Guilty Pleasures

Popular Novels and American Audiences in the Long Nineteenth Century

Hugh McIntosh

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780813941660
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Nordamerikanische Literaturkritik

Guilty pleasures in one's reading habits are nothing new. Late-nineteenth-century American literary culture even championed the idea that popular novels need not be great. Best-selling novels arrived in the public sphere as at once beloved and contested objects, an ambivalence that reflected and informed America's cultural insecurity. This became a matter of nationhood as well as aesthetics: the amateurism of popular narratives resonated with the discourse of new nationhood.

In Guilty Pleasures, Hugh McIntosh examines reactions to best-selling fiction in the United States from 1850 to 1920, including reader response to such best-sellers as Uncle Tom's Cabin, Ben Hur, and Trilby as well as fictional representations—from Trollope to Baldwin—of American culture's lack of artistic greatness. Drawing on a transatlantic archive of contemporary criticism, urban display, parody, and advertising, Guilty Pleasures thoroughly documents how the conflicted attitude toward popular novels shaped these ephemeral modes of response. Paying close attention to this material history of novel reading, McIntosh reveals how popular fiction's unique status as socially saturating and aesthetically questionable inspired public reflection on what it meant to belong to a flawed national community.

Chapter 1

Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Unprivileged Public Sphere

In one of the most frequently cited recollections of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Henry James describes Stowe’s novel as a kind of omnipresence in 1850s New York. As he remembers, the story seemed “much less a book than a state of vision, feeling, and of consciousness,” a field in which “we lived and moved.” Much of what James writes about Uncle Tom’s Cabin anticipates twentieth-century critiques of mass culture as mind control. New Yorkers didn’t “read and appraise” the novel, he claims, but instead “walked and talked and laughed, and cried . . . in a manner of which Mrs. Stowe was the irresistible cause.” The more James remembers about Uncle Tom’s Cabin, however, the less authoritative Stowe’s text seems to have been. He goes on to suggest that the “amount of life” in the novel might be measured by the degree to which it is “taken up and carried further, carried even violently furthest” by its audience. Theater crowds flock to the show “in order not to be beguiled.”1 James’s memory bears out an irony of mass circulation: the greater a narrative’s appeal, the more appealing it is to be seen avoiding its pull.

This chapter explores the long tradition of ambivalent reaction to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, showing how the cultural life of Stowe’s text and its countless spin-offs helped define a sensibility of detachment. Charged with racial politics and ethical urgency in ways that distinguish it from later best sellers, Uncle Tom’s Cabin nonetheless set the stage for novel reception to come. Seeing this requires keeping in mind how many things Uncle Tom’s Cabin did at once: rallying support for abolition, drawing fire from proslavery voices, showcasing a truly national cultural reach, and promoting ideals of whiteness and womanhood that would stay prevalent long after the Civil War. The many-layered response to Uncle Tom’s Cabin reflected this unique complexity. But it also registered how Stowe’s text laid bare a contradiction shared by many other Victorian narratives. Making huge claims for a novel’s power to change the social world and circulating as widely as it did, Uncle Tom’s Cabin came to signify the tension between grand ideals and humble formats that shaped the meaning of popular reading throughout the nineteenth century.

This tension between form and format inspired responses to Uncle Tom’s Cabin that didn’t align with the extremes of praise and blame which surrounded the novel then and continue to surround it today. We now have a broad body of scholarship on the proslavery reaction, including the subgenre of “anti-Tom” literature that attempted to counter Stowe’s abolitionist message. On the other side, there is plenty of evidence that Uncle Tom’s Cabin deeply moved and convinced a wide range of readers, as cultural historians who praise the novel’s relatively bold antislavery and feminist ethics often point out. Other twentieth-century critics have suggested new ways of thinking about Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a pernicious text—most notably James Baldwin, who argued that Stowe’s narrative sidesteps realism in favor of racist caricature and white self-congratulation, and Ann Douglas, who took Uncle Tom’s Cabin to task for embodying consumer culture’s celebration of superficial feeling.2 The long social life of Uncle Tom’s Cabin has been defined, in part, by very strong and very contentious judgments.

But just as much of the response surrounding Uncle Tom’s Cabin was spoken in weaker terms, as ambivalent readers reacted with a vocabulary of uncertainty. These readers peppered criticism of Uncle Tom’s Cabin with phrases like “despite its flaws,” “though comeliness of form was lacking,” and “artistic—if the word can stand the strain.” The critique articulated by these hesitant voices was not a rejection of Stowe’s text but a questioning of what it meant that valuable moral sentiment seemed to travel most widely in an artistically dubious novel, and later in its outlandish stage adaptations. This question became especially pressing in the postwar decades, as its stage versions became increasingly absurd—a fact emphasized over and over by its many parodies. While Stowe’s writing struck some as lacking in proper authorial control, the explosion of stage versions literally demonstrated what it looks like when a popular story takes on a life of its own in the United States. Those observing this explosion voiced a wide-ranging critique of the intertwined ideals of American progress and the elevation of individual feeling.

