Uncle Tom's Cabin, By Harriet Beecher Stowe

1741 Words7 Pages

There are expectations of every child as they grow up. The race, the social situation, and the parental figures of each child determine these expectations. In Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, race is especially important in n determining the treatment of each child, where black children are slaves and rejected from the sphere of childhood. Eva and Topsy try to define their own childhoods around the restrictions and expectations placed upon them Enslaved childhood in the novel is often unstable and unpredictable. Prue describes the fate of her children, “A man kept me to breed chil’en for market, and sold ‘em as fast as they got big enough” (323). Her slaveholder sells away all of her children once they are considered valuable in …show more content…

Eva has a sense of racial innocence, unlike the rest of her family. “Eva flew from one to another, shaking hands and kissing, in a way that Miss Ophelia afterwards declared fairly turned her stomach” (255). Miss Ophelia reacts with disgust to Eva’s “shaking hands and kissing” of the enslaved. Although she is from the abolitionist north, she still has racist tendencies. Eva is ignorant of difference, yet she lives in a society deeply imbued with race. This foundational racial difference prevents the St. Clare family from viewing Topsy and Dodo as children. Henrique believes, “Dodo is a perfect sprite,—no amount of whipping can hurt him” (390). Dodo is a child like Henrique and Eva, but Henrique does not see him as a child. Rather, Dodo to him is a creature “controlled by…a master” (Lupton, 1). Henrique sees him as no more than a brute. Topsy, is also whipped and no one feels the need to protect her from such acts of violence, nonetheless from hearing about them. This is very different from the protection surrounding Eva. Topsy is the subject of mistreatment and has the potential to end up in a situation similar to Prue’s while she remains enslaved. Eva carves out an alternative way of seeing black people in which she does not view them as “the ‘other creatures’” (1). Eva …show more content…

This is especially difficult for the enslaved because they have to be laborers at a very early age. Society does not want them to be equal to white children and therefore destroys their chance to enjoy a life outside of the labor market. Though Topsy is initially somewhat a pickanniny trope, through her interactions with Eva she becomes a rounder character. However, she is not given the full ability to express herself as a child. She is still an enslaved individual, someone who is a part of the labor force and not the mastering and consuming class. In a system of slavery, there will always be an oppressed group that cannot have the same privileges as their oppressors. Each child in the novel can only do so much to change the way people perceive

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