The Pacifist vs. the Bellicose: “Naughty Harriet”

Corina Crisu

Rewriting

Polytropic Identities

in the Postmodern African American Novel

Chapter V

“Fiction-Made Characters”

Parodying Stereotypes in Ishmael Reed’s

Flight to Canada

The Pacifist vs. the Bellicose: “Naughty Harriet”

With its pre-Civil War atmosphere, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin becomes a signpost of reference, a center of gravitation for Reed’s plot and heroes. This textual signpost indicates two different directions taken by two types of characters. On the first way, we can encounter the black hero: the pacifist, Christ-like Uncle Tom. On the second way, we run into the mulatto hero: the rebellious, warrior-like George Harris. Tom’s and George’s divergent adventures are the basis for the double plot present in both Stowe’s and Reed’s books. The images of the black pacifist and the rebellious mulatto can be found in significant nineteenth century texts, starting with the 1820s and 1830s, when these types were employed by both pro-slavery and anti-slavery supporters who used them in order to consolidate their own perspectives.

The first type corresponding to Uncle Tom was the epitome of humility, meekness, and gentility. Outstanding personalities such as William Channing, Theodore Parker, and Charles Stuart advocated the Christian virtues of the black race, its unique blend of submissiveness and affection. Thus appeared the doctrine of romantic racialism, which “acknowledged permanent racial differences, but rejected the notion of a clearly defined racial hierarchy” (Fredrickson 1987, 107). In comparison with the hard, haughty Anglo-Saxon, the African individual had a natural inclination toward Christianity. “All the sweeter graces of the Christian religion appear almost too tropical and tender plants to grow in the Caucasian mind,” affirmed Alexander Kinmont, a leading exponent of Swedenborgianism, who added: “they require a character of human nature which you can see in the rude lineaments of the Ethiopian” (Kinmont 1839, 218, in Fredrickson 1987, 105).²³

In contrast to this docile black character, a second type arose: the rebellious mulatto, the unyielding, relentless type who recalls the resolute Anglo-Saxon race as part of his/her mixed blood. The mulattos were praised as superior individuals, “the best specimen of manhood found in the South,” since “the African mothers have given them a good physical system, and the Anglo-Saxon fathers a good mental constitution” (Parsons 1855, 65-66, in Fredrickson 1987, 121).²⁴ These conventional views disseminated a growing belief in the inborn racial differences: to the passive character of the quiescent black man, they opposed the unruly character of the resistive mulatto. While the first type was prone to stay on the plantation and conform to the master’s will, the second type was more inclined to run away and defy the white system in search of liberty.

The conventional images of the black pacifist and the bellicose mulatto were in vogue in 1852, when Stowe published her bestseller Uncle Tom’s Cabin.²⁵ By intermingling the separate destinies of Uncle Tom and George Harris, Stowe disseminated her antislavery views and criticized the whole dehumanizing racial system. She mostly aimed at unmasking the immorality of the Fugitive Slave Law, which had been reinforced just two years before Uncle Tom’s publication.²⁶ The book’s impact at the national and international level was unprecedented. Stowe was not just “the little woman who started the big war,” as Lincoln called her. Read both in America and in England, her novel strengthened the Transatlantic relations between the African Americans and the British. Influenced by its abolitionist message, the British kept the Canadian border open to the fugitive slaves arriving from the United States.²⁷ In Stowe’s novel, Canada was the free land of cornucopia, the Canaan toward which the fugitive mulatto George Harris and his family were fleeing. At the same time, Stowe made the reader empathize with the black slave Uncle Tom, whose ardent desire was to reach the Christian heaven—his ideal Canada of spiritual liberation.

What’s so wrong, we may inquire now, with Stowe’s history-making fiction? In spite of its wide reception, why did so many voices rise against it in the nineteenth century? Why did her novel gradually go out of print toward the end of the nineteenth century? Most of all, the harshest criticism came from James Baldwin, who, in his famous “Everybody Protest Novel,” saw in Stowe’s book a “catalogue of violence” that was “activated by theological terror” (Baldwin 1955, 150).²⁸ Furthermore, protests rose in the 1980s and 1990s, when critics discussed Stowe’s rhetoric of colonization that sent blacks back to Africa and her “failure to imagine an America in which blacks could be recognized as persons” (S�nchez-Eppler 1992, 113).

Tributary to a certain mentality, Stowe could not avoid the unavoidable—what Toni Morrison called a “racially infected language” (1992, 12). She could not help reiterating some of the racist ideas of her time, among whom the stereotype of the black pacifist and the bellicose mulatto. In order to give more strength to these types, she made use of a great number of authenticating documents ranging from slave narratives to letters and journals.²⁹ She was also inspired by texts pertaining to Frederick Douglass, Josiah Henson, the Clarke brothers, and others, as disclosed in Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin.³⁰

If Stowe’s ideas were anchored in her time, still, why does Reed call her “naughty Harriet,” and think of her authentication as theft? At the beginning of his novel, Reed harshly satirizes Stowe’s usage of Henson’s autobiographical story as the model for Uncle Tom:

The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave. Seventy-Seven pages long. It was short, but it was his. It was all he had. His story. A man’s story is his gris-gris, you know. Taking his story is like taking his gris-gris. The thing that is himself. It’s like robbing a man of his Etheric Double (Reed’s italics, 8).

Reed’s critique draws attention to Stowe’s plagiarism, to her framing of Josiah Henson’s story within the bounds of her sentimental novel. Wanting to liberate the Africans, in fact, she reinforced white conventions. At a time when black people had no copyright over their stories (as Reed humorously says), Stowe as a white woman appropriated a black man’s experience and wrote a book that made her famous.³¹ In order to depict significant black and mulatto types, Stowe re-told Josiah Henson’s story, as well as other black texts.³² This kind of “stolentelling” is not just an innocent borrowing, but a way of “repossessing the ‘property’ her novel was actually attempting to free” (Moraru 2001, 91).³³

Hence, Reed’s anger; his conscious attempts to recuperate in writing a story that was taken away from his literary precursors; his ambition to rewrite what was wrongly written. Reed thus appears not a doctus cum libro,³⁴ who would directly make use of Stowe’s text, but as an incredulous reader who disbelieves her epoch-making opus. Flight to Canada is a postmodern example of “lethetic fiction,” where Reed stubbornly resists conventional interpretation in a critical process of revising Stowe (Koelb 1984, 48). As Hortense Spillers remarks, “Stowe’s subsequent narrative on prior texts of Scripture and the historical is absorbed and displaced in Reed’s contemporary structure through his translation of syntactic elements into an iconic sign, whose ‘verbal equivalent… is not a word but a phrase or indeed a whole story’” (Eco 1979, 215, in Spillers 1989, 31).

In this way, Reed keeps the two narrative threads present in Stowe’s novel, each of them dealing separately with Uncle Tom and George Harris. Only that Uncle Tom becomes Uncle Robin, Aunt Chloe—Aunt Judy, George Harris—Raven Quickskill, Eliza—Quaw Quaw, Missis Shelby—Ms. Swille, Master Shelby—Massa Swille. Last but not least, Harriet Beecher Stowe becomes simply “naughty Harriet.”

NOTES

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