Stereotypes In Uncle Tom's Cabin

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the stage; the most standard being George L. Aiken’s script, though written only six months after the original it was already the third adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Wilmeth 181). By February of 1863 New York had four rival productions of the play competing at once. These competing companies, like numerous other productions competing across the (barely) United States, needed something to sell their plays, something more entertaining than the other versions; a difficult task considering the seriousness of the topic and the melodramatic way it was written. Eventually all Tom-shows, as they came to be known, were “stuck full of banjos, cakewalks, and tin-pan-alley coon songs with no relation to (the action). All insisted more and more on the minstrel-show picture of the Negro” (Furnas 271).
Though a minstrel show was not what Stowe had in mind, nor was it what Aiken had in mind when adapting the novel, this became the future of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The play had been done so many times by so many playhouses that for a while nearly all of the actors in America had played a part in it at one point in their careers. At one point an American theatre company was touring Australia and locals asked them to do Uncle Tom’s Cabin; they realized that so many of the actors had been in it before that they could do it without a script. At this point Aiken’s version had hit a point of no return, it became a “true folk-play” one that even the audience knew well enough to have the lines memorized (Furnas 276). Of course over periods of productions, lines in the play became altered, added, and often left out all together but it didn’t matter, the story had lost its meaning and the entertainment value was all that was important.
The new versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ones that were tossed together through the memories of past productions made it easy to add and build to the stereotypes of the characters, even if this was not ...