Question

YOUR ASSIGNMENT: Do a search for "Uncle Tom's Cabin Synopsis"

1. What was/were the purpose(s) of this book?

2. Summarize the story.

3. What was the impact of this book?

4. What were reactions to this novel - - both in the North and in the South.

One term, "He is an Uncle Tom" was much-used in Martin Luther King's day - - what does this term mean to modern black people?

If you can find this information: This "book" did not appear as a book. What was the "marketing approach" to selling copies of Stowe's efforts?

Answer 1

1 and 2 ) It’s important to remember that the novel isn’t just titled Uncle Tom – it’s titled Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which makes the cabin the most important symbol around. Tom’s cabin, however, isn’t in the novel for very long. In Chapter Four, with the rather obvious title "An Evening in Uncle Tom’s Cabin," we get a sense of the domestic tranquility and religious piety that exist in the cabin. When circumstances permit – when their master is kind enough, or if they could be freed – slaves like Tom and Chloe can create a perfect 19th century household, faithful, hardworking, and principled. At the end of the novel, young George Shelby turns the cabin into an even more obvious symbol when he tells his freed slaves to look at it and remember the sacrifice Uncle Tom made, which (indirectly) brought about their freedom.

After Tom leaves the Shelbys, the cabin exists in the mind of the reader as a point of contrast for the other places he lives and the other households that we see. The cabin’s humble piety contrasts with the lavish indulgence of the Shelby’s big house or the St. Clare mansion. It also contrasts with the rude wooden shack that Tom occupies on Legree’s plantation and the cotton gin shed where Tom lies dying. When he has a cabin, Tom, though a slave, exists as a human being with a home of his own; when he’s reduced to the gin shed, he’s being treated like just another piece of rusting machinery. The final point of contrast is the cottage where George, Eliza, and their family are reunited in Canada. Uncle Tom may not get back to his cabin, but freed slaves like him can create loving, harmonious households similar to it.

2 ) Uncle Tom’s Cabin tells the story of Uncle Tom, depicted as a saintly, dignified slave. While being transported by boat to auction in New Orleans, Tom saves the life of Little Eva, whose grateful father then purchases Tom. Eva and Tom soon become great friends. Always frail, Eva’s health begins to decline rapidly, and on her deathbed she asks her father to free all his slaves. He makes plans to do so but is then killed, and the brutal Simon Legree, Tom’s new owner, has Tom whipped to death after he refuses to divulge the whereabouts of certain runaway slaves. Tom maintains a steadfastly Christian attitude toward his own suffering, and Stowe imbues Tom’s death with echoes of Christ’s.

3 ) Some 300,000 copies of Uncle Tom’s Cabin were sold in the United States during the year after its publication, and it also sold well in England. It was adapted for theatre multiple times beginning in 1852; because the novel made use of the themes and techniques of theatrical melodrama popular at the time, its transition to the stage was easy. These adaptations played to capacity audiences in the United States and contributed to the already significant popularity of Stowe’s novel in the North and the animosity toward it in the South. They became a staple of touring companies through the rest of the 19th century and into the 20th

4)

Stowe’s depiction of slavery in her novel was informed by her Christianity and by her immersion in abolitionist writings. She also drew on her personal experience during the 1830s and ’40s while living in Cincinnati, Ohio, which was a destination for those escaping slavery in Kentucky and other Southern states. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin she made her case against slavery by cataloging the suffering experienced by enslaved people and by showing that their owners were morally broken. Stowe also published a collection of documents and testimony, A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853), that she used to prove the truth of her novel’s representation of slavery.

The role of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a cause of the American Civil War is rooted in a statement—typically rendered as “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!”—that is spuriously attributed to President Abraham Lincoln. According to scholar Daniel R. Vollaro , this comment, supposedly made by Lincoln to Stowe in December 1862, originated in Stowe family tradition and did not appear in print until 1896 (albeit as “Is this the little woman who made the great war?” ). That Lincoln almost certainly did not say these words, however, has not prevented them from being cited repeatedly as Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s legacy.

The novel’s reputation became problematic during the 20th century. In a 1952 introduction to the novel, Langston Hughes referred to Uncle Tom’s Cabin as “a moral battle cry,” but his introduction’s effort to redeem the novel came after Richard Wright and James Baldwin, among other black writers, had attacked it during the 1930s and ’40s. The term Uncle Tom also became an insult used to describe a black person who shows subservience to whites or is otherwise considered complicit with oppression by whites. This sense can be traced to at least the early 20th century, and early public use of it (c. 1920) has been attributed variously to Marcus Garvey and George Alexander McGuire. Today Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s depiction of its black characters is seen as racist and patronizing.