This chapter does not present an overview of Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s transformation from a trenchant serial novel in 1851’s National Era to a massive, diffuse phenomenon of spin-offs, merchandising, and, above all, repetition by the end of the century. This story has been told thoroughly by Harry Birdoff, Jane Tompkins, Sarah Meer, Eric Lott, Barbara Hochman, Lauren Berlant, and David Reynolds. Neither does it recount the shifts in technological production and mass literacy that, as Trish Loughran and Claire Parfait have detailed, paved the way for Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s unprecedented popularity. Instead, the following focuses on a sensibility that scholarship on Stowe’s novel has tended to overlook by reading across three sites that expressed uncertainties about Uncle Tom’s Cabin “mania:” early newspaper and magazine criticism; Agnes of Sorrento (1862), a novel Stowe wrote after witnessing nearly a decade of mixed reaction to Uncle Tom’s Cabin; and postbellum parodies of the novel’s many stage adaptations, from the pages of the humor magazine Puck to Langston Hughes’s defiant “Colonel Tom’s Cabin.” In very different ways, these sources express the feeling that Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s extreme faith in privileged individuals does little to represent the truth about the American populace.

At the center of these reactions to Uncle Tom’s Cabin was little Eva, Stowe’s iconic image of the white redeemer. Countless racist renditions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin would turn the novel’s black characters into minstrel caricatures, implying in the process that African Americans were less worthy of sympathy than Stowe had proclaimed. The long tradition of revising Eva contested Stowe’s faith in the power of sympathy itself. Since Eva was the moral center of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, rethinking her character became a way of engaging with questions not only about racial equality but also about the potential of sentimental ethics more broadly conceived. Writing at the end of a long stage career, Cordelia Howard, one of the first actresses to play Eva on stage, lamented that Uncle Tom’s Cabin had become “the butt of all the critics’ ridicule,” losing the “grandeur” that it once conveyed.3 The loss of grandeur to which Howard refers can certainly be seen in the trajectory of the character she helped make famous, who is so often singled out for mockery and violent parody. But the many attempts to ridicule little Eva attest to the difficulty critics and everyday readers alike had in writing her off entirely.

Recalling the popular uncertainty about Uncle Tom’s Cabin foregrounds three points about cool readership to which the following chapters will return. First, the attitude cut across erudite criticism and more popular discourses of humor: one would have been as likely to encounter ambivalence about Uncle Tom’s Cabin in a Henry James essay as in a stridently lowbrow comic magazine. Second, the response to Stowe’s novel portrayed uncertainty about national community as a typically American point of view. And third, cool reading turned an especially skeptical eye on the privileging of individual subjects, an attribute that placed it at odds with the individualism so central to Victorian novels themselves. Helping to imagine an American community unattached to the graciousness of any privileged individual perspective, the reaction to Uncle Tom’s Cabin laid the groundwork for a kind of critical consciousness that would appear again and again as audiences engaged with the period’s best-selling fiction.

Following Eva’s changing fate over the nineteenth century offers insight into the ways cool audiences pushed the novel’s exploration of race and redemption toward reflection on consumption and community. And this shift makes sense when we consider the special relationship that Uncle Tom’s Cabin seemed to have with the emerging consumerist culture that surrounded and included it. It might be a bit extreme to say, as Ann Douglas does, that Eva’s saccharine goodness anticipated the shallow self-congratulation that would characterize so much twentieth-century mass culture. But it is certainly true that Stowe’s faith in easily accessible fiction as a catalyst for social change helped Uncle Tom’s Cabin reflect a rosy view of the mass marketplace. Ultimately, the reassessment of Eva as an exemplary individual was hard to distinguish from the critique of the popular novel as an exemplary market object. In Lauren Berlant’s words, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a “beacon” within commercial culture, a symbol of “the power of a commodity to shock its consumers into a contemporary crisis of knowledge and national power.”4 Stowe’s novel was about the corruption of a democracy that allowed slavery to exist, but it would come to represent a different subject as well: the potentially transformative force of a consumer-driven mass culture.

In the postwar decades, audiences reversed the terms. Particularly as it became common to note how the theater industry had distorted Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the text came to signify not the commodity’s power to transform the social world but consumers’ power to turn political momentum into the inertia of entertainment. Somewhat ironically, just when Uncle Tom’s Cabin could seem to have directly changed the nation—calling for the end of slavery that did, in fact, take place—as a long-running cultural presence, the story became a symbol of a disappointing status quo. It was in the context of this shift that the revision of Stowe’s imagery of redemption took on its most critical edge. The clearer it became that Uncle Tom’s Cabin was played out, the less audiences could take its faith in the power of sympathetic individuals at face value.

