Critical Analysis Of Uncle Toms Cabin

When Harriet Beecher Stowe published her anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in 1852, no one could predict the sweeping influence it would have in American and European culture. Uncle Tom’s Cabin became the best-selling novel of the 19th century and produced countless reviews, ignited debates, and elicited widely varying responses in not only America, but in France, England, Spain, and Germany. In fact, while the novel became famous in America, it became an unprecedented success in Europe. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was translated into French in 1853, when she released two French language editions. In France, Stowe hoped to gain their support of the anti-slavery cause as well as accomplish an understanding that abolishing

Stowe wrote of how the human soul is “poor” and “helpless”, but that through Jesus Christ it becomes “powerful” and “glorious.” Stowe described how Uncle Tom’s Cabin shows a parallel to Jesus Christ in how he lived in the lowest poverty and that no man was so poor and lowly that he was undeserving of the love from Jesus. Stowe detailed the American laws against African Americans in how they can “do nothing possess nothing acquire nothing but what must belong to his master.” Stowe concluded her preface by speaking of the day of reckoning and how Christ has regarded every sorrow of the African American

Stowe wrote editions to France in hope for support, as they had just abolished slavery a few years before her novel was published. The French reception to Uncle Tom’s Cabin was more than she could have anticipated. Incredibly enthusiastic, the French created fourteen translations of the novel by 1853. As proof of the book’s immense popularity in France, Stowe’s friend Annie Fields cites that Madame L. S. Belloc, who had also translated works by the British author Maria Edgeworth, was invited by one French publisher to prepare what would become the fifth translation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. When Belloc objected that perhaps there were already enough versions available, the publisher, M. Charpentier, is said to have replied: “Il n’y aura jamais assez de lecteurs pourun tel livre,” or “There can never be enough readers for a book such as this.” Having had slavery recently abolished, slavery was therefore fresh in the minds of the French and they were persuaded to to “cry for the brotherhood and freedom from the American slave.” Among this enthusiastic reception, the French also created three melodramas, two vaudevilles and an opera based on Uncle Tom’s Cabin. While there were those who opposed Stowe’s use of sentiment in her novel, the French praised her for it. A French novelist, Amandine Aurore Lucile Dupin