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The "maw of western culture": James Baldwin and the anxieties of influence
African American Review, Winter, 2004 by Elise Miller
A refusal to be subject to another writer can be seen in Baldwin's discussion of Harriet Beecher Stowe, which rejects the notion that it is Baldwin who gets lost, twisted, or deformed as he struggles to make his place in American letters. Stowe, whose Uncle Tom's Cabin Baldwin calls "the cornerstone of American social protest fiction," is the subject of "Everybody's Protest Novel," in which Baldwin rereads both Uncle Tom's Cabin and Native Son. He casts Stowe and Wright as mother and father of a dysfunctional family of literary predecessors. While Baldwin does seem disturbed or disrupted by his similarities to and differences from Stowe, in the end, his appraisal of her splits apart the literary foremother. Calling her not a true novelist but rather a "pamphleteer," Baldwin argues that Stowe wrote out of guilt, "a panic of being hurled into the flames, of being caught in traffic with the devil" (17). In her missionary zeal, he asserts, Stowe undercuts her effort "to bring greater freedom to the oppressed" by painting sentimentalized, unrealistic portraits of her black protagonists: "It is, indeed, considered the sign of a frivolity so intense as to approach decadence to suggest that these books are both badly written and wildly improbable. One is told to put first things first, the good of society coming before niceties of style or characterization" (Notes 18). Baldwin must establish himself in relation to both this major American author and her subject matter of blackness in America.
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But because he sees his own struggles in Stowe's artistic conflicts, Baldwin's critique of Uncle Tom's Cabin is partly defensive, but ultimately productive. Understanding Stowe and her novel becomes a way of understanding himself as a particular kind of writer. Throughout Notes, he emphasizes that "literature and sociology are not one and the same thing" (19). As he recounts his earliest writing experiences in "Autobiographical Notes," he acknowledges that every writer sees the world as "nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent," but the black writer is particularly vulnerable to the pressure to represent his race and its political agendas (4). Baldwin rejects Stowe because he believes that "social affairs are not generally speaking the writer's prime concern"; however, Baldwin does not want to abandon the black race that Stowe claimed to wish to save. Having defined social protest fiction as bad art, Baldwin can affirm Stowe's political sentiments, but then is left without a model for good literature. If he privileges literature, will he abandon black Americans, and thus, perhaps, fall prey to underplaying social and historical forces in favor of aesthetic and psychological ideals? Baldwin's identification with Stowe in essence splits her into a good mother and a bad one, as it were: the former a laudable abolitionist; the latter a writer ineffectual because she let politics contaminate her art.
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