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Uncle Tom's Cabin
Harriet beecher stowe.
Slavery and Race
Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin in order to demonstrate the “living dramatic reality” of slavery. The novel protests the horrors of this institution: the way it degrades black men and women and gives absolute power to slaveowners and thereby corrupts them. The novel portrays and explores various “kinds” of slavery. The Shelbys treat Uncle Tom and other slaves as part of a separate, “childlike” addition to the family. Augustine St. Clare allows his…
Christianity and Christian Charity
Uncle Tom's Cabin repeatedly references the Bible, especially the New Testament. The dominant morality of the United States is, according to Beecher Stowe, a Christian one, and slavery is utterly incompatible with it. Uncle Tom owns only one book—the Bible—and is often found reading it, slowly and with great religious feeling. He quotes the Bible to educate Eva , Cassy , and others, and to find the strength to survive his own trials. The Quakers…
Uncle Tom's Cabin contains numerous strong female characters. The social role and importance of women, both white and black, is emphasized throughout the novel, and female characters are often linked by interaction and influence. Eva is fair-skinned and beautiful, generous, deeply religious, and always kind; she becomes an example to the uneducated, “heathenish” Topsy . After Eva's death, Topsy grows (with Miss Ophelia's help) into a Christian woman. Miss Ophelia herself believes in duty as…
Uncle Tom's cabin, described early in the novel, represents the warmth and love of family life. It is a place Tom hearkens back to over the course of his trials. George Shelby wishes to bring Tom home, and at the close of the book, he points to Tom's cabin as a symbol of honest work and Christian faith. Other homes are juxtaposed with the cabin. The Shelby estate is genteel and placid, though disrupted upon…
Freedom is a central and complex concept in Uncle Tom's Cabin . Slaves wish to be free, and abolitionists in the novel wish also to free the slaves. But, as St. Clare points out, what is to be done after the abolition of slavery? Is it enough simply to release the slaves, to let them do as they wish?
George Harris argues for the colonization of Liberia by freed slaves. Many thought this a viable…
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Thesis and Theme in Uncle Tom's Cabin Dorothy S. Brown Department of English Berea College Berea, Kentucky T HE thesis of Harriet Beecher Stowe's famous novel is explicit: slavery is al …
The book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe has a strong thematic concern of antislavery with regards to compassion, inhumanity, and cruelty. The story puts its focus on a black slave who suffers for quite a …
Uncle Tom’s Cabin and its Effects Uncle Tom’s Cabin is an anti slavery book created by Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1852. It was written to protest against the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which …
Uncle Tom’s Cabin impacted the Civil War by opening the door of slavery to the people of the North, making the South angry, and increasing the tensions that separated the two distinct …
In his introduction Eric J. Sundquist attempts to show that Uncle Tom's Cabin boldly takes issue with both proslavery arguments and prevailing prejudices among abolitionists, …
The theme of Uncle Tom's Cabin, then, is the conflict between the evil of slavery and the good of Christian love. Eva, symbolic of this sort of love, is killed (mythically) by slavery, but …
A comparison of Uncle Tom's Cabin and its real source, The Slave: or the Memoirs of Archy Moore (1836) reveals the extent of Mrs. Stowe's borrowing of her chief characters and incidents.