[On March 20, 1852,
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s titanic novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published
in book form for the first time. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful
of Stowe contexts, leading up to a special post on the wonderful Stowe Center
in Hartford!]
On the
very complicated, confusing, and crucial case of the Uncle Tom’s Cabin toys and games.
In a
long-ago Tribute
Post here, I wrote about my Dad, (now retired) University of Virginia Professor
Stephen Railton, and more specifically about his public scholarly and pedagogical
websites. While the Mark
Twain site focuses pretty specifically on Twain’s major works and on their
many biographical, historical, cultural, artistic, and scholarly contexts, the Uncle
Tom’s Cabin site has a very different additional emphasis
(while still highlighting many elements in those categories for Stowe’s novel):
tracing the novel’s multi-faceted, multi-century legacy in American culture. It’s
fair to ask, as the site itself does in each case (and as I’ll explore a bit
more in tomorrow’s series-concluding post as well), whether any of those
aftermaths—from the touring Tom Shows to the dozens of film adaptations, the
collectibles to the card games, and many many more—can tell us much at all
about Stowe’s novel itself, whether they’re more about their own particular
moments or connected to enduring national narratives, how, indeed, we American
Studiers analyze this century and a half of Stowe-inspired cultural and
material cultural stuff.
Those
questions are relevant to any and all of the Stowe legacies highlighted on the
website, but are nowhere more vexed and challenging than when it comes to the Tom-inspired children’s merchandise (or
“Tomitudes,” as the material culture artifacts inspired by the novel are often
known). What on earth do we make of these jigsaw puzzles, these Tom’s cabin
pieces included in assemble-your-own-village sets, these paper dolls and
cut-outs of characters and scenes from the novel? Do they simply and neutrally
reflect the way that (imagine this next word in the voice of Yogurt from Spaceballs) “merchandising” can and
will find its way into anything in our capitalist society? Are they part of the
process of stereotyping and watering-down that (building on certain aspects of
the novel but ignoring many, many others) has reduced Stowe’s novel from
impassioned protest to cultural mainstay? Could they instead represent a way in
which those moral lessons and goals of Stowe’s novel could be passed down to
open-minded and impressionable young Americans, not unlike the ways in which Tom
influenced young Eva (and then she in turn influenced her father, the reformed
slaveowner St. Clare), in the novel’s most idealized relationship?
Hell if I know. But I do know this: while
Stowe’s novel may be an extreme case (I’m not familiar, at least, with the Marrow of Tradition jigsaw puzzles, the Ceremony cut-out dolls, the Awakening ocean-suicide dioramas),
there’s something unavoidably true and important about the fact that our most
prominent cultural figures, events, and texts eventually filter down to our
kids. Obviously the versions of the America Revolution and the Civil War, of
Mark Twain and Martin Luther King, of the frontier and the Cold War, that
become toys and games, children’s books and snippets of kids’ TV shows, and the
like can seem far removed from those with which we scholarly, adult AmericanStudiers
engage. But we’d better not think of them that way, not treat them as distinct
in any absolute sense—had better, instead, remember that national, historical,
and cultural narratives are created and passed down in a variety of forms, and
that the ones that seem the simplest are often those that become the most
ingrained in our identities and communities. I’m not saying we all need to play
with the Uncle Tom’s Cabin cut-out
dolls, necessarily; but we’d all better think about them.
Last
StoweStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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