Sentimental emasculations: Uncle Tom's Cabin and black beauty

Nineteenth-Century Literature

Volumn 54, Issue 1, 1999, Pages 53-72

  Stoneley, Peter ^a  

^a QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY BELFAST   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61149103728     PISSN: 08919356     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2902997     Document Type: Article

References (46)

1. See D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923; New York: Viking Press, 1961), p. 5
2. Van Wyck Brooks, The Ordeal of Mark Twain (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1920)
3. and Fred Lewis Pattee, The Feminine Fifties (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1940)
4. See Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977)
5. See Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986)
6. and Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985)
7. See, for instance, Susan K. Harris, Nineteenth-Century American Women's Novels: Interpretative Strategies (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990)
8. and Lynda Zwinger, Daughters, Fathers, and the Novel: The Sentimental Romance of Helerosexualily (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1991)
9. Among the many possible references, see Robert K. Martin, Hero, Captain, and Stranger: Male Friendship, Social Critique, and Literary Form in the Sea Novels of Herman Melville (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1986)
10. David Leverenz, Manhood and the American Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1989)
11. and Christopher Lane, The Ruling Passion: British Colonial Allegory and the Paradox of Homosexual Desire (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1995)
12. The phrase is Nina Baym's; see "Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors," American Quarterly, 33 (1981), 123-39
13. See Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather. Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 4
14. See Lawrence; and Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Criterion Books, 1960)
15. The imperial tradition is discussed by Joseph Bristow in Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man's World (London: HarperCollins, 1991)
16. See in this context Horst Dôlvers's "'Let Beasts Bear Gentle Minds': Variety and Conflict of Discourses in Anna Sewell's Black Beauty," Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Ameri-canistik, 18 (1993), 195-214
17. Soliloquies in England, and Later Soliloquies (London: Constable and Co., 1922), p. 35
18. For a powerfully synoptic view of the white American dichotomy, see Diane Roberts, The Myth of Aunt Jemima: Representations of Race and Region (London: Routledge, 1994)
19. Rudyard Kipling, Kim, ed. Edward Said (1901; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1987), p. 228. Kipling is describing an Indian character who aspires to the prestige and rationality of white English knowledge
20. This notion of the divided text has received frequent attention in feminist studies of the novel; see, for instance, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979). I take the phrase "cover story" from Harris's idea of the "cover-plot" (p. 20)
21. "The white woman writing about race is necessarily a double agent, both acting as 'mistress' in controlling her characters and her plot, and identifying with them" (Roberts, p. 19)
22. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly, in Three Novels, ed. Kathryn Kish Sklar (New York: Library of America, 1982), p. 32. Further references are from this edition and are incorporated into the main text
23. Furthermore, the ease with which we may "enter the dwelling" also serves to remind us that Tom's cabin does not really belong to Tom but to his master, Mr. Shelby. This is a harsh truth that Stowe chooses to soften in the naming of her book. Hortense J. Spillers, in "Changing the Letter: The Yokes, the Jokes of Discourse, or, Mrs. Stowe, Mr. Reed," in Slavery and the Literary Imagination, ed. Deborah E. McDowell and Arnold Rampersad (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1989), pp. 25-61, relates this entering of the dwelling to desire when she notes that the short, 1853 children's version of Stowe's novel was called A Peep into Uncle Tom's Cabin. This "peep," she argues, offers a "prurient, voyeuristic suggestion" that "is quite appropriate to a national mentality that wants to 'steal' a look at the genitals in vague consciousness that they are covered by an interdiction" (p. 30)
24. Roberts provides a more extensive discussion of the connection between blackness and the Gothic in relation to Stowe, as does Karen Halttunen in "Gothic Imagination and Social Reform: The Haunted Houses of Lyman Beecher, Henry Ward Beecher, and Harriet Beecher Stowe," in New Essays on Uncle Tom's Cabin, ed. Eric J. Sundquist (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986), pp. 107-34. My argument might seem to be contradicted by the fact that Tom's torturer is a white man from the North. Simon Legree has fallen into savage ways, taking sexual advantage of his female slaves and whipping any who resist his will. But his suppressed past is not the heathen richness of Africa. In his depravity Legree has fallen away from the maternal whiteness of his background; in their depravity, Sambo and Quimbo are merely continuing their black inheritance. Tom's black virtue, on the other hand, is a transcendence of blackness into whiteness
