Slavery’s Destruction Of Domestic Life In Uncle Tom's Cabin

8 Pages 1981 Words

es in Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Stowe directly addresses her readers, forcing them to consider slavery from the point of view of the enslaved. Tomkin says, “Expressive of and responsible for the values of its time, it also belongs to a genre, the sentimental novel, whose chief characteristic is that it is written by, for, and about women” Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a sentimental novel written to appeal to the unsettled emotions that exist in the reader’s mind in an attempt to make the reader see how slavery destroys human lives and families. Sundquist notes that “Sentiment, not ant-slavery, made the book popular and its black hero an exemplary suffering heroine; Tom’s access of feminine power and his pious sacrifice, in explicit contrast to Legree’s inexorable lust and cruelty, marks the fantasy Stowe’s audience eagerly adopted- that slavery was the culture’s extreme revelation of lust and the South an arena of erotic dissipation ‘where the repressed came out of hiding’”. Sundquist further states that “..Stowe insisted that the power of sentiment, a rebellion of the emotions, of heart over head, would crush the masculine tyranny of American institutions and the law of the ‘fathers’”. Through the introduction of Southern families, Stowe demonstrates how slavery corrupts and ultimately eliminates domestic stability, which is the key to a successful household and family.
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