Whitewashing Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Nineteenth-Century Women Novelists Respond to Stowe

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.