[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Uncle Tom's Cabin
Harriet Beecher Stowe's best seller Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) has been heralded as the most controversial and most influential antislavery novel written in antebellum America. And the critical consensus generally supports this contention.
In a recent reassessment of Uncle Torn’s Cabin, it is noted that although Stowe unquestionably sympathized with the slaves, her commitment to challenging the claim of black inferiority was frequently undermined by her own endorsement of racial stereotypes. Because these stereotyped notions not only appear in Uncle Tom's Cabin but show up more frequently than perhaps Stowe had intended, it would seem that Stowe's attitude toward chattel slavery, or rather how she pandered to her readers' conflicting attitudes toward slavery, was ambivalent.
The use of racial stereotypes adds credibility to the long-standing notion that Stowe consciously made concessions to the South in Uncle Tom's Cabin. Among white Southerners and slave owners featured in the novel, Mrs. Shelby and Augustine St. Clare the former the wife of Tom's first owner, and the latter Tom's second master are for the most part admirable characters. And the novel's most despicable character, Simon Legree, is a New Englander from Vermont. Stowe herself had always thought that her novel depicted the favorable side of slavery, and the fact that she did so should have appeased the South. The typical Southern reaction, however, did not reflect such awareness. Indeed, in the eyes of most contemporary Southerners (even those who had never read Uncle Tom's Cabin) Stowe's novel was an abomination, utterly false and therefore a full-fledged misrepresentation of the institution of slavery.
Whereas, in one respect, Southern criticism regarding the veracity of Uncle Tom's Cabin was justified, most contemporary Southern readers of the novel failed to give Stowe the credit she obviously sought. Still, in both overt and subtle ways, Stowe had consciously attempted to appease the South.....
