Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 171toil and white indifference and spite. Wilson’s book is all of these generic forms, and
it is more than the sum of them, as it charts the journey of her heroine towards
survival rather than satisfaction, let alone success. And, in being so, it illustrates the
problem so many African-American writers have faced, of trying to find a workable
genre in which to express and explore themselves: a form that gives them a chance of
narrating, properly, their identity. The author’s identification of herself as simply
“Our Nig,” in the first edition of the book, was, of course, ironic; and it underlined
the difficulty of finding a name for herself in a culture that tried to do that work for
her – to give her, not so much a name, as a demeaning label. It is an additional irony
that she was to remain unnamed, for over a hundred years, as the author, the maker
of her own work: invisibility, the namelessness that is perhaps the central theme in
African-American writing, was to be the story of Our Nig, for a long time, as well as
the story in it.The Making of an American Fiction and Poetry
The emergence of American narratives
Our Nig had almost no impact when it was published. The reverse was true of Uncle
Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly. The author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet
Beecher Stowe (1811–1896), was born in Connecticut. Her father, Lyman Beecher
(1775–1863), was an influential Calvinist preacher, whose sermons and magazine
articles were published in a collected edition in the same year as his daughter
Harriet’s most famous novel. Later, Stowe was to reject his insistence on constant
self-searching and a sense of damnation in favor of a gentler gospel, based on a belief
in the Christ of the New Testament and on the virtues enshrined in feminine piety
and motherhood. But, just as all her brothers went on to become ministers –
including the best-known of them, Henry Ward Beecher (1813–1887), who also
wrote fiction – so Stowe herself remained a fundamentally religious writer, whose
art and politics were shaped by her concern for spiritual and moral purity. In 1824
Stowe went to Hartford, where her sister Catharine – who was to become a notable
spokesperson for the ideas of female education, the importance of the domestic
virtues, and a separate sphere for women – had founded a female seminary. She
stayed at the seminary, first as a pupil and then as a teacher, until 1832; and in 1834
she collaborated with Catharine on a geography book for children; two years later,
she married Calvin Stowe, who was then a professor in her father’s theological
seminary. Beginning to write sketches and short fiction for mostly evangelical
periodicals, Stowe collected some of these in her first book, The Mayflower: Sketches
and Scenes and Characters Among the Descendants of the Puritans (1843). The pieces
included here show the interest in local color and the didactic purpose that would
stay with her throughout her career. But they lack intensity or passion. That came as
she committed herself to the abolitionist cause. Stowe’s father, while opposed to
slavery, was a gradualist, believing that the slave system could be dismantled in
stages. Stowe, however, became convinced of the urgency of the situation, and saidGGray_c02.indd 171ray_c 02 .indd 171 8 8/1/2011 7:54:41 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 41 AM