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12 - The afterlife of Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2006

Cindy Weinstein
Affiliation:
California Institute of Technology
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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.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2004

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