Uncle Tom's Cabin

In class, we’ve been discussing the trends of children’s literature from the nineteenth century and how morality is a key concept. This week our reading offered something a little different. Harriet Beacher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin contains many child characters, but since its intended audience is not necessarily children, it dances to a different beat.

Stowe portrays the harsh realities of slave life, putting emphasis on the pain and despair experienced by families. One example of this sad truth appears in chapter 12, when the trader states to the slave mother of the young baby, “your child’s gone … I got a chance to sell him to a first rate family,” and her reaction late at night before she commits suicide, “O! What shall I do? O Lord! O Good Lord do help me!” Often children were separated from their mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers, only to be sold to owners who would curse the rest of their lives with hard labor.  This to us seems completely horrible and unjust and allows us to really sympathize with the characters. However, during the time it was written, this way of life was nothing, but normal, for both the slave owner and the enslaved. As Tom states in chapter 10, “I’m in the Lord’s hands and nothin’ can go no furder than he lets it.” Even all that they were put through they still remained strong in their faith.

Because of this, I believe Uncle Tom’s Cabin does not completely go against the theories of children’s literature from the nineteenth century.  I know it opened a lot of people’s eyes and created an uproar regarding slavery, but since most of the readers were predominantly white, slave owning citizens, they probably did not have much sympathy for the characters in the story. Some may even have used the story as an example to their children of “how” to properly handle the slave business. As far as theories that we’ve seen in other stories this semester, religion was very prevalent in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. All the characters in the story, white and black, had their strong Christian beliefs in common. For children reading this literature, remaining faithful to God no matter what could have very much been the underlying lesson.