By the nineteenth century, jigsaw puzzle content expanded beyond the geographical subjects that puzzles originally featured and began to include, among other subject matter, literature. Given literary narratives’ reliance on linear order to produce meaning, the jigsaw puzzle form enacted a fundamental challenge to narrative, by inviting users to disassemble and play with the ordering of a narrative’s pieces. Although puzzles might be conceived as exercises in achieving order, nineteenth-century puzzles that functioned as children’s toys went through multiple rounds of disassembly, assembly, and all of the chaotic stages in between, and they therefore fostered disorder as well as order. When these puzzles depicted literature, then, they disrupted the process by which stories function, through particular arrangements of narrative events.
A jigsaw puzzle version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel, illustrates both how linear order generates narrative meaning and how the jigsaw puzzle form can subvert that meaning. This fifty-two-piece jigsaw, probably manufactured in the early 1850s in England and consisting of paper glued to a sheet of wood, features eighteen scenes from the novel. They start (top left) with the slave trader Haley, the enslaver Mr. Shelby, and the enslaved woman Eliza interacting in the Shelby parlor, and end (bottom right) with Eliza, her husband George, and their son arriving in Canada, the “Land of Liberty.” Arranged in four rows, the scenes “read” from left to right and top to bottom, like lines in a book.
But the puzzle reshapes Stowe’s story. When her massively popular novel was translated into other forms, including theatrical productions as well as a whole slew of material objects, the story was adapted to suit its new forms, audiences, and purposes. The puzzle, aimed primarily at a child audience, gives Stowe’s story a happy ending, weakening the original political message of the story. But the idea of an “ending” relies on linear order, and the jigsaw puzzle form wreaks havoc on the narrative structure by which an ending is made meaningful by virtue of its position. Where does a story “end” when its pieces lie in a jumbled pile?
