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Fathering and Blackface in "Uncle Tom's Cabin"

1989; Duke University Press; Volume: 22; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/1345523

1945-8509

Christina Zwarg,

Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinary Research

In recent years critics have emphasized the subversive feminism of Uncle Tom's Cabin by focusing on Stowe's play with the themes of motherhood and domesticity.' What has yet to be examined is the feminist subversion inherent in her treatment of fatherhood and its effect upon the home.2 In contemporary criticism, the home has become the place where white women in the nineteenth century found their strength and used it to effect change in the larger political and masculine sphere. But even as Stowe attempts to reveal some of these strategic reversals in her novel, she also pays close attention to the complicated notion of the man of the house. That the issue of maternal power is so seductive in Stowe's novel certainly explains why few critics have made an attempt to discuss the equally important and nettlesome issue of paternal power in Uncle Tom's Cabin. This is not to say that fathering has never been an issue, but merely that those critics first interested in fathering approached the topic in a way that has encouraged later critics to dismiss it. Not surprisingly, this debate centered on the characterization of Tom. In the view of James Baldwin, for example, Tom was robbed of his humanity and divested of his sex, and many critics agreed.3 This in turn has caused feminist critics to answer that Stowe deliberately shed the paraphernalia of manhood in her depiction of Tom so as to endow him with the feminine virtues of Christ and the humane attributes of maternity. The problem with this approach is that it bars us from seeing the radical nature of Stowe's feminism. Stowe's feminism is powerful because it does not attempt to replace a failed patriarchy with a matriarchy: this would merely replace one rhetoric of dominance and possession with another. Stowe's complex feminism in Uncle Tom's Cabin emerges from her realization-a realization made through her recognition of the slave culture itself-that the issues concerning women and slaves, questions of authority and writing and selfhood and freedom, are issues that have been defined by and therefore assume power within the discourse of patriarchy. By exploring patriarchy in a variety of manifestations including capitalism, slavery, Christianity, and finally, liter-