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Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy, and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s, by Sarah Meer; pp. viii + 332. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005, $54.95, $24.95 paper.
"Tom-Mania" was the phrase coined by The Spectator to describe the fascination in Britain and the US with Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). In Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy, and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s, Sarah Meer considers the "miasma" (7) of texts and products that surrounded Stowe's novel in the mid-nineteenth century. Her goal is to "uncover the 'cultural conversation'" between Stowe's original and "its many offshoots" (8). What she finds is that "Tom-Mania" drew on "traditions and motifs derived from outside the novel [that] recur as often as elements created by Stowe herself" (7). "Tom-Mania" was so powerful that it, and not the novel itself, "produced the meaning of Stowe's book" (8) in the popular imagination.
The main argument running through the volume is that Stowe drew on the minstrel tradition, particularly stock elements such as the "end man-interlocutor exchange" (12), and that this tradition is responsible for Uncle Tom's subsequent "ambigui-ties," "amorphousness," and "adaptability" (17). Meer goes so far as to attribute some of the success of the novel to "its debts" to blackface and the minstrel tradition: "blackface elements . . . can be seen to form part of the secret of Uncle Tom's broad popularity and apparently infinite adaptability" (11-12). She discusses minstrelsy's ambiguity about race and its demeaning representation of black people, but she also argues that Stowe's "radical use" of blackface elements "enable[d] fantasies of revolt" and "comically upset bourgeois values" (11-12). Because it was...