1994/12/01 by Arthur Riss · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #American Constitutional Law and Politics #Race, History, and American Society #Essentialism #Sociology #Art #Gender studies
paper · doi:10.2307/2713382
openalex publication_date 1994/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/11/06
WHEN HARRIET BEECHER STOWE INTRODUCES HER READERS TO UNCLE Tom's cabin, she remarks that the wall over the fireplace adorned with some very brilliant Scriptural prints and a portrait of General Washington.' In their privileged position over the hearth, these domestic adornments, one sacred and the other secular, prefigure the Christian virtue and the desire for personal liberty that Tom's life, and by extension his home, will come to embody. As George Shelby tells the slaves he manumits at the novel's conclusion, think of your freedom every time you see UNCLE TOM'S CABIN; and let it be a memorial to put you all in mind to follow in his steps, and be as honest and faithful and Christian as he was (437). Of course, it not unusual to find either Scriptural prints or a portrait of Washington in a typical nineteenth-century American home.2 One might assume, therefore, that Stowe places these generic household icons in the cabin of a slave to demonstrate that the American slave and the American citizen are essentially similar. However, readers quickly learn that there is a striking difference between the slave and the citizen. Tom's portrait of Washington is drawn and colored in a manner which would certainly have astonished that hero (20). Tom's Washington is black.3