25. In "'This Promiscuous Housekeeping': Death, Transgression, and Homoeroti-cism in Uncle Tom's Cabin," Representations, no. 43 (1993), 51-72, P. Gabrielle Foreman looks at death as punishment for sexual transgression, especially in relation to what she sees as the homoerotic elements in the representation of St. Clare. She capitalizes on Spillers's discussion of Tom and Little Eva as a shocking combination, as much against the culture as in salvation of it
26. The Inadvertent Epic: From "Uncle Tom's Cabin" to "Roots" (Toronto: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 1979), pp. 29-30
27. For a careful delineation of Stowe's shifting attitudes on this belief, see Joan D. Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994)
28. Gillian Brown, Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1990), pp. 31-32
29. "Heroines in Uncle Tom's Cabin," American Literature, 49 (1977), 173
30. See also Marianne Noble, "The Ecstacies of Sentimental Wounding in Uncle Tom's Cabin," Yale Journal of Criticism, 10 (1997), 295-320
31. For a detailed account of this literature, see Coleman O. Parsons, "The Progenitors of Black Beauty in Humanitarian Literature," Notes and Queries, 192 (1947), 156-58, 190-93, 210-12, 230-32
32. Sewell was from a Quaker background, and Quakers had, since early in the eighteenth century, campaigned strongly against the slave trade. For information on Sewell, her life, and the background to Black Beauty, see Margaret J. Baker, Anna Sewell and Black Beauty (London: George G. Harrap, 1956)
33. and especially Susan Chitty, The Woman Who Wrote "Black Beauty": A Life of Anna Sewell (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1971). For Stowe's knowledge of Quakers and Quakerism, see Hedrick
34. Anna Sewell, The Annotated "Black Beauty, " ed. Ellen B. Wells and Anne Grimshaw (London: J. A. Allen, 1989), p. 4
35. Further references to this work appear within the text. It is perhaps as well to note that black is a quite unusual color for a horse, and certainly much less common than chestnut, brown (meaning a milk-chocolate brown, as distinct from the bright, reddish brown of chestnut), bay (brown with black points), or gray. Besides Chitty, two more recent studies to note the connection between Stowe and Sewell are Moira Ferguson, "Breaking In Englishness: Black Beauty and the Politics of Gender, Race and Class," Women: A Cultural Review, 5 (1994), 34-52
36. and Robert Dingley, "A Horse of a Different Color: Black Beauty and the Pressures of Indebtedness," Victorian Literature and Culture, (1997), 241-51
37. In "Saddled with Ginger: Women, Men, and Horses," Encounter, 55, no. 5 (1980), 47-54
38. Washington Irving, "The Country Church," in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., in History, Tales and Sketches, ed. James W. Tuttleton (New York: Library of America, 1983), p. 831
39. For a broader discussion of animals and class, and intersections with colonialist racism, see Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1987)
40. For an example of the transformation of the horse as a model of desire in women's writing of the twentieth century, see my own "Feminism, Fascism, and the Racialised Body: National Velvet," Women: A Cultural Review, 9 (1998), 252-65
41. An interesting alternative reading of this sadly neglected (if "classic") work is Horst Dölvers's previously cited essay, "'Let Beasts Bear Gentle Minds.' " Dölvers specifies a discourse of men in which "good" signifies in a technical sense as the amount of work that can be beaten out of a good animal, whereas at the end of the novel Beauty enters a female-inflected discourse in which he is seen as "good" in the sense of moral sentiment, when one of the sisters says that Beauty "had such a good face" (Black Beauty, p. 448). I would maintain that Beauty is good at the end because his submission to the sisters' purposes is evident in his face - that for Sewell the two discourses are not so clearly separate
42. Jane Tompkins develops this argument to great effect in "Sentimental Power: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Politics of Literary History," which was originally published in Glyph, 8 (1981), 70-102, and subsequently incorporated within Sensational Designs, pp. 122-46
43. This essay has used the sociohistorical as a framework for literary readings. There are numerous texts that offer a broad-based analysis of the ambiguities of the ideology of womanhood; see, for instance, Nancy F. Cott, "Passionlessness: An Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology, 1790-1850," in A Heritage of Her Own: Toward a New Social History of American Women, ed. Cott and Elizabeth H. Pleck (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), pp. 162-81
44. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: "Woman's Sphere" in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1977)
45. Carl Degler, At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1980)
46. and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985)