The uncertainties about Uncle Tom’s Cabin this chapter discusses were not voiced by harsh critics as much as by readers unable to accept its sentimental ethics without reservation. One of the first and most conflicted of these voices was Stowe herself, who explored her rising doubts about sentimental heroines in a text not often considered alongside Uncle Tom’s Cabin: her novel, Agnes of Sorrento. The connection between these two texts has been obscured in part by the convoluted timing of Stowe’s post–Uncle Tom’s Cabin literary production. The nonfictional A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853) and the follow-up novel Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856) directly answer criticisms of Stowe’s 1851 bestseller, A Key providing a range of sources confirming the plausibility of her fictional portrayal of slavery and Dred depicting an insurrectionary black hero in stark contrast to the nonviolent Uncle Tom. She also published a European travelogue, Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands (1854), reissued a collection of pre–Uncle Tom’s Cabin short stories and poems, The Mayflower, in 1855 (originally published in 1843), and published a novel she had begun writing just after she finished Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Pearl of Orr’s Island (1862).5 The second novel she published in 1862, Agnes of Sorrento, deserves special attention, as it was the first narrative she wrote in its entirety after witnessing the surprising and contentious early years of Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s life in American culture.

Shaped by this context, Agnes of Sorrento is an extended exploration of sentimentalism as an unstable and unreliable social form. Although the novel departs from the setting of American slavery that Stowe had struggled with in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Key, and Dred—set instead in fourteenth-century Italy—Agnes presents the most complex treatment of sentimentality that her works have to offer. Notably for the purposes of this chapter, the novel approaches sentiment as a problem of reception, depicting a priest who tries to reach his sinful congregation by describing others’ suffering only to find that his audience enjoys the imagery of pain. Portraying the appeal to mass feeling as a risky venture, Agnes anticipates the coolness that would come to surround Uncle Tom’s Cabin later in the nineteenth century. The novel also shares with later critics and parodists the desire for an updated version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s little Eva. Agnes reimagines Eva through the eponymous heroine, a figure of inspiration and redemption who stands out less for her sensitivity to others’ suffering (as Eva does) and more for her compulsion to inflict pain on herself. Agnes of Sorrento is thus the first of many para-texts of Uncle Tom’s Cabin that will imagine Eva withstanding extended ordeals of abuse.

I would argue that the violence surrounding Eva reflects a larger ambivalence about American mass culture that Uncle Tom’s Cabin played a major role in making visible. Over the course of the nineteenth century, Stowe’s heroine became a sign of an increasingly doubtful fantasy, as the adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin—but also the growing prominence of consumerist genres like sensationalism and spectacular theater—made it difficult if not impossible to believe that a popular commodity might change the world. Against this backdrop, responses to Uncle Tom’s Cabin took up and questioned the redemptive promise of sentimental consumption and individuality rooted in domestic space. As Lori Merish has shown, sentimental novels did much to link ideals of femininity with the acquisition and care of commodities in the home, a crossing between literary content and market expansion that helped make a healthy love for lithographs, carpets, and furniture part of what it meant to be a “true woman.”6 The imagery of cool response tied sentimentality to consumerism in a different way, less invested in the familiarity of the home. Ambivalent readers of Uncle Tom’s Cabin expressed the suspicion that for a commodity to “shock its consumers into a contemporary crisis,” it would have to be a stranger thing than Stowe’s novel.

Where Stowe had asked what the United States might look like if its citizens followed their hearts instead of their heads, the response to Uncle Tom’s Cabin shied away from faith in individual feeling. Stowe’s famous appeal to the “men and women of the North” to counter the cold calculations of politicians and clergymen with the simplicity of sympathy was a powerfully accessible political statement. But this hope only made sense by exalting the actions of individuals uncorrupted by the world around them: the peaceful resistance of Uncle Tom, for instance, or the purity of little Eva. If popular novels were allowed to set the limits of their reception, this fixation on the selves exempted from the violent pull of their surroundings would strongly support the long view—a running theme in the historiography of the novel—that the genre both reflected and enabled the ascendency of modern individualism. But no novel as popular and controversial as Uncle Tom’s Cabin is allowed to have a meaning this fixed.

Early Reviews

In many initial reviews, Uncle Tom’s Cabin sounds more like a gift from God than a well-written book. According to one National Era review, this “providential” novel “was a necess...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Not-So-Great American Novel
• 1. Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Unprivileged Public Sphere
• 2. Ben-Hur: Spectacles of Belief
• 3. British Authorship, American Advertising
• 4. Questionable Americans Abroad
• 5. Unknowing American Realism: Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Henry James, James Weldon Johnson, and James Baldwin
• Afterword: The Novel and America Abroad Now
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index