Tyler Cowen interviews Hollis Robbins, who is a dean at Sonoma State University. (She also studied and worked with Dick Macksey at Johns Hopkins). She's an expert in African-American literature. The conversation was wide-ranging, as conversations with Tyler tend to be. I'm going to reproduce just this one excerpt. Why? Because, like Tyler, I didn't read Uncle Tom's Cabin until middle-age and I was surprised at how powerful it is.
COWEN: Why was Uncle Tom’s Cabin so effective in the fight against slavery? It was a best seller. Ostensibly, President Lincoln once said this was responsible for the Civil War. Why this novel?
ROBBINS: Well, have you read it?
COWEN: I have read it.
ROBBINS: How old were you when you first read it?
COWEN: Fifty-seven.
ROBBINS: Oh! How old are you now?
COWEN: Fifty-seven.
[laughter]
ROBBINS: You hadn’t read it before that?
COWEN: Correct. I’d looked at some of it, I think, in high school, but not really.
ROBBINS: That’s so interesting. Actually, when John Updike reviewed our version in the New Yorker magazine, he confessed that he had never read it before either. He also confessed to having put down our version because our annotations, he said, were too distracting, which I thought was fun. But, again, why do you think you didn’t read it?
COWEN: No one told me to. It is, in fact, one of the best American novels and one of the three or four best of the 19th century. Yet it’s become a school kid’s thing that you’re supposed to read, but nobody ever does. It’s gripping. It’s manipulative and interesting in informative ways.
ROBBINS: You’ve answered the question, then. It’s manipulative, interesting. What Stowe’s comparative expertise is, is creating these characters that live and jump out of the page. I wouldn’t call Uncle Tom a character that jumps out of the page, but his stalwart forthrightness, his devotion, his clarity of thought about what is right and what is wrong guide and ground the novel.
But we have Little Eva, who’s patterned a little bit on Dickens’s Little Nell from The Old Curiosity Shop. We have Topsy, who was just a sprite, an imp, sweet, generous, really extraordinary character. We have Simon Legree, who everybody knows as the avatar of a cruel overseer.
COWEN: Did the book convince more women or more men to oppose slavery?
ROBBINS: Well, the point of the book was to appeal to white women, frankly, to white Christian mothers in the North who could imagine their own child being taken from them.
In the first chapter of the book, Eliza, who is a light-skinned enslaved woman in Kentucky, learns that her son is going to be taken away from her, is going to be sold. She flees in the middle of the night and, in that famous scene, crosses the Ohio River on ice floes, which is a signal moment in American literary history.
In all of the illustrations and the paintings of this book, she is very, very light-skinned. If you take a look at any of these illustrations, white women readers would take a look and imagine themselves in that position.
COWEN: Harriet Beecher Stowe was Calvinist. Is this book actually a Calvinist book in terms of its implicit theology?
ROBBINS: No. This has to do a lot with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s relationship with her father, Lyman Beecher, who was a Calvinist preacher and whose doctrinal beliefs were so strong that he basically told his elder daughter, Catharine, that she was not going to be reunited with her fiancé in heaven because he hadn’t been saved, which is a cruel thing to say after your daughter loses a fiancé. Then saying, “Sorry, you’re not even going to be reunited in heaven.”
Harriet thought that that was a little bit too cruel, and so you see her Calvinism in her novel tempered a little bit by emotion. She thought —
COWEN: There’s free will in the novel, it seems.
ROBBINS: And there’s free will.
COWEN: Are there still Calvinists in American politics today?
ROBBINS: Well, it’s a good question. Do you think most of the candidates running for president today would even be able to say what Calvinism is? I tweeted this the other day.
COWEN: Mayor Pete perhaps, right?
ROBBINS: Perhaps, but can most Americans tell the difference between doctrines of Calvinism, Lutheranism, Methodism, Episcopalian? I doubt it.
COWEN: Is the portrayal of Uncle Tom in the novel in fact racist, as is sometimes alleged?
ROBBINS: Well, Uncle Tom is the racial epithet and has been almost from the beginning of the novel. I don’t think he’s racist. I think he is a character who works within his belief system as a character and does not fight back. He’s an avatar of nonviolence. Certainly, if you’re going to say that nonviolence and those who espouse it are racist, then you’re going to have a little bit of trouble thinking about where to put Martin Luther King.
No comments:
Post a Comment