Uncle Tom's Cabin
Jesse
Scott Ness
Literature
Grade 11
2016/6/25
Table of contents: 1. Background info 2. Rationale reasons of choosing the book 3. Definition of greatness of books and the defending essays 4. The method to examine the qualities 5. Analysis 6. Conclusion 7. Works cited
Research paper about Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Background info:
After meeting the author of this book, Harriet Beecher Stowe, for the first time, President Lincoln said, “So this is the little lady who made this big war.” Stowe was a short lady, but she made up the influence and success of civil rights.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin became one of the most widely read books of its time. It sold hundreds of thousands of copies and was translated into numerous languages. Many historians believe the novel with contributing to the victory of the Civil War in America.
As the daughter of an eminent New England preacher, Stowe was born into an intelligent family. As a child, she learned Latin and wrote a children’s geography book, both before she was ten years old. She involved in religious movements, fighting of feminist rights, and the most divisive political and moral issue of her time, the abolition of slavery, throughout her life.
Stowe grew up in the Northeast but lived for a time in Cincinnati, which enabled her to see both sides of the slavery debate without losing her abolitionist’s perspective. Cincinnati was evenly split for and against abolition, and Stowe wrote satirical pieces on the subject for several local papers there. She often wrote pieces under fake names and with variety styles and one can see a similar attention to voice in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in which dialects and patterns of speech contrast among characters. Though Stowe absorbed a great deal of information about slavery during her Cincinnati years, she nonetheless conducted extensive research before writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin. She wrote to Frederick Douglass and others for help in creating a realistic picture of slavery in the Deep South. Her black cook and household servants also helped by telling her stories of their slave days.
Stowe’s main goal with Uncle Tom’s Cabin was to convince her large Northern readership of the necessity of ending slavery. Most immediately, the novel served as a response to the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which made it illegal to give aid or assistance to a runaway slave. Under this law, Southern slaves who escaped to the North had to flee to Canada in order to find real freedom. With her book, Stowe created a sort of expose that revealed the disasters of Southern slavery to people in the North. Her radical position on race relations, though, was informed by a deep religiosity. Stowe continually emphasizes the importance of Christian love in helping the powerless. She also works in her feminist beliefs, showing women as equals to men in intelligence, bravery, and mental strength. Indeed, women dominate the book’s moral code, proving vital advisors to their husbands, who often need help in seeing through convention and popular opinion.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published in episodes in the National Era in 1851 and 1852, and then published in its entirety on March 20, 1852. It sold 10,000 copies in its first week and 300,000 by the end of the year, astronomical numbers for the mid-nineteenth century. Today, analysis of both the book’s conception and reception proves helpful in our understanding of the Civil War era.
Rationale: Why I choose this book is for three reasons. One is it is famous, when I
Search the lists of English great books when our professor assigned us to do, I found it in the number one position of the list. The other one is I had read it in primary school, so I think is easier for me to understand what the book is trying to say and the plot after read it once before, even is more than six years ago.
The definitions of greatness of a book and the defending essays:
1. The book reflects the zeitgeist, the culture or social issues at that time.
2. The book has the potential to inspire people to pure good qualities.
3. The book has fantastically designed characters.
4. The book was popular and wildly read by many people.
The methods to examine the qualities:
- Find and analysis the book reviews and compares them to the thesis of the book.
- Find academic book reviews and see if the think so or not.
- Analysis the characters and see can they represent their group of people, can they represent human beings just like you and me or simply they can’t.
- See the data.
Analysis
1. The reader Apatt’s book review in May 10, 2016
<Uncle Tom's Cabin tells the story of a faithful, kind and extremely pious “Uncle Tom” and several characters associated with him. At the beginning of the book, Tom is one of the more fortunate slaves working for the very kind Shelby family who treat their slaves as human beings. Unfortunately, the head of the family, Arthur Shelby, is considerably less kind than his wife and son and one day decides to sell Tom, Eliza (a pretty slave girl), and Eliza’s young son Harry, to a slave trader. Eliza makes a run for it, taking her son with her, but Tom—incredibly pious man that he is—stays put and meekly goes with the slave trader. During his voyage with the slave trader down the Mississippi River Tom lucks out again and meets Augustine St. Clare, a very kind man traveling with his angelic little daughter Eva. Augustine buys Tom and takes him to his home in New Orleans where Tom lives happily for a couple of years, and is promised his freedom by Augustine. Before the emancipation could happen, however, Tom’s luck runs out. Augustine dies and Tom is sold again—in an auction—by the nasty Mrs. Marie St. Clare. This time, he is bought by the irredeemably evil plantation owner named Simon Legree, leading to the most harrowing part of the book.