Professor Rose's Lecture

1982 edition of Slavery and Freedom by Willie Lee Rose, Oxford University Press
 
 

115: Crevecoeur: "What then is the American, this new man?"

 Professor Rose turns to popular thought for an answer- focuses on a vast reading public fed by modern (initially steam run) presses

 discusses four publishing successes, three of which we will be covering in this course:

 Harriet Beecher Stowe's "famous" book Uncle Tom's Cabin, published in 1852

 promptly dramatized by George Aiken and run almost continuously somewhere in some form since

 Thomas Ryan Dixon's1905 the Clansman (translated into film as the Birth of the Nation by D.W. Griffith)

 Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, written between 1925 and 1929 and published in 1936, selling at an average of 500,000 copies a year (by 1982) and made into a movie of the same name

 Alex Haley's Roots, published in 1976 and made into a television series seen all over the world in a multitude of languages
 
 

119: all were challenged as to their historical accuracy, [and Haley faced serious charges of plagiarism before and after his death]

 [neither Professor Rose, or shall we spend much time with Alex Haley's work, but much what we will explore with the work of the other three author's and its translation into popular culture, both as a reflection, and as a factor in the determination, of cultural norms could easily be applied to the Roots phenomenon as well]
 
 

121: Professor Rose repeats the standard story of Harriet Beecher Stowe came to write Uncle Tom's Cabin (inspiration in a church pew) to make her point that Uncle Tom is a christ figure meant to be sacrificed for the betterment of humanity.
 
 

122: the catalyst for the writing of the novel, apart from divine inspiration, was the adoption of the Fugitive Slave law as a part of the compromise of 1850, crafted by that fallen angel of the north, Daniel Webster. The law required the northern states to cooperate in the return of fugitive slaves [and was to be up held by the Supreme Court in the now infamous decision of Chief Justice and Marylander, Roger Brooke Taney, in 1857].

124: By not spending much time explaining the plot of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Professor Rose implicitly reinforces the argument that by 1982 the plot was so well known as not to need illumination. Indeed, she spends her time suggesting that not enough research has been done on the impact the book had on the international context of the Civil War. For example, p. 125, she suggests that the many British play productions of the late 1850s that featured a whip wielding Simon Legree, only helped to solidify the resistence in England to recognizing the South during the Civil War.

125: Professor Rose concludes that the dramatizations of Uncle Tom's Cabin in time lost their vigor and persuasiveness, giving way to slapstick and over-dramatized productions featuring real dogs and angels to keep the audience interested.

126: the book, however, endured because it was readable, was stirring, and could persuade even the most perceptive critics of style like Henry James to read it. According to James:

 It had the "extraordinary fortune of finding itself, for an immense number of people much less a book than a state of vision, of feeling, and of conciousness, in which they didn't sit and read and appraise .. but walked and talked and laughed and cried ... in a manner of which Mrs. Stowe was the irresistable cause. ..."
 
 

126: Professor Rose then turns to the "nadir of race relations in the U.S." and "the badly deteriorating images of blacks" that had become the normative world of the first decades of the 20th century, to examine the publication of Thomas Dixon's the Clansman and the film version, Birth of a Nation.

127: Professor Rose has no explanation for the intensification of Dixon's racist views that bore fruit in his novels. Dixon claimed he was incensed at a 1901 revival of Uncle Tom's Cabin and decided to "make a merciless record of the facts" instead." He even used "a few of the characters from "Uncle Tom's Cabin" to undermine the way in which Harriet Beecher Stowe portrayed them. Interestingly enough, although Dixon apparently sold millions of copies of his novels and millions have seen Birth of a Nation, Professor Rose found it necessary to explain the plot to her British audience. She probably would have had to have done so for an American one as well. Mrs. Stowe continues to be read and her characters known and understood by even those who abhorred her message. Dixon's characters have not survived, although his racist message has proven more tenacious.

130: Professor Rose suggests that the reason for the success of the Clansman and Birth of Nation relates to the ebbing of nationalism and increasing fear of cultural invasion, not necessarily so much by blacks wielding political power, but by foreign elements of any sort (southern europeans included) who seemed to be attacking the very essence of what it meant to be an American.

130: Professor Rose seems to measure Thomas Dixon's success in reinforcing the dark side of American attitudes towards race by the spectacular response to both the book and movie of Gone with the Wind "the greatest publishing extravaganza of all time." It became a state of mind, not unlike that attributed to Mrs. Stowe's work by the novelist Henry James. She proves more successful because she deemphasizes the negative while using stereotypes of "good darkies" to re-emphasize white superiority. Indeed so successful was she that "she disarmed much black criticism that mgiht otherwise have come upon the plantation stereotypes the modern Negro had begun so much to hate.

132; here again, Professor Rose does not find it necessary to summarize the plot to her English audience. They all have seen the movie, maybe even read the book. She simply explains that the book has power because it explains the loss of South in terms that everyone can accept: The cause was just but the economic resources were just not there.

133: Professor Rose explains Margaret Mitchell's success as partly flowing from her account of the overcoming of adversity after a debilitating defeat which proved so attractive to people caught in the adversity of the Depression. People wanted believable myths of the old and the new, more materialitic and economically aggressive south, and in Gone with the Wind they got them. Who cared what irate critics and informed historians had to say?

134: In conclusion, Professor Rose asks the question: How good are these works? She answers that of the four, Stowe, Dixon, Mitchell, and Haley, Stowe and Mitchell may well endure as readable rediscoveries generations from now. Dixon will not, and Haley was, for her, too new to evaluate fairly.

 It is in her concluding paragraphs, however, that Willie Lee Rose captures the essence of the success of all four novels, and the objective of this course:
 
 

135: she writes that she searched long and hard for other examples of 'such popular reading-viewing successs that have sustained themselves for so long, and contributed to the shorthand visual images and vocabulary of the American experience in section and race as these have done. I cannot find them."

 All share the characteristic of responding to [and, I would argue, creating] a common ground of understanding about ourselves as we wish we were and we think we are. Whether a book will ever be able to do that again in our culture remains to be seen. But what Professor Rose seems to have missed, is that fact that each author, while successful in writing a book people bought and read, transcended the printed page almost immediately into the world of what we now call 'virtual reality.' Creating images, reinforcing images already held, and sparking ongoing debate over what was truth, and how do we know it.

 Professor Rose closed with an admonition that anyone brave or foolish enough to teach a course in Race and Gender in America would do well to heed:

 She reminded her British audience that Thomas Dixon's father and brother had had more detachment than most, when they critized him for inciting hatred for personal gain.

President Woodrow Wilson called [Birth of A Nation] "history written in lightning," and thought it "all too true." He had been a college professor ... and had picked up some Aryan notions of his own in the same school where Dixon studied briefly. If College professors of tomorrow are to prove Dixon wrong about their own ability to resist the balndishments of "history written in lightning" they have a very large order; if they are to help others to bring a detached capacity to discern, the order is mucch larger. It will involve at the very least teaching more history more effectively to more students. The good teacher will be suspicious of the trendy, but sufficiently modest to recognize that what is apparent may also be real. Modesty is the appropriate reading-viewing style."

(use back key to return to outline)

Return to syllabus

Office Hours by appointment
Phone: (o) 410-260-6401; (h) 410-467-6137

 Internet Address: http://www.ed.papenfuse.com