Assemblage Point: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the American Racial / Cultural Identity Model

Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly (1852) being the most powerful statement on the racial issue in the 19th century American literature, succeeded to incorporate and rethink everything that the national tradition had in stock on the problem of slavery and race relations. The Black racial / cultural identity model that was taking shape in the 18th century Anglo-American literature, later was being enriched and transformed throughout American (and African-American) literary history. Uncle Tom's Cabin became another crucial text (the next one after Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia) that provided the emerging Black cultural / racial identity model with a new quality: it became universal, nationally recognized — and at the same time a point of controversy provoking endless debates and open for dynamic change and transformations, as was the case with anti-Tom literature and the ambivalent reception of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in African American literary tradition. The analysis of The Planter’s Northern Bride (1854) by Caroline Lee Hentz, a typical example of anti-Tom novels, gives an idea of the pro-slavery response to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The final part of the paper is a survey of the main stages in African American response since the 1853 argument between Martin Delany and Frederick Douglass that became a matrix for the further polemic, and up to Henry Louis Gates’s subversive “double-voiced” interpretation of the novel which is in full agreement with the tendency to revise the role of white Abolitionists in the antislavery movement and African American history, typical for African American studies in the 1990s–2000s.