Response to Literature: Uncle Tom's Cabin

Response to Literature: Uncle Tom's Cabin

This book changed the way people looked at others and themselves. Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe is a melodramatic story with adventure and tragedy. Uncle Tom's Cabin was one of the most widely read books in the world in the 19th Century. The masses in the northern U.S. and in many foreign countries embraced its melodrama, as well as its timely message, and used the book to shock the anti-slavery movement in the 1850's. The book thus became one of the causes of the American Civil War. Stowe reveals many different answers in her novel such as, the way she portrays the impossibility of African American Christians actually tolerating slavery and the love they express no matter the circumstance. Plus the death of Tom and Eva gave more meaning to the book's Christian messages and the change in the culture that made people more alert and less weak willed.

Stowe makes it painfully obvious that although the Christian ethics are to tolerate and to love there is no way that anyone could tolerate slavery and persecution, and how could they be in a mood to give or receive love. Why Eliza ran away from her comfy as can be work place is a wonderful example of the unobtainable tolerance of the enslaved Christians. She ran away because she could not bear the loss of her son Harry especially if he is going to get sold and she is not able to go. In the same instance Eliza's husband could not take it any longer either. George says "I wish I'd never been born myself!"(Stowe18) because his "master" says he wants him to marry a girl on the same plantation but George has a wife but he has no choice. As it has been noted it would be damn near impossible to practice "Christian restraint" as Eliza urges George to do when he is leaving. To be literally told what to do without any say so or choice by people who you do not know; I would not be the most lovable person.

Next the Christian messages in the story are lightly noticeable but they are pronounced by the Christ like figures such as Eva and Tom. Both Tom and Eva are compared to Christ when Miss Ophelia says "Well, she's so loving! After all, though, she's no more than Christ -like...I wish I were like her."(Stowe69) Tom is depicted by the author to be "carrying his cross behind Jesus." The best example of the idea of the Christian ways is when Legree and his men had beat Tom to death and as he is dying he forgives them which converts Legree's men to Christianity. Thus Tom now is a martyr. Both of the deaths were to achieve salvation for others. Eva's death leads to St. Clare's deathbed conversion to Christianity and to Ophelia's recognition and denunciation of her own racial prejudice. Tom's death leads to Emmeline and Cassy's escape and to the freedom of all the slaves on the Shelby