Synopses & Reviews
Joy Jordan-Lake examines the ways in which antebellum women novelists tried to counter Harriet Beecher Stoweís enormously popular Uncle Tom's Cabin by preaching a ìtheology of whitenessî from within the pages of the books - but were ultimately undermined by their own proslavery agendas. Including a discussion of twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels that revisit plantation mythology, Whitewashing Uncle Tom's Cabin casts new light on the ethical and moral disaster of securing one groupís economic strength at the expense of other groupsí access to dignity, compassion, and justice.
Review
. . . careful analyses show the interlocking relationships between race, class, and gender in antebellum Southern society.
--Choice
About the Author
Joy Jordan-Lake holds graduate degrees in theology and literature. She formerly taught English at Baylor University and is currently writing and teaching part time at Belmont University in Nashville.
Table of Contents
Preface 1
In the Beginning, a Photograph
Introduction 7
The Personal Becomes the Project
Chapter One 27 "To Woman . . . I Say Depart!":
The Plantation Literary Tradition, the Emergent
Anti-Uncle Tom Novel and Gender
Chapter Two 66
Sanctified By Wealth and Whiteness:
Mother-Saviors in the Urban North
Chapter Three 127
Justified by Mother's Milk:
Mammies and Mistress Figures in Pro-Slavery Fiction's
Plantation South
Chapter Four 182
The Background that Belies the Myth:
The Historical Record that Helps Explain the Preponderance
of Non-Slaveholding Pro-Slavery Women Authors
Chapter Five 228
Mothering the Other, Othering the Mother:
An African-American Woman Novelist Battles Slavery
and Uncle Tom
Chapter Six and Conclusion 246
Still Playing With Fire:
Perpetuation and Refutation of the Plantation Romance
in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Novels by Women
Bibliography 283