Uncle Tom is the title character of Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. The character was seen in the Victorian era as a ground-breaking literary attack against the dehumanization of slaves. Tom is a deeply religious Christian preacher to his fellow slaves who uses nonresistance, but who accepts being flogged to death rather than violate the plantation's code of silence by informing against the route being used by two women who have just escaped from slavery. However, the character also came to be criticized for allegedly being inexplicably kind to white slaveowners, especially based on his portrayal in pro-compassion dramatizations. This led to the use of Uncle Tom — sometimes shortened to just a Tom — as a derogatory epithet for an exceedingly subservient person or house negro, particularly one accepting and uncritical of their own lower-class status.

Original characterization and critical evaluations

At the time of the novel's initial publication in 1851, Uncle Tom was a rejection of the existing stereotypes of minstrel shows; Stowe's melodramatic story humanized the suffering of slavery for white audiences by portraying Tom as a young, strong Jesus-like figure who is ultimately martyred, beaten to death by a cruel master (Simon Legree) because he refuses to betray the whereabouts of two women who had escaped from slavery. Stowe reversed the gender conventions of slave narratives by juxtaposing Uncle Tom's passivity against the daring of three African American women who escape from slavery. Senator Charles Sumner credited Uncle Tom's Cabin for the election of Abraham Lincoln, an opinion that is later echoed in the apocryphal story of Lincoln greeting Stowe with the quip, "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!" Frederick Douglass praised the novel as "a flash to light a million camp fires in front of the embattled hosts of slavery."</blockquote>

James Weldon Johnson, a prominent figure of the Harlem Renaissance, expressed an antipathetic opinion in his autobiography:

<blockquote>For my part, I was never an admirer of Uncle Tom, nor of his type of goodness; but I believe that there were lots of old Negroes as foolishly good as he.</blockquote>

In 1949, American writer James Baldwin rejected the emasculation of the title character "robbed of his humanity and divested of his sex" as the price of spiritual salvation for a dark-skinned man in a fiction whose African-American characters, in Baldwin's view, were invariably two-dimensional stereotypes. To Baldwin, Stowe was closer to a pamphleteer than a novelist and her artistic vision was fatally marred by polemics and racism that manifested especially in her handling of the title character.

Inspiration

thumb|Uncle Tom and Eva, [[Staffordshire figure, England, 1855–1860, glazed and painted earthenware]]

A specific impetus for the novel was the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which imposed heavy fines upon law enforcement personnel in Northern states if they refused to assist the return of people who escaped from slavery. The new law also stripped African Americans of the right to request a jury trial or to testify on their own behalf, even if they were legally free, whenever a single claimant presented an affidavit of ownership. Henson was enslaved at birth in 1789. The term has also, with more intended neutrality, been applied in psychology in the form of "Uncle Tom syndrome", a term for the use of subservience, appeasement, and passivity to cope with intimidation and threats.

The popular negative connotations of "Uncle Tom" have largely been attributed to the numerous derivative works inspired by Uncle Tom's Cabin in the decade after its release, rather than to the original novel itself, whose title character is a more positive figure. These works, often called a "Tom show," lampooned and distorted the portrayal of Uncle Tom with politically loaded overtones. Minstrel show retellings in particular, usually performed by white men in blackface, tended to be derisive and pro-slavery, transforming Uncle Tom from a Christian martyr to a fool or apologist for slavery.

Adapted theatrical performances of the novel, called Tom Shows, remained in continual production in the United States for at least 80 years beyond the 1850s (1930s). Whereas Stowe's Uncle Tom was a young, muscular, and virile man who refused to obey his cruel master, Simon Legree, when Legree ordered him to beat other slaves, the stock character of the minstrel shows was degenerated into a shuffling, asexual individual, with a receding hairline and graying hair.

Claire Parfait, author of The Publishing History of Uncle Tom's Cabin, 1852–2002, opined that "the many alterations in retellings of the Uncle Tom story demonstrate an impulse to correct the retellers's perceptions of its flaws" and of "the capacity of the novel to irritate and rankle, even a century and a half after its first publication."

The Emmy Award-winning 1987 documentary film Ethnic Notions by Marlon Riggs narrates the history and legacy of the dehumanizing effects of African-American stereotypes and racializing caricatures from the "Loyal Uncle Tom" to grinning fools (see Stepin' Fetchit) in cartoons, minstrel shows, advertisements, household artifacts, and even children's rhymes.

See also

References

Further reading

  • An article on the Uncle Tom caricature
  • An article from EveryGirls 1931 by Olive Burns Kirby