the Interracial Male Bond,” Cultural Critique 13 (1989): 89.
See Susan Jefford, The Remasculization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989). Jefford defines the recuperative process as the remasculization of American culture aimed at sustaining the gender hierarchies necessary to the political and economic functioning of America. The premise that informs Jefford’s work is that white men felt threatened by the civil rights and women’s rights movements of the 1960s.
Debra Walker King, Body Politics and the Fictional Double (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2000) vii-viii.
David Marriott, On Black Men (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2000) 68–69.
Karen Sanchez-Eppler, “Bodily Bonds: The Intersecting Rhetorics of Feminism and Abolition,” The New American Studies: Essays from Representations, ed. Philip Fisher, vol. 5 (Berkeley: U of California P, 1991) 250.
Ed Guerrero, “The Black Man on Our Screens and the Empty Space in Representation,” Callaloo 18.2 (1995): 399.
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© 2011 Stacy C. Boyd
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Boyd, S.C. (2011). Messianic Masculinity: Killing Black Male Bodies in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Green Mile. In: Black Men Worshipping. Black Religion/Womanist Thought/Social Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230339415_2
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