Analysis Of Uncle Tom's Cabin By Harriet Beecher Stowe

Last year was a year of trying to be someone I knew I could never become. I read more books in the year of 2017 than I had all of the years before combined. Each book, the pressures of wishing to be a bookworm convinced me that I was edifying myself, and teaching myself a new life lesson. Out of the dozens of novels I read that year, only one was this personal conception genuinely achieved. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin perfectly captures life in the confederate South from the perspective of slave, slave owners, slave traders, and neutrals with its distinct wit, provides motifs applicable to the current world, and remains a historical symbol for the civil war. Uncle Tom’s Cabin perfectly captures life in the confederate South

Already achieving this, she goes above and beyond to fill in what kinds of people were in between these opposing sides: the traders, the bystanders, the children too young to take any side but still do. Eva, a symbol of child innocence and humanity, never submits to her parents’ idea of how a child should act, and does so with peace and grace, exhibiting this trait immediately after she is introduced to Uncle Tom for the first time. “Then I mean to call you Uncle Tom because, you see, I like you,” (Stowe, 233). Miss Ophelia is another character with perspective leaning towards one of Eva’s, but pretends to be on a higher moral ground than she is with her abolitionist stances, and has her fair share in prejudice towards Africans herself. It is only after her and Eva take care of their slave girl Topsy that she internally concedes that sending the blacks back to Africa isn’t the best idea. "I can love you, though I am not like that dear little child. I hope I've learnt something of the love of Christ from her. I can love you; I do, and I'll try to help you to grow up a good Christian girl,” (Stowe, 432). Unfortunately, for every Eva and Miss Ophelia, there’s a Haley and Tom Loker. Haley and Loker are interesting characters to say the least, because while they are certainly exaggerated in their behaviors of that of a slimy businessman, their motivations

Uncle Tom, George Harris, and Eliza are all protagonists with nearly nothing in common. Eliza and George are fierce in their journey to escape racial prejudice, while Uncle Tom accepted it since the day he was born, almost embracing it. This makes for the interesting “clash” between one of the main antagonists of the book: Simon Legree. Clash was in quotations because the personalities really don’t clash very much at all. Legree’s abrasive and controlling nature goes hand in hand with Uncle Tom’s docile and submissive tendencies. When Legree assigns Tom as his slave, the lack of resistance tests the idea that there even is a conflict. Another element of friction is the types of characters Stowe wrote. With her “Godsent image of a slave suffering,” (Baym, Nina, Levine, 1532) Stowe, perhaps stylistically, composed many more static characters than dynamic characters. The characters mentioned before, Tom, George, and Eliza, are all static characters. They embark on a journey in hopes to achieve a goal, meet different kinds of people along the way, and then achieve their goal. One character that doesn’t follow this formula is Mr. Shelby. He isn’t by any means a main character, but from what readers learn of him, he goes through an interesting development. At the beginning, he sends away Uncle Tom with the assumption of a good