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Uncle Tom's Cabin


litechick

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Have you read it?  For all that it has a significant place in both Literature and American History, I had not read it until recently.  (It is in the public domain so you can download it for free to an ereader.)

I was really surprised to find that an 'Uncle Tom' was not what I thought it was.  Based on context clues in the way that the expression is used in American Culture, I assumed that Uncle Tom was a sniveling sycophant who praised and supported white people in the suppression of black people.

I was Super Wrong.  Uncle Tom is a Christ figure who accepts his lot in life, makes the best home he can under the circumstances, champions the weak, defies authority, has compassion for all. 

Written by a white woman in the North so her authority can justly be questioned but so many of the anecdotes related resonate with other stories of the time that it's hard to discount her. 

The bit about the angelic white child was difficult to swallow.  It was perfectly obvious that she wrote with an agenda.  (Booker T Washington also wrote with an agenda but I love Up From Slavery.) 

Does anyone else have any thoughts on this book?

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Harriet Beecher Stowe and her family were deeply involved in the anti-slavery and abolition movements.  It was a large family . . . .

She knew personally the most famous of the self-emancipated figures such as Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass and most tellingly, in terms of her most famous work, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Jacobs, as well as many, many, many others. Her authority was and has been later, verified.  See: the Annotated Uncle Tom's Cabin.

She wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin in a white hot fury after the Fugitive Slave Act was passed and the Dred Scott Case was ruled on by white supremacist Chief Justice Tawney.  She always said God wrote it, not she.

 

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On Thursday, August 17, 2017 at 6:14 AM, litechick said:

Have you read it?  For all that it has a significant place in both Literature and American History, I had not read it until recently.  (It is in the public domain so you can download it for free to an ereader.)

I was really surprised to find that an 'Uncle Tom' was not what I thought it was.  Based on context clues in the way that the expression is used in American Culture, I assumed that Uncle Tom was a sniveling sycophant who praised and supported white people in the suppression of black people.

I was Super Wrong.  Uncle Tom is a Christ figure who accepts his lot in life, makes the best home he can under the circumstances, champions the weak, defies authority, has compassion for all. 

Written by a white woman in the North so her authority can justly be questioned but so many of the anecdotes related resonate with other stories of the time that it's hard to discount her. 

The bit about the angelic white child was difficult to swallow.  It was perfectly obvious that she wrote with an agenda.  (Booker T Washington also wrote with an agenda but I love Up From Slavery.) 

Does anyone else have any thoughts on this book?

I read this when I was quite young.  I  was was maybe 11 or so. I  have to say that it did have a profound influence on  me. I went from that book to reading Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver and just about anything else I could find on civil rights and slavery. 

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