When Mark Twain wrote The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn after the Civil War, it was in part a response to Harriet Beecher Stowe's pre-Civil War novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin. While supporting many of Stowe's claims and motives, Twain also found fault...

Even today, with literature constantly crossing more lines and becoming more shocking, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin remains one of the most scandalous, controversial, and powerful literary works ever spilled onto a set of blank pages....

While lying on her death bed, in Chapter 26 of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, little Eva says to the servants in her house who have gathered around her, "You must remember that each one of you can become angels" (418). In this chapter...

Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, written during the period of boiling tumult that was to erupt into the Civil War, has struck it's readers in more ways than one. Wildly popular, Uncle Tom's Cabin was made into theatrical pieces and...

The cultural repercussions of Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, are undeniable. Uncle Tom's Cabin became one of the most widely read and profoundly penetrating books of the nineteenth century. Richard Yarborough remarked that,...

'During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens . . . [I] at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of...

In the 19th century novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe portrays Uncle Tom, a black slave, as an heroic figure. Written shortly before the American Civil War, the novel attempts to change negative moral attitudes towards blacks....

Uncle Tom’s Cabin is powerful not only because of its moving plot, but also because of several literary tools used by Harriet Beecher Stowe to accentuate the evils of slavery. In the book, Stowe contrasts a detached and sarcastic tone with...

In Martin Scorsese’s 2002 film Gangs of New York, the two main characters—Amsterdam Vallon (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) and Bill “the Butcher” Cutting (played by Daniel Day-Lewis)—attend a ‘Tom’ show (a stage adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin) in...

Inheriting the vices of both the black and white race, traditionally tragic mulatto characters have been comfortably depicted in much of abolitionist literature as intricately, and inextricably, conflicted individuals; miserable and without race “...

Jane Tompkins writes on how nineteenth century domestic novels characterise ‘a monumental effort to reorganize culture from the woman's point of view…in certain cases, it offers a critique of American society far more devastating than any...

In considering how Stowe represents gender, it must be foregrounded that men and women inhabited different sectors within nineteenth century American society. Males belonged almost exclusively to a public world of work, whilst females were...

As Albert Camus once said, ‘You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.’[1] If ‘order’ within life means a structure that can bring meaning, ‘fragmentation’ deems life’s occurrences, whether fortunate or unfortunate, as...

Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin in reaction to her own epiphany concerning the immorality of slavery, which accompanied the passing of the Fugitive Slave Law. Indeed, she developed a novel worthy of protest literature. With each...

March 20th, 1852 was an important day for the United States of America. Harriet Beecher Stowe finally published her much debated story, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, on this exact date. Recent stringent changes in fugitive slave laws had inspired the...

Much of the literature that emerged during the 19th century dealt with the then controversial and incredibly widespread institution of slavery. Nearly equally widespread, however, was white Southerners’ claim to Christianity, a religion that, by...

“Is this the little lady who started the great war?” said Abraham Lincoln during his first meeting with Harriet Beecher Stowe. The reaction of one of America’s most celebrated president is a clear demonstration of the effectiveness of Stowe’s...

Every choice a person makes, every action a person performs, every thought that crosses a person’s mind is influenced by emotion. The strength and intensity of feelings in the decision-making process makes emotional manipulation a powerful tool...

It is the middle of the nineteenth century, and, seemingly by coincidence, two novels, both written by women, are released in close proximity to one another, and each manages to grip tight the American public, and each in their own way becomes...

Of the two modern critical objections to Uncle Tom’s Cabin – sentimentality and intrusive narrator – the first one is accurate while the latter objection is disingenuous; however, both criticisms belie the overtly political nature of the book. In...

Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, presents the linked stories of different slaves in Kentucky from the perspective of an omniscient narrator. “The role of the omniscient narrator is to chronicle the events of a story in an impartial...