| Popis: |
In the narrative American historians typically tell about the coming of the Civil War, the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852 invariably appears on the traditional list of significant events that contributed to the conflict between the North and the South. Historians generally fail to recognize, however, that Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel was simply the most popular work that emerged from a mass of antebellum fictional literature dealing with the subject of American slavery. This tradition began long before Uncle Tom's Cabin, arid even before the first abolitionist novel, Archy Moore, was released in 1836 or The Liberator appeared in 1831.The appearance of the black slave in American literary culture originated in the realm of children's fiction produced in both Great Britain and the United States during the opening decades of the nineteenth century. In these narratives, aimed at an audience of ten- to twelve-year-olds, white authors for the first time fashioned black characters who displayed above all else a childlike docility and a heartfelt devotion to their white benefactors. These representations undercut the manhood of black men, thereby leaving a cultural legacy that would legitimate the denial of the manly privileges of political and legal equality to African American men in the North. Because the children who read these books in the 1820s and 1830s would grow up to become the adults of the antebellum period, the storylines and characters in this juvenile literature played a critical role in shaping the racial attitudes of white Americans who would make key decisions about black civil rights in the pre-Civil War period.1A close look at the first juvenile fiction involving slaves that was published in the United States urges an expansion of current scholarly wisdom on both the purposes of early children's literature and the ways in which Americans in the early republic thought about race. In his 1980 essay "Children's Literature and Bourgeois Ideology," Isaac Kramnick argued that middle-class writers who created the new genre of children's fiction in Great Britain during the second half of the eighteenth century consciously used this literature as a means of inculcating bourgeois values into the next generation of would-be capitalists. Kramnick, whose findings continue to provide the basis for the discussion among historians in this field, maintained that early children's stories promoted character traits like industry and self-sacrifice to encourage children to work hard and save so they would maintain middle-class status as they became adults.2The slave-related children's stories released hy American publishers in the 1820s and early 1830s, however, reveal that juvenile fiction of this period transmitted to the nation's youth a particular understanding of what it meant to be white as well as what it meant to be part of the middle class. These narratives did not encourage self-reliance and the Protestant work ethic in young readers so much as they advocated the benevolent, paternalistic treatment of black slaves and servants by their white masters. The British authors who crafted many of these initial forays into children's fiction, of course, probably did not write with the primary objective of teaching future slaveholders to be good to their slaves. Given the personal connection Kramnick has noted between the creators of juvenile literature and the emergent industrial classes, these writers may instead have been suggesting to the capitalists of the next generation a way to avoid social upheaval on the part of the lower classes that would make up their workforce.3 Regardless of the lessons these British authors intended to teach, however, plots involving masters and their black servants would have resonated with American children in a literal sense at least as much as they would have on an allegorical level. In a society with a population of over 3.5 million slaves and free blacks, white children could not help taking away from these stories certain morals about how whites and African Americans should relate to each other. … |
