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This dissertation charts the dramatic cultural transformation of Uncle Tom, the heroic Christian martyr of Harriet Beecher Stowe's antislavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), into a commonly known slur for a submissive race traitor. As many scholars have noted, the hero of Stowe's novel is not what we would today call an "Uncle Tom." Some have put the blame for the figure's drastic transformation on the many popular stage adaptations of Stowe's novel that blanketed the nation during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, relying on extensive archival work in both traditional archives and digitized historical periodicals, which have been unexamined on this topic until now, this dissertation reveals that Uncle Tom's transformation did not occur in the theater. Not only did the Uncle Tom character often retain his dignity in these postbellum shows, but the Uncle Tom's Cabin dramas remained politically relevant to many African Americans--and for that reason deeply threatening to many white Southerners--into the twentieth century. Significant objections to Uncle Tom as a racial representation in popular culture did not emerge until the late 1930s, but Uncle Tom became a detested political model two decades before that. The Christ-like qualities that made him a hero in Stowe's novel and to many nineteenth-century Americans, black and white, became increasingly undesirable to a new generation that embraced a more assertive understanding of masculinity and were less interested in heaven's salvation than in earthly progress. This turn-of-the-century transformation in cultural values set the stage for a more pointed critique of Uncle Tom as a political model in the 1910s, a decade of turmoil not only because of growing racial injustice, but also because of major political, educational, and geographical shifts within the race. While Uncle Tom's Cabin retained progressive meanings to many African Americans, Uncle Tom became a slur in the black political rhetoric of the 1910s, when a younger generation of leaders responded to the deteriorating racial climate by attacking the values and strategies of the older generation for seriously jeopardizing racial progress.

Texts such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Nella Larsen’s Quicksand each present a different understanding and perspective of relationships based on their time periods and social statures. The type of relationship Stowe focuses on in her novel is that of friendship. Friends, defined as people with whom have a bond of mutual affection, and friendships, the state of mutual trust and support (Merriam-Webster), anchor the relationships that Eva and Eliza create with members on the plantation. These female protagonists turn to friendship as a way to live each day more normally – that is, to somehow alleviate the brutal cruelty of living through slavery. Despite varying odds, trials, and tribulations, seeking friendships that had preservative and supportive qualities allowed the female protagonists in Stowe’s novel to survive their own lives. The friendships Eva and Eliza formed discredit what many paternalist pro-slavery authors used as evidence to justify the institution of slavery. In the paternalist proslavery mindset, slave-owner and slave friendships revealed the benefits of slavery – that the two groups would be happier together rather than apart. Stowe discredits this mentality by relating to her 19th century reader’s emotions, representative of the sentimental genre in which she writes. However, in writing about slavery from a white woman’s perspective, Stowe isn’t fully exempt from the paternalist genre. As I will examine later, many of her statements about slavery and the friendships she narrates embody implicitly racist stereotypes and caricatures that complicate the abolitionist approach to her novel. In this way, she falls under the category of paternalist abolitionism, rather than paternalist proslavery. Stowe also highlights the fleeting nature of these friendships. Many, if not all, of the friendships Eva and Eliza form are not able to last, which is one way Stowe argues against the institution of slavery. Following Stowe, my discussion of Jacobs will introduce a slave’s perspective to female relationships in slavery. The relationships in Jacobs’ narrative are centered on family, and the power of relying on one’s own blood or close-knit community to survive slavery. Writing also within the sentimental mode, Jacobs focuses on her reader’s emotions in order to propel her anti-slavery argument. The female relationships Jacobs details are grounded in literal and metaphorical motherhood. She highlights these relationships as an emotional and familial, particularly motherly, survival method. Jacobs’ text showcases the importance of family, rather the relationships or friendships formed with strangers– thereby differentiating her argument from Stowe’s. Nella Larsen’s Quicksand draws on the emotional and social difficulties one biracial woman faced in a world affected by the legacy of slavery and World War I. As a biracial woman, Helga develops relationships with men and women she hopes will support her progressive way of thinking and sense of selfhood. Helga’s relationships are more aptly defined as partnerships – given that “partners” may involve sexual, non-sexual, and business-like dynamics between two people. Helga must find authentic, or non-hypocritical, people to assist in her journey for selfhood and kin. But similarly to the relationships in Stowe and Jacobs, the friendships Helga creates often fail her. The question of why they fail in Quicksand connects directly to the question the novel itself is asking: is the search for selfhood more important than the search for kin? The argument all three works make with these failures represents a call to action – not just for the time period in which their novels were written, but also for future American communities. The continuing consequences of racial and gender discrimination exposed by Stowe, Jacobs, and Larsen show us that real social change must come from people – from the relationships we form.

Detractors of sentimental literature argue that such novels are unoriginal and concerned primarily with emotions. Feminist scholars redeem the reputation of sentimental literature to an extent. At present, a multitude of approaches present sentimental authors as active agents, engaging with public issues. Building upon the scholarship of prominent feminist historians and literary critics, this thesis provides direct evidence that three female authors embrace the responsibilities of being a social critic. The Wide, Wide World (1850) by Susan Warner, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851) by Harriet Beecher Stowe, and The Hidden Hand (1859) by Emma D.E.N. Southworth provide unique commentaries on the separation of the private and public spheres, market revolution, and religion. Decisive differences between the authors’ opinions reveal a high degree of engagement with the public issues.

Univ., Diss.--Mannheim, 2002. / Literaturverz. S. 295 - 304.

Toni Morrison, in Playing in the Dark, observes the pervasive silence that surrounds race in nineteenth-century canonical literature. Observing the ways in which the “Africanist” African-American presence pervades this literature, Morrison has called for an investigation of the ways in which whiteness operates in American canonical literature. This thesis takes up that challenge. In the first section, from Chapters One through Three, I explore how whiteness operates through the representation of the African-American figure in the works of three eminent nineteenth-century American writers, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman, and Mark Twain. The texts studied in this regard are: Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Leaves of Grass, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. This section is not concerned with whether these texts constitute racist literature but with the ways in which the study of race, particularly whiteness, reveals the contradictions and insecurities that attend (white American) identity. As such, Morrison’s own fiction, written in response to white historical representations of African-Americans also deserves attention. The second section of this thesis focuses on Morrison’s attempt to produce an authentically “black” literature. Here I look at two of Morrison’s least studied but arguably most contentious novels particularly because of what they reveal of Morrison’s complex position on race. In Chapter Four I focus on Tar Baby and argue that this novel reveals Morrison’s somewhat essentialist position on blackness and racial, cultural, and gendered identity, particularly as this pertains to responsibilities she places on the black woman as culture-bearer. In Chapter Five I argue that Paradise, while taking a particularly challenging position on blackness, reveals Morrison’s evolving position on race, particularly her concern with the destructive nature of internalized racism. This thesis concludes that while racial identities have very real material consequences, whiteness and blackness are ideological and social constructs which, because of their constructedness, are fallible and perpetually under revision.