Historians have said that the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin had such a great impact on the public so that it led to the Civil War, from which slavery was abolished. It is said, that when Abraham Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe he declared: “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war “(Bennett, 284). Harriet Beecher Stowe was born in 1811 in England, but spent much of her life Ohio, a State that was firmly against slavery. The publication of the novel, in 1852, was an event that changed a nation that was already undergoing major changes. Uncle Tom's Cabin was the best-selling novel of the nineteenth century and the second best-selling book of the century, after the Bible (Smith 221). The book helped to feed the abolitionist cause in the 1850s. In the first year after publication, it sold 300,000 copies in the United States. The book is structured in many layers that are combined, creating a surprising novel that can be read at any age.
The first layer is the story itself, perhaps the one most often followed by the child in a summer vacation. This later is represented by the places in which Uncle Tom, a black, gentle and very faithful slave from Kentucky gets, by the parade of colorful, very talkative and always well-defined characters and their words and emotions, because all the people in the novel, white or black, are always ready to express themselves. The second layer is the one of the thoughts, speeches and diatribes against slavery and its foundations. The tone is often very sentimental and naïve. Only an insensitive reader would make a stylistic literary dissection on such a text and would label as embarrassing the narrator’s direct addressing to some potentially mother- readers. If the swirling...
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...l system to remove the stain of slavery and to vaccinate people against similar excesses of dehumanization.
Works Cited
Aiken, George L. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. New York: Garland, 1993, Print
Bennett, William John. America: From the Age of Discovery to a World at War, 1492-1914. Thomas Nelson Inc, 2006. Print
Jordan-Lake, Joy. Whitewashing Uncle Tom's Cabin: Nineteenth-Century Women Novelists Respond to Stowe, Vanderbilt University Press, 2005. Print
Tompkins, Jane. In Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Print
Smith Gail K. The Sentimental Novel: The Example of Harriet Beecher Stowe. The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Women's Writing, Cambridge University Press, 2001, Print
Stowe Harriet Beecher, Uncle Tom's Cabin. Vintage Books. Modern Library Edition, 1991. Print
University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee. “The Classic Text: Harriet Beecher Stowe”. 19 Nov 2001. 5 Jan 2002. <http://www.uwm.edu/Dept/Library/special/exhibits/clastext/clspg149.htm>.
In her article “‘But is it any good?’: Evaluating Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Fiction,” Susan Harris provides methods and criteria for examining Women’s Fiction in what she calls “process analysis” (45). To apply Harris’ guidelines to Catherine Maria Sedgwick’s A New England Tale, I must first “acknowledge the ideological basis of [my] endeavor” (45) as a feminist/equalitist critique of the text. Furthermore, I identify the three-fold approach that Harris describes as historical, in distinguishing early nineteenth-century from mid- to late-century attitudes, rhetorical, in labeling Sedgwick’s communication to readers didactic, and ideological, by understanding my objections stem from twenty-first-century attitudes. Harris also explains, “If we look at them as both reactive and creative…we can understand [texts’] aesthetic, moral, and political values” (45); I consider A New England Tale to have a sentimental aesthetic, a Christian morality, and a support of female subordination.
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Olaudah Equiano’s Narrative of his Life both endeavor to stir antislavery sentiment in predominantly white, proslavery readers. Each author uses a variety of literary tactics to persuade audiences that slavery is inhumane. Equiano uses vivid imagery and inserts personal experience to appeal to audiences, believing that a first-hand account of the varying traumas slaves encounter would affect change. Stowe relies on emotional connection between the readers and characters in her novel. By forcing her audience to have empathy for characters, thus forcing readers to confront the harsh realities of slavery, Stowe has the more effective approach to encouraging abolitionist sentiment in white readers.
Harriet Beecher Stowe publishes “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” in 1852. This anti-slavery book was the most popular book of the 19th century, and the 2nd most sold book in the century, following only the Bible. It was said that this novel “led to the civil war”, or “the straw that broke the camel’s back”. After one year, 300,000 copies were sold in the U.S., and over 1 million were sold in Britain.
Two books of the era that were influential in changing public opinion about slavery are The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, The African, Written by Himself , published in Britain in 1789 and Uncle Tom’s Cabin , written by a white woman abolitionist named Harriet Beecher Stowe. The first is an account of the author’s life from his capture in Africa to his eventual freedom and travel adventures around the world. The second is a fictional account of the lives of slaves and masters in the pre-war South. Written from different perspectives, at different times, and in different styles, both works employ the concept of home to advance the anti-slavery cause. Though Equiano promotes more of an adventurous manliness than Stowe’s Uncle Tom, both works exalt to some extent the “cult of dome...
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, has had a tremendous impact on American culture, both then and now. It is still considered a controversial novel, and many secondary schools have banned it from their libraries. What makes it such a controversial novel? One reason would have been that the novel is full of melodrama, and many people considered it a caricature of the truth. Others said that she did not show the horror of slavery enough, that she showed the softer side of it throughout most of her novel. Regardless of the varying opinions of its readers, it is obvious that its impact was large.
In Harriet Jacobs Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, the author subjects the reader to a dystopian slave narrative based on a true story of a woman’s struggle for self-identity, self-preservation and freedom. This non-fictional personal account chronicles the journey of Harriet Jacobs (1813-1897) life of servitude and degradation in the state of North Carolina to the shackle-free promise land of liberty in the North. The reoccurring theme throughout that I strive to exploit is how the women’s sphere, known as the Cult of True Womanhood (Domesticity), is a corrupt concept that is full of white bias and privilege that has been compromised by the harsh oppression of slavery’s racial barrier. Women and the female race are falling for man’s
Harriet Beecher Stowe, a northern abolitionist, published her best-selling novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852. Uncle Tom’s Cabin contracts the many different attitudes that southerners as well as northerners shared towards slavery. Generally, it shows the evils of slavery and the cruelty and inhumanity of the peculiar institution, in particular how masters treat their slaves and how families are torn apart because of slavery.
Even today, with literature constantly crossing more lines and becoming more shocking, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin remains one of the most scandalous, controversial, and powerful literary works ever spilled onto a set of blank pages. Not only does this novel examine the attitudes of white nineteenth-century society toward slavery, but it introduces us to the hearts, minds and souls of several remarkable and unprecedented characters.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin contains almost as basic of a moral as any story could; love has no physical barriers. The goal of Stowe’s novel is to show that in terms of race. But at the same time Stowe shows it in terms of gender as well. By making the female characters more morally righteous than the male characters and displaying the women’s physical feats more overtly than the men’s, Stowe enables the audience to see a side of women relatively unseen in 19th century American culture.
Many people condemn Uncle Tom’s Cabin simply because it is a sentimental novel. This genre appeals to the reader’s emotions in order to enact social change. While popular during Stowe’s time, the sentimental novel is now scorned by many members of the academy, such as Baldwin: “Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a very bad novel, having, in its self-righteous, virtuous sentimentality, much in common with Little Women” (496). Some modern readers are repulsed by Stowe’s desire to reform society, but that is because in our times the purpose of literature is to represent the world, not change it. Because the modern critic finds it hard to identify with Stowe’s genuine desire to improve society, he sees it as an example of her self-righteousness.
The illumination of the brutal treatment of the slaves, both physically and mentally, are also apparent in the works of Stowe and Jacobs. Stowe, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, uses the stories of Eliza, Harry, Uncle Tom and Cassy to show how slavery, with both cruel and kind masters, affects different members of the slave community. In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Jacobs focuses her work on the how the institution is “terrible for men; but is far more terrible for women” (B:933), adding sexual abuse to the atrocities of slavery. Douglass’ Madison gives the reader a masculine perspective on the
Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. Print.
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: the Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 2000. Print.
Rarely is one work of literature so significant that it has the ability to change a society or cascade it down a path of ruinous conflict. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, written by Harriet Beecher Stowe, is a work that provided such a catalytic occurrence. To this day, this work of fiction brilliance is considered one of the most instrumental American works to ever be published. Selling over a million copies in its first two years and being the second bestselling book next to the Bible, what makes this accomplishment even more incredible is the fact that a woman wrote this book during a period in history when women were not granted the ability to have roles of influence or leadership, in any society1. In 1852, when the book was published, women were nonetheless confined to domestic obligations. With the help of the books, Uncle Tom’s Cabin written by Harriet Beecher Stowe and Social Analysis: Linking Faith and Justice written by Joe Holland, one is able to understand how much of an impact Stowe had on America’s history with the way people viewed slavery. The percussion of Uncle Tom’s Cabin caused much conflict between the abolitionists and the antislavery citizens. This work is important to history because it created the idea of finding a place for religion in society, shone a light on how African American slaves were treated, pushed the United States to a realization with the idea of whether slavery could continue to be a cornerstone of American life and how it contributed to the beginning of the Civil War. As Abe Lincoln said of Stowe, “the little woman who started the Great War1.”