Jordan-Lake, J., Whitewashing Uncle Tom's Cabin: Nineteenth-Century Women Novelists Respond to Stowe: [Book Review]

Joy Jordan-Lake's Whitewashing Uncle Tom's Cabin provides a thorough account of nineteenth-century plantation romances written by women in reaction to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). Jordan-Lake suggests that Mary H. Eastman's Aunt Phillis' Cabin (1852), Maria J. McIntosh's The Lofty and the Lowly (1853), and other anti-Tom novels appear to attack patriarchy but ultimately reinforce all “three primary buttresses of slavery: racial, gender, and economic oppression” (p. xxii). As Jordan-Lake shows, images of slave culture made their way from Uncle Tom's Cabin, through plantation novels, into twentieth-century fiction and beyond. The result is a useful corrective to academic discussions that sometimes turn Uncle Tom's Cabin itself into a Southern romance.