Arguing With Pictures: Race, Class, and the Formation of Popular Abolitionism through Uncle Tom's Cabin

I [St. Clare] lifted up a curtain that covered the glass-door, and looked in.... There sat the two children on the floor.... Topsy, with her usual air of careless drollery.. but, opposite to her, Eva, her whole face fervent with feeling, and tears in her large eyes. "What does make you so bad, Topsy?...Don't you love anybody... ? 0 Topsy, poor child, I love you!" said Eva..., and laying her little thin white hand on Topsy's shoulder;... "I wish you would.. be good for my sake;it's only a little while I shall be with you." The round, keen eyes of the black child were overcast with tears;-large, bright drops rolled heavily down.. and fell on the little white hand. Yes, in that moment, a ray of real belief, a ray of heavenly love had penetrated the darkness of her heathen soul! She laid her head down between her knees, and wept and sobbed,while the beautiful child, bending over her, looked like the picture of some bright angel stooping to reclaim a sinner. (410-11)' While Harriet Beecher Stowe was working on Uncle Tom's Cabin, she wrote to her editor that she intended "to paint pictures" for her readers because "[t]here is no arguing with pictures" (Hedrick 208). I define Stowe's pictures as brief scenes ranging in length from a paragraph to a page or two, which feature dense physical description over the plot's advancement or the narrator's commentary.2 Stowe was prescient about the enormous power her verbal pictures would hold for a popular audience. Such pictures in Uncle Tom's Cabin are often striking because they solicit from readers almost instant, and often shared, recognition of their "meaning," at the same time that they are charged with contradictions and uncertainties. The tableau of Little Eva bending over Topsy taps Christian iconography to display as a simple and immediately accessible truth the allegory of Christian redemption. Framing the quasi-religious icon with curtain and glass, the novel at once presents the tableau as complete and advertises the transparency of its truth.3 The picture of Christian redemption is aligned with the narrative Eva tells Topsy about her equal inclusion in Christ's love in the same tableau. [D]on't you know that Jesus loves all alike? He is just as willing to love you, as me.... [Y]ou can go to Heaven at last and be an angel forever, just as much as if you were white. (410) However, the most striking visual feature of the image of Little Eva and Topsy in this novel that is fascinated with visuality-the sharp contrast between blackness and whiteness-is at odds with the narrative of redemption. The picture so fully links darkness and blackness to heathens and sin (Baldwin 84)-opposed as they are to whiteness, brightness, angels, and redemptionas to imply that Topsy can never go to heaven. Stowe's picture is infused with metaphors of darkness and light that call to mind a Calvinist narrative of redemption, based not in equality but in opposition and exclusion, that relays the authority of the Book of Revelations. The most visual aspect of the picture implies a racially coded and culturally mediated counter-narrative in the very scene that advertises its transparency and immediacy. Stowe's verbal pictures and their popular variants became magnets for cultural fascination, which helped to catalyze the identifications and exclusions of an imagined abolitionist community across the gaps and distances that extended from New York and New England to Ohio, to California, as well the identities of opposing sections and groups. Abolitionism spread and consolidated its following in the antebellum decades through the early stirrings of American mass culture which originated in the press. In the 1840s, slave narratives claimed a large popular audience; by 1852, Uncle Tom's Cabin broke all previous sales records for American novels.4 Stowe's novel stimulated a consumer fad that took up its characters in plays, popular songs, lithographs, children's books, and various sentimental items for the middle-class home. …