Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Stowe and race
- 2 Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the south
- 3 Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the American Renaissance
- 4 Reading and children:Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Pearl of Orr’s Island
- 5 Uncle Tom and Harriet Beecher Stowe in England
- 6 Staging black insurrection: Dred on stage
- 7 Stowe and regionalism
- 8 Stowe and the law
- 9 Harriet Beecher Stowe and the American reform tradition
- 10 Harriet Beecher Stowe and the dream of the great American novel
- 11 Stowe and the literature of social change
- 12 The afterlife of Uncle Tom’s Cabin
- Select bibliography
- Index
- Series List
12 - The afterlife of Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Stowe and race
- 2 Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the south
- 3 Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the American Renaissance
- 4 Reading and children:Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Pearl of Orr’s Island
- 5 Uncle Tom and Harriet Beecher Stowe in England
- 6 Staging black insurrection: Dred on stage
- 7 Stowe and regionalism
- 8 Stowe and the law
- 9 Harriet Beecher Stowe and the American reform tradition
- 10 Harriet Beecher Stowe and the dream of the great American novel
- 11 Stowe and the literature of social change
- 12 The afterlife of Uncle Tom’s Cabin
- Select bibliography
- Index
- Series List
Summary
In the introduction to the Vintage edition of Invisible Man Ralph Ellison recalls the Vermont summer of 1945 during which he began to write his soon-to-be-classic novel of race and identity. Ellison remembers that while unsuccessfully “plotting a novel based on the war then in progress,” he happened upon
a poster announcing the performance of a “TomShow,” that forgotten term for blackface minstrel versions of Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. I had thought such entertainment a thing of the past, but there in a quiet northern village it was alive and kicking, with Eliza frantically slipping and sliding on the ice, still trying - and that during World War II! - to escape the slavering hounds.
Finding Uncle Tom apparently alive and well was certainly a shock to Ellison’s sensibilities, and for the novel he thought himself to be writing, the jolt administered turned out to have been terminal. Yet, Ellison’s unexpected encounter with what he had presumed to be a dead letter was also highly fortuitous: the Vermont Tom Show conjures up “the spokesman for invisibility” who would become the protagonist of Ellison’s first novel (xvi). Uncle Tom’s refusal to die becomes the invisible man’s insistence on living.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Harriet Beecher Stowe , pp. 219 - 234Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004
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