Week 6 - Uncle Tom's Cabin

Uncle Tom's Cabin seems to be a perfect example of a "poster child" cause, in this case the cause being to abolish slavery. Throughout the 80 or so pages of the novel that we read this week, we were introduced to several different groups of slaves, most all of which featured a child. In the very beginning of the novel we are introduced to Eliza "leaving the only home she had ever known, and cutting loose from the protection of a friend whom she loved and revered." (243) Though she was owned by a family that treated her kindly, she decides to risk her own life running away to spare her son the cruelties of being sold to the south, which as we read on we learn is much worse than being a slave in Kentucky. The main audience for this novel I assume was women and mothers, as the novel makes many more examples of children being split from their parents. And what mother reading this novel wouldn't be heartbroken by Aunt Hagar begging Master Haley "buy me too, Mas'r, for de dear Lord's sake!--buy me--I shall die if you don't!" (318) These passages are heartrending; I can imagine the horror white women must have felt back then in learning that every day poor black mothers were being separated from their children forever, and how much these feelings of horror and outrage must have galvanized the population into action.

I don't feel that the novel is drastically changing how we should interpret children's literature. I think what it does is to take the preexisting idea of children as being pure, innocent beings and shows how the institution of slavery perverts and destroys the rights children have to grow up safe and loved. There is no goodness in a 10-month-old child being sold apart from his mother, let along not being allowed to say goodbye to your child, no matter how you spin it. (326) Books like The Wide, Wide World and The Hidden Hand showed American audiences how children should be raised, how they should act, and what qualities should be encouraged. After reading these earlier novels and having formed a schema about what is "good" about childhood, we can see from Uncle Tom's Cabin that the "goodness" of childhood is absolutely absent in the black community of the time. Harriet Beecher Stowe plays on these conceptions like a master musician to show to the reader of the time that slaves have feelings and families, that this institution of slavery is tearing apart their lives, and that no child of any race deserves this kind of treatment.

So, though the theme and mood of this book are obviously drastically different from previous texts that we have read,  the theme of childhood as something to be protected is simply saturated in the text. In just 80 short pages we have three different stories of mothers being separated or threated to be separated from their children (if I've counted correctly), and one young mother even kills herself after the loss of her baby. (329) Uncle Tom's Cabin shows us how children aught to be raised by showing the audience story after story of children who obviously haven't had the luxury of a safe and comfortable childhood.