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Domestic Ideology and the Social Construction of Mammy

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Domestic Ideology and the Social Construction of Mammy W&M ScholarWorks Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects 1994 Domestic Ideology and the Social Construction of Mammy Bridget Mary Brown College of William & Mary - Arts & Sciences Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd Part of the American Studies Commons Recommended Citation Brown, Bridget Mary, "Domestic Ideology and the Social Construction of Mammy" (1994). Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects. Paper 1539625853. https://dx.doi.org/doi:10.21220/s2-zcrg-sw71 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects at W&M ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects by an authorized administrator of W&M ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Do m e s t ic I d e o l o g y a n d t h e S o c ia l C onstruction o f M a m m y A Thesis Presented to The Faculty of the Department of American Studies The College of William and Mary in Virginia In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts by Bridget M. Brown 1994 A p p r o v a l S h e e t This thesis is submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts < . Bridget M. Brown Approved, May 1994 Susan Donaldson <^r(jce McConacfTie f T '~ A cknowledgments Thanks to Professor Richard Lowry for his guidance, his thoughtful (and multiple) readings of various drafts of this thesis, and his encouragement throughout the writing process. Thanks also to Professor Susan Donaldson for the provocative and insightful feedback that jump-started my brain for the final stretch. Thanks to Bruce McConachie for providing indispensable guidance in the early stages of this project and graciously agreeing to be a reader. Thanks to Deborah Williams (New York University) for talking me through my thoughts. Thanks also to Jeff Kazin and Chris Pennington for the free word processing (and the Matzah Brei). Finally, thanks to my family for their unflagging support. Do m e s t ic I d e o l o g y a n d t h e S o c ia l C onstruction o f M a m m y ABSTRACT This thesis is an exploration of the cultural work of the Mammy stereotype in two antebellum American novels: Uncle Tom's Cabin: or Life Among the Lowlv. an antislavery novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe, and The Planter’s Northern Bride, a proslavery novel by Caroline Lee Hentz. In both of these novels one finds liberal doses of nineteenth-century domestic ideology and the rhetoric by which it was circumscribed, characterized by the glorification of piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity in women. Yet, for both Stowe and Hentz, domestic ideology contained implicit — and differing — visions of social hierarchy. These differing vision of social hierarchy become apparent when one examines the ways in which Stowe and Hentz connect elements of domestic rhetoric to their respective abolitionist and proslavery stances. Despite their opposing political positions, it is argued in this thesis that both Stowe and Hentz viewed slavery as a potentially marvelous opportunity for the exertion of feminine power through the care and guidance of one's extended Black “family’' of slaves. This opportunity, however, is consistently thwarted by circumstances beyond the control of women, circumstances caused by men, slaves, abolitionists, or slave traders Ultimately, both Stowe and Hentz look to the marginal female characters in their narratives — and none is more marginal than Mammy — to express those critiques of “true womanhood” that they themselves were constrained from expressing by literary and cultural expectations. Do m e s t ic Id e o l o g y a n d t h e S o c ia l C onstruction o f M a m m y In Sensational Designs Jane Tompkins re-visions literature as an attempt to "redefine the social order": In this view, novels and stories should be studied not because they manage to escape the limitations of their particular time and place, but because they offer powerful examples of the way a culture thinks about itself, articulating and proposing solutions for the problems that shape a particular historical moment (Tompkins p.xi). In 1852 Harriet Beecher Stowe initiated a literary dialogue among American women about the relative merits of the slave society that was flourishing in the South. Her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin was extremely popular, and a number of like novels were written about this social issue before the Civil War erupted. Stowe also provoked a number of passionate responses in the form of proslavery novels. One such "anti- Uncle Tom" proslavery novel is The Planter’s Northern Bride, written by Caroline Lee Hentz. In these novels, both Stowe and Hentz explore the questions of race and chattel slavery. They grapple with political, social, even economic issues, all of which had traditionally been considered concerns of what Nancy Cott and others have termed, the "male sphere." Yet the more closely one examines these two texts, the more one discovers that they are not simply impassioned defenses of socio-political systems but rich examples of the ways in which nineteenth-century American women writers explored their own roles within male-dominated hierarchical societies by employing a uniquely feminine discourse. 2 This discourse was drawn in large part from what I will refer to as the rhetoric of domesticity. The rhetoric of domesticity was, as I will discuss in more detail later, language used by both men and women to justify and exalt the confinement of women to the home, or the "female sphere." In domestic literature, women who were pious, pure, and submissive were deemed "true women." It was suggested in this literature that "true women" could by virtue of their purity and moral superiority provide invaluable moral guidance to others, including men, children, and in the two novels that I will discuss, slaves. According to this idealized vision of female confinement, a woman had only to stay home and spin her magic web of nurturance and evangelism in order to save her family and, by extension, the world. The rhetoric of domesticity, as perpetuated in sermons, tracts, magazines, and novels of the nineteenth century became so pervasive in its suggested vision of female empowerment as to represent an ideology unto itself. I contend that in Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Planter's Northern Bride Stowe and Hentz debated the goals and limitations of domestic ideology and the extent to which the empowerment that it implied could or should effect change in either the domestic or the larger public arena. In order to understand the degree to which each accepted or rejected that domestic ideology was empowering, it is useful to consider that for Stowe and Hentz domestic ideology contained implicit -- and different -- visions of social hierarchy. These differing visions of social hierarchy become apparent when one examines the ways in which Stowe and Hentz connect elements of domestic 3 rhetoric to their respective abolitionist and proslavery stances. Stowe and Hentz sought to preserve different socio-political systems in the face of a rapidly approaching Civil War and in so doing each accentuated those facets of domestic rhetoric that best served her political agenda. In Uncle Tom's Cabin Stowe combined domestic rhetoric -- language that praised the virtues of true womanhood and the role of women as preservers of happy, healthy, Christian families -- with the rhetoric of reform and abolition.While patriarchal thinking certainly existed in the North and is reflected in domestic rhetoric, it did not drive the political machinery of the North as explicitly as it did southern slave society. Stowe wrote in an attempt to preserve a northern social system wherein hierarchies of class, race, and gender existed but were increasingly challenged. Reformers - many of them middle-class women - came together in the North to call these hierarchies into question by suggesting that the lives of the oppressed, disenfranchised, or "lowly" could be made better. For Stowe, abolitionism was a public extension of the private goal of guiding and caring for others to improve their condition. In Uncle Tom's Cabin, then, Stowe focuses on those aspects of abolitionist thought that emphasized the immorality of slavery, its divergence from the Christian ethic of caring for others, and the ravages of slavery on the family. Although Stowe combines domestic and reform rhetoric to argue against slavery, she does not conclude that either are successful in deterring its continuation or the advent of Civil War. Uncle Tom's Cabin can be read as a 4 sustained illustration of how ineffective woman's reform efforts are in the face of the public and political dealings from which she is excluded. Stowe was clearly aware of the limits of female reform efforts on both the private and public level. In linking the languages of domesticity and reform Stowe ends up stressing the limits of both in the face of patriarchy and market capitalism as embodied by the slave trade. In a letter to a friend after publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Stowe reflected that "I wrote what I did because as a woman, as a mother, I was oppressed and heartbroken, with the sorrows and injustice I saw" (Boydston 48). She continued by noting that she, "must speak for the oppressed who cannot speak for themselves." The juxtaposition of the two parts of this statement capture Stowe's ambivalence toward her place in the cultural hierarchies of race and gender.
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