Whitewashing Uncle Tom's Cabin

by Jordan-Lake, Joy

• ISBN13: 9780826514752
• ISBN10: 0826514758
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-10-30
• Publisher: Vanderbilt Univ Pr

Summary

Joy Jordan-Lake examines the ways in which antebellum women novelists tried to counter Harriet Beecher Stoweís enormously popularUncle Tom's Cabinby preaching a ìtheology of whitenessî from within the pages of the books - but were ultimately undermined by their own proslavery agendas. Including a discussion of twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels that revisit plantation mythology,Whitewashing Uncle Tom's Cabincasts new light on the ethical and moral disaster of securing one groupís economic strength at the expense of other groupsí access to dignity, compassion, and justice.

Author Biography

Joy Jordan-Lake formerly taught English at Baylor University and is currently writing and teaching part-time at Belmont University in Nashville

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Preface: In the Beginning, a Photograph	p. xi
Introduction: The Personal Becomes the Project	p. xv
"To Woman...I Say Depart!": The Plantation Literary Tradition, the Emergent Anti-Uncle Tom Novel, and Gender	p. 1
Sanctified by Wealth and Whiteness: Mother-Saviors-and Not-in the Urban North	p. 25
Justified by Mother's Milk: Mammies and Mistress Figures in Proslavery Fiction's Plantation South	p. 63
The Background that Belies the Myth: The Historical Record that Helps Explain the Preponderance of Nonslaveholding Proslavery Women Authors	p. 97
Mothering the Other, Othering the Mother: An African American Woman Novelist Battles Slavery and Uncle Tom	p. 126
Still Playing with Fire: Perpetuation and Refutation of the Plantation Romance in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Novels by Women	p. 136
Notes	p. 161
Bibliography	p. 